Antiracist by Design: Reimagining Applied Behavioral Science

INTRODUCTION

I’m no longer accepting the things I cannot change … I’m changing the things I cannot accept.

—ANGELA DAVIS

In 2010, just as behavioral science—the study of how and why people behave in the wacky, wild, and sometimes wondrous ways we do—was leaping into the world of public policy, we found ourselves sitting on cold metal chairs in a free tax preparation center in Philadelphia.

We watched people stream in the door, bracing against freezing rain, eager to get help filing their taxes. Pinching and expanding that moment into a close-up, our role was straightforward. We were there to help (nudge) the people in the waiting room—all tax filers with low incomes—save some of their tax returns. The assumption was that even small amounts of savings could buffer against financial shocks, paving a way to economic security and even mobility. When we zoom out of this moment, we can see we were part of something bigger. We were among the early experimenters testing the enticing but embryonic promise of applying behavioral insights to America’s social challenges. The potential matched the risks of getting it wrong.

It was an exciting time for those of us who studied human behavior. Academic researchers were diving into ambitious collaborations with governments and nonprofits, philanthropists were inviting behavioral scientists to discuss how our field could respond to global dilemmas like poverty and child mortality, and in short order, world leaders like President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron were investing in applied behavioral science at the highest levels of government as a promising way to design a better world.

As young professionals, we arrived in Philly and in this fascinating field just as behavioral science was poised to make its big break. We both had the opportunity to study with the late Daniel Kahneman, honored as one of the founders of modern behavioral science, at Princeton University shortly after he received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He received the award for his groundbreaking research incorporating psychological insights into economic science with his longtime friend and collaborator Amos Tversky. About a decade later, we were two of the first team members on the US version of the United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT)—the Social and Behavioral Scienced Team (SBST)—established during the Obama administration.¹ The opportunity to bring this work to the US federal government was so exciting that Crystal paused her teaching and research as a tenure-track professor to move to Washington, DC, for a year and Mindy flew from Mozambique, where she was living at the time, just to be part of the first full team meeting.

Back in Philly, we were thrilled to be part of what felt like a groundbreaking attempt to capture insights from social theories to improve people’s lives. But as we sat together, looking around and jotting down notes, we felt a growing unease. It wasn’t random that most of the folks in the waiting room were BIPOC and looked more like our families than our fellow behavioral scientists. (Neither of us had ever had a Black or Latino² behavioral science professor, which was unsurprising given that data indicates that in 2013, Black and Latino researchers accounted for under 4 percent of the workforce in behavioral and social sciences research).³

In America, debt and wealth aren’t race neutral.⁴ Black and Latino families are far less likely to have access to employer-sponsored retirement accounts and more likely to be denied loans regardless of credit score.⁵ In addition, Black workers earn 76 cents, Latino workers earn 73 cents, and Indigenous workers earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by white workers.⁶ These disparities reflect historic discrimination and ongoing structural racism, not individual choices like the one-time savings decision at a tax site that we were there to influence.

Our emerging field was about shifting choices. But in America, skin color often narrows the choices available. Still, our job wasn’t to notice that or to name the racist policies and practices that lead to it, and our job certainly wasn’t to use behavioral insights to respond to it.

We designed and ran a few simple interventions in tax sites in Philly that focused on individual-level biases, designed to respond to systemic errors in judgment instead of responding to—or even acknowledging—systemic errors like racism and inequity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, our interventions had little effect.

Over the years, this situation repeated itself in different forms and our discomfort grew. Together, we bring almost forty years of experience engaging in behavioral research in academic settings, in nonprofits, and with governments at all levels—in the United States and abroad. As a result, we’ve seen the field’s shortcomings up close.

For example, we worked to encourage people on federal assistance to join work training and educational advancement opportunities, leaning into America’s story that economic returns to education can overcome structural barriers like race-based economic exclusion. We never acknowledged that the financial returns on education are different for BIPOC.

