Why Fixing Systems Matters More Than Fixing People: Insights from Dr. George Loewenstein

CHIBE recently hosted a seminar with Dr. George Loewenstein, one of our faculty affiliates who co-authored a new book called “It’s on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society’s Deepest Problems” with Dr. Nick Chater.

The book discusses how major social and policy problems are often framed as matters of individual responsibility rather than systemic design. The authors argues that many of today’s most pressing challenges—such as climate change, health care costs, retirement planning, obesity, gun violence, and misinformation—persist because responsibility is strategically shifted away from institutions and systems and toward individuals.

Drs. Loewenstein and Chater describe 2 frames:

• The i-frame refers to changing individual behavior (for example: putting the onus on a person to better control their weight through diet and exercise). This frame helps people “play the game” better and takes the rules as fixed.
• The s-frame refers to changing systemic issues (for example: changing how food companies market and create highly addictive, highly processed food). This frame works out why the game is “going wrong” and tries to find better rules.

The authors argue that i-frame interventions are often inadequate for large-scale problems and can distract from more effective systemic solutions. (Read CHIBE’s previous blog post about this topic with Dr. Loewenstein here.)

In CHIBE’s talk this January, Dr. Loewenstein discussed several examples of how powerful corporations or ultra-wealthy individuals (often with the aid of behavioral scientists) have taken measures to place more responsibility on the individual, while at the same time rigging the system to benefit themselves. This is the central theme of the book, which Drs. Loewenstein and Chater refer to as the i-frame “sleight of hand.”

Dr. Loewenstein also talked about one of his previous papers, “Nudging Out Support for a Carbon Tax,” which mentions crowd-out effects. In that paper, he and his co-authors did an intervention where they explicitly told people how small the impact of a green-energy nudge would be. They explained what it did and how limited its effect was. When they did that, the crowd-out effect disappeared.

“When people realized how small the impact was going to be, it no longer crowded out support for a carbon tax,” he said. “And I think that gives us an important lesson, which is: we can be doing nudges in parallel with more kind of substantive types of polices and research. We just need to make sure not to oversell nudges. If we don’t oversell nudges, then the nudge research isn’t going to crowd out support for more substantive policies.”

Dr. Loewenstein also cited a recent paper here that provides a blueprint for how behavioral scientists can engage with s-frame research. 

If you missed the seminar and would like to watch it in full, click here. Purchase the new book here.

Also, you can read some of the Q&A portion of the talk below between moderator Dr. Judd Kessler (a Wharton professor and CHIBE affiliate) and Dr. Loewenstein.

Dr. Kessler: Do you think that s-frame messages—those focused on systems—don’t land as well with audiences as i-frame messages? If so, why? And if s-frame change is part of the solution, what should individuals actually do? Instead of worrying about recycling one piece of plastic, should I be calling my member of Congress? What actions matter most, and what kinds of messages are effective for generating s-frame change?

Dr. Loewenstein: That’s a fantastic question. When I used to do i-frame research and give talks—like public lectures or talks to industry—people loved it. They really ate it up. I think i-frame interventions and nudges to some degree got oversold, but even more than that, they were overbought. The idea is so appealing: that we can solve the world’s problems with these little tweaks.

It’s kind of like TED Talks—if you listen to TED Talks, you think that the world’s problems could be solved by i-frame solutions.

When I started doing s-frame research, I got such a different reaction. I remember presenting a talk in Vienna based on the i-frame/s-frame paper. There was a guy in the audience, and I had never seen anyone who looked so depressed—he was shaking his head and looking down. When I finished, he came up to the podium, and he said my talk made him feel incredibly depressed. He had been doing all this i-frame research, and I guess I must have convinced him a little bit that we should be changing our research focus.

Let me say, I don’t think we shouldn’t be doing i-frame research. I think it’s really important for psychology to improve individual behavior. I just think there’s more of a role to be played by behavioral science and psychology in public policy. We can think about psychologically informed public policies. If there could be a carbon tax, how should it be implemented?  Should it be implemented upstream, downstream? How should it be framed? What could be done with the [carbon tax] revenue to make the tax more palatable or most appealing to voters?

And so, my view is that there’s a tremendous role for behavioral scientists to play. For some reason we’ve been locked into this situation where we thought what we should be doing is nudging and doing nudge-related research, and I think it’s really unfortunate that when the public thinks about behavioral economics they think about nudges. We have a much wider role that we can play.

Dr. Kessler: How does one implement needed systemic change when there are powerful special interests against reforms – and without sufficient political will to make the change? What are the actions that we as individuals can take?

Dr. Loewenstein: At the individual level, the implication of this work would be that political activism is more important than trying to shrink your personal carbon footprint.

Trump’s policies have clearly had a lot of impact, and many of them are adverse. I assume there are a lot of academics on this Zoom, and we all know that Trump’s policies have had an adverse effect on academia, and on a personal level I’ve wondered whether the Trumpian shift has decreased the timeliness of our book.

Some people, when I talked to them about these issues, they’ve said, given what’s going on now in the United States, isn’t this all kind of “pie in the sky?” And I do think that in the next short interval we’re unlikely to have a lot of really great s-frame reform.

One way that I think about it is that if the other political party ever gets back into power, maybe then some of our prescriptions could be very useful because I think that nudges have been a bit of a distraction and that we really need to be thinking about fundamental reform in so many of these different areas if we want to solve these policy problems.

Dr. Kessler: What is the unique role of behavioral science in promoting corporate and public-sector systemic reform? And also, is industry generally against our collective interest, or is there nuance in that assertion? Is there a lever for us to pull with them?

Dr. Loewenstein: As you can tell from the title of our book, this book is very critical of corporate interests in the economy—not only the fossil fuel industry, but a lot of other industry, for example, the health insurance industry.

I mentioned I’m about to finish reading the book “Broken Code” about Facebook. I think that’s a great example of industry; the moment we had a right-ward shift in government, you can see what happened. Somebody who was a Trump advisor just became president of Meta.

Corporations tend to blow with the wind. Maybe there are some good corporations out there, like Patagonia, maybe, but in general, corporations tend to blow with the political wind.

I don’t think the solution to any of these problems lies with well-meaning corporations turning things around. I think that if we change the system, we can change the incentives for corporations to make it more likely that they will take action to turn things around.

The Facebook story is really interesting because almost every time that political pressure was applied to them and they got afraid, they became afraid of regulation. This is both in the United States and in other countries too. Only then did they very quickly start to reform their ways and introduce different filters and other high-tech solutions to reduce misinformation and to reduce polarization. But, the moment the pressure was off, they reverted back to their old ways. So, I don’t think that I think that corporations themselves are the answer, but I do believe in the capitalist system, and I think that with the right incentives in place, corporations could play a constructive role.