148573_Navigating normative issues in behavioral and well-being public policy.pdf (175.04 kB)
Be happy: navigating normative issues in behavioral and well-being public policy
journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-21, 05:19 authored by Mark Fabian, Pykett, JPsychological science is increasingly influencing public policy. Behavioral public policy (BPP) was a milestone in this regard because it influenced many areas of policy in a general way. Well-being public policy (WPP) is emerging as a second domain of psychological science with general applicability. However, advocacy for WPP is criticized on ethical and political grounds. These criticisms are reminiscent of those directed at BPP over the past decade. This déjà vu suggests the need for interdisciplinary work that establishes normative principles for applying psychological science in public policy. We try to distill such principles for WPP from the normative debates over BPP. We argue that the uptake of BPP by governments was a function of its relatively strong normative and epistemic foundations in libertarian paternalism, or nudging, for short. We explain why the nudge framework is inappropriate for WPP. We then analyze how boosts offer a strict but feasible alternative framework for substantiating the legitimacy of well-being and behavioral policies. We illuminate how some WPPs could be fruitfully promoted as boosts and how they might fall short of the associated criteria.
History
Publication title
Perspectives on Psychological ScienceVolume
17Pagination
169-182ISSN
1745-6916Publisher
Sage Publications, Inc.Place of publication
United StatesRights statement
Copyright 2021 the authors. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Repository Status
- Open