But Chris Rock did when he described his neighbors: [My only three black neighbors are] Mary J. Blige, one of the greatest singers of all time, Denzel Washington, one of the greatest actors of all time, and Jay-Z, one of the greatest rappers of all time. His white neighbor? A dentist. And he isn’t like the greatest dentist in history either. I had to host the Oscars to get that house—a black dentist in my neighborhood would have to invent teeth.⁷

Chris Rock has a point. Black people attain more years of schooling and credentials than white people from families with comparable resources but have less to show for it: Black households headed by a college graduate have, on average, less wealth than those headed by white high school dropouts. Returns to employment are different too. White families where the head of the household is unemployed have double the wealth of a Black family where the head of the household is employed full time.⁸

We also worked on projects to improve the health behaviors of people living in poverty, but our interventions never took into account that BIPOC are less likely to have access to health care and more likely to be exposed to lead-contaminated water, pollution, and toxic waste. Additionally, Black mothers and their babies—regardless of income—are about twice as likely to die as white mothers and their babies during childbirth.

We plugged along, ignoring our nagging intuition that our designs and interventions were failing to account for something enormous and that this oversight might be blunting the promise of our work, or worse, creating unintended consequences that hurt the very people we were trying to help.

Meanwhile, the field of behavioral science grew to touch human decision-making in almost every domain—from COVID-19 vaccine campaigns to college financial aid forms. More than five hundred behavioral science units now sit in the biggest companies in the world (Walmart, Pepsi, IKEA) and in some of the largest and most powerful countries on the planet. Today, social scientists have a seat at the policy table and an entry point into the lives of millions, which is why it’s so urgent to correct our glaring oversights.

Throughout the field’s rise, we have failed to name and challenge the racial injustices fundamental to many of the issues we work on. Instead, we put a postracial frame around our work and focus on social mobility broadly, ignoring race-specific barriers as if structural racism were an unfortunate mess for someone else to clean up.

As popularly understood, the term structural racism can seem vague and notional. But it points to specific policies and practices that embed ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudices into every aspect of American life, from our legal and educational systems to our housing and lending practices. These policies systematically excluded people of color from opportunities and benefits, and that exclusion has created long, sticky tails of inequity that manifest in the yawning gaps between white and BIPOC populations in wealth, health, education, employment, and housing that persist today.

Applied behavioral science has launched interventions focused on each of these areas, often considering poverty and classism while avoiding race and racism. As a result, we created nudges aimed at the tail-end manifestations of structural racism while never mentioning the original exclusion. Perhaps this was because to gain traction in the early days, the field wanted to define itself in wide, nonpartisan strokes and reach as large an audience as possible. Maybe tackling individual-level barriers seemed more feasible. Or possibly the field just fell under the gravitational pull of powerful interests vested in upholding an unequal status quo by shifting attention away from structural issues.

Whatever the reason, this colorblind approach became increasingly unsustainable. We were forced to concede that our work was not colorblind, it was racist blind and color silent.⁹

The year 2020 was a breaking point.

IMAGINING A BETTER WAY

We, and the behavioral science field, hummed along, racial blinders snuggly in place, until 2020 changed everything. George Floyd’s murder catalyzed a national reckoning, the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately devastated Black and Brown communities, and the Black Lives Matter protests that spread across the country (and then the world) demanded justice and made it clear that the stakes were nothing less than the survival of entire communities.

For us, this moment cracked open a space to imagine and push for a better way in our work and field. And it revealed the stakes: the promise of applied behavioral science to improve lives will remain unrealized until we acknowledge and address racist institutions, practices, and systems.

The historian, professor, and antiracism activist Ibram X. Kendi makes a powerful argument about the way policies can support or fight against the racist status quo: There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.¹⁰

As behavioral science’s influence has reached into the corridors of policy and extended into people’s daily lives, so has the responsibility of its practitioners, teachers, students, and even fans to make sure that our work is not race neutral or colorblind in theory and racist blind in practice. We should not be the people poet Nayyirah Waheed was referring to when she said never trust anyone who says they do not see color. This means to them, you are invisible.¹¹ We should aim to practice antiracist behavioral science.¹²

First, what do we mean by colorblind or race neutral? Take a straightforward voting law that everyone must produce a driver’s license to vote. While on the surface this law seems to have nothing to do with race, systemic racism plays its part, snaking beneath the surface, influencing behavior.

