So, will the London diner find the ‘carbon footprint’ nudge cheap and easy to avoid, as nudges are meant to be? Or will the shame of saying “no” to saving the planet and helping poor people plant fruit trees around the world in front of family or friends be so great that the poor diner will accept this nudge as yet another imposition by the climate establishment?

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

h/t CTM – “Nudge theory”: Ruthless application of advanced behavioural science psychological manipulation upon unsuspecting diners.

Carbon Footprint And Fine Dining In London: Nudged To Fight Climate Change

Tilak Doshi
Contributor

On Friday, the “Money Reporter” of The Telegraph, Noah Eastwood wrote about London’s diners being hit by a “climate footprint charge” on restaurant bills. …

Carbon Friendly Dining’s website says the charge “helps counterbalance the environmental impact” of diners’ meals and “also help some of the poorest communities on the planet”. …

…

The most interesting part of this voluntary scheme between restaurants and their patrons is that “diners can ask for the new donation on their bill to be removed.” And that is the nudge: you must ask to opt out (explicitly), not agree to opt in (implicitly). The ingeniousness of the “opt out” requirement is that it puts the onus of action on the paying customer. …

See where this is going?

The “opt out” default choice in this voluntary scheme — the “nudge” – is part of the brainchild of the pioneering work on behavioral economics by University of Chicago economist and Nobel Laureate Richard H. Thaler and Harvard Law School Professor Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge theory proposes adaptive designs of the decision environment – “choice architecture” in the jargon — to influence the behavior and decision-making of groups or individuals like you and me.

…Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tilakdoshi/2023/10/31/carbon-footprint-and-fine-dining-in-london-nudged-to-fight-climate-change/?sh=4a7984c32b7f

The rest of the article is well worth reading, Doshi goes into detail how such psychological manipulation can have serious consequences when the experts guiding the nudges get it wrong.

Today it’s a voluntary levy. But maybe next year it’s a mandatory charge on restaurant bills. And nobody objects, because they have already been conditioned to paying the “voluntary” levy.

But nudges can have far worse consequences than facilitating the stripping away of a little freedom. I’ve seen first hand how defective psychological manipulation can lead to disaster.

Bear with me, this is relevant to the point I am making.

Many years ago I was in a pub in London, when a young man glassed someone. After they finished wrestling, the aggressor went back to his table and slowly sipped his drink, watching curiously while people tried to staunch the blood gushing out of the face of his victim.

I was very confused about what I had just seen – why wasn’t the aggressor running away? So I went up to the aggressor and asked “Aren’t you worried about being arrested?”. His reply was even more confusing – he said “I did nothing wrong“.

About 30 seconds later the London police flying squad stormed in and arrested the aggressor.

I asked my cousin, a retired school teacher, what she thought of what I had seen. My cousin said “Yes, I’ve seen it before. The problem is sanitised schoolyards. Fighting and bullying has been almost completely eliminated from school playgrounds, but as a consequence, kids growing up today have no idea that attacking and injuring someone has serious consequences, because they have never personally experienced violence.”.

By sanitising schools of violence using behavioural science, the behaviourists didn’t always create the peace loving young adults they hoped to create, they also created lots of young adults who, having never personally experienced violence in childhood, have no idea that violence has serious consequences, and never had an opportunity to develop empathy for people hurt by violence. They created the Antifa generation.

It seems likely the aggressor I saw in that pub will never properly learn to appreciate he did wrong. Behavioural psychologists experimenting on kittens in the 1970s discovered if the kittens grow up in a room with abnormal visual stimuli, their ability to navigate a normal environment is severely impaired. Once the kittens reach adulthood the damage is irreparable. There is some improvement over time, but the kittens subjected to this behavioural manipulation never learn to be as sure footed as cats raised in a normal environment.

Badly thought through behavioural psychological manipulation can have severe and lifelong consequences for the targets of that manipulation, and in some cases for their victims.

I have no idea what damage this latest fine dining climate nudge will cause, hopefully nothing nearly as serious as the mess school behavioural scientists have created. The obvious likely perverse consequence from the point of view of the manipulators, is diners who pay their carbon tip are more likely to assume they have done their bit, and may be less willing to cooperate with other climate behaviours being pushed by politicians and behavioural scientists. But this ongoing societal obsession with advanced psychological manipulation, let’s just say I do not believe intensive and ubiquitous scientific psychological manipulation of the general population is making the world a better place. There are just too many ways it can go wrong.