As recently as 2020, people who identified as Black, Latino, or Native American were about twice as likely as those who identified as white to lack a nonexpired government-issued photo ID.¹³ Excluding people without an ID from voting disproportionately hurts BIPOC. Not surprisingly, several studies have found that photo ID laws decrease election day turnout among BIPOC.¹⁴ In a country where a tiny slice of votes can determine the seats of power, this ostensibly race-neutral policy potentially disenfranchises people of color and preserves power within the white majority.

Questioning the idea of race-neutral policies should come naturally to behavioral scientists. As a field, we’ve embraced a similar idea: there are no behaviorally neutral programs or policies. Think of the classic where to place the apples in a cafeteria example in the popular book Nudge. If you run a cafeteria, you must make decisions about where to put all the food. Because people are influenced by convenience, placing apples in attractive, prominent locations influences them to eat more apples, nudging people toward healthier choices. But you could also put candy bars in the prime spot and apples in a less visible place. Now you’re steering people toward cavities!

Because we are influenced by even small situational factors, decisions about how a policy or program is designed is consequential, not neutral. When we recognize this as a field, we acknowledge that constant unseen forces influence behavior, and our interventions can either sustain a harmful status quo (keep the candy) or push against it (replace the candy with apples).

It’s time to extend this line of reasoning and acknowledge the larger situational factors that disproportionately affect Black and Brown people in America: racism is pervasive and influences every facet of life. Failing to account for this endemic situational factor could be undermining the impact of our field. More urgently, if our interventions are simply applied on top of long-standing structural inequities, we inadvertently reinforce those racist practices and policies.

Indeed, building on Kendi’s work, we define the racist application of behavioral science as any intervention that directly or indirectly produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. Imagine an intervention to improve maternal health outcomes. A traditional approach would consider possible cognitive, not structural, biases. For example, attending prenatal appointments increases the chances of a healthy pregnancy, but research has shown that actions that must be repeated can feel like a hassle and therefore drop off over time. So, an intervention might send women text message reminders about upcoming appointments.

While research teams might think about how to improve maternal health outcomes for those living in poverty broadly, it’s very unlikely the intervention would acknowledge that BIPOC women and their babies are more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than white women and their babies. The resulting colorblind intervention might consider income-level barriers like health-care access. And so the text message reminders might also include tips on accessing federal benefits like Medicaid.

But health-care access is the result of deeper historical, systemic, and political forces that were specifically designed to discriminate against Black and Brown people. As BIPOC scholar Joia Crear-Perry, a physician and policy expert, put it, race is not a factor for illness and death, but racism, bias, and discrimination definitely are.¹⁵

With this lens, we can see that access to health care is only one barrier—the quality of that care matters too. In fact, research has shown that issues like interactions between women and their health-care providers, including disrespect, disparaging comments, and dismissing Black women’s pain, may help explain why Black women are more likely to die of pregnancy complications at every income level. And it may explain why death rates for infants born to Black women with advanced degrees are higher than rates for babies born to white mothers who didn’t finish high school.¹⁶

Because our theoretical intervention wasn’t designed to acknowledge, understand, or address any of these deeper barriers faced by BIPOC women, it’s reasonable the intervention might have some effect on white women while failing to address the larger barriers faced by women of color. The vast majority of studies in our field are not disaggregated by race and ethnicity,¹⁷ so the results of our hypothetical intervention would only name the average impact on women in the study. Eventually, the results might be summarized as something like Text Message Reminders Increase Positive Health Impacts for Women. Beneath that headline would be a community whose racist-imposed barriers persist, untouched and unacknowledged. In Kendi’s framing, this well-meaning intervention has sustained racial inequity between racial groups.

We can do better. Again, inspired by Kendi, we define an antiracist application of behavioral science as interventions designed to identify or quantify racial inequities and/or to produce or sustain racial equity between racial groups. Antiracist application of behavioral science means actively examining racism by asking, What role does (or could) racism play in this