The behavioural state

Years

1946 to the present

Location

London, then dozens of governments

Funder

Rockefeller Foundation at the Tavistock Institute's founding in 1946. The UK Cabinet Office for the Behavioural Insights Team from 2010, which was later part-privatized.

Institution

Tavistock Institute, and the Behavioural Insights Team

This is the institutional history behind the psychology domain, and it is unusually well documented because most of it was published deliberately.

Skinner, who said it plainly

B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), argued openly for designing environments that produce desired behaviour, and dismissed autonomy as a pre-scientific idea. He is valuable precisely because he states without embarrassment what later programmes do quietly. Read him to see the argument in its undefended form.

Tavistock

Founded in London in 1946 with initial Rockefeller funding. Group relations, human relations in industry, applied psychoanalysis inside organizations.

It attracts an enormous amount of conspiracy literature, which is a reason to use its own publications and serious institutional histories rather than secondary claims. The documented version is interesting enough. The invented version is not.

The nudge unit

The Behavioural Insights Team was set up inside the UK Cabinet Office in 2010, the first state nudge unit, and dozens of governments copied the model. There is a published trail: the MINDSPACE report (2010), the EAST framework, and randomized trials with results in the open.

Read Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge (2008) as a primary document of governing technique rather than as advice. Note the internal critique, made by sympathetic people, that libertarian paternalism depends on the citizen not noticing the architecture. If you notice it and object, the mechanism that was supposed to preserve your freedom to choose turns out to have been the invisibility.

This is Foucault's governmentality with a budget line and an annual report.

Contemporary and algorithmic

• Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality (2018). Automated eligibility and risk scoring, tested on poor people first. The single most concrete book in this cluster.
• Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (2015). Authority that cannot be inspected.
• Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction (2016) and Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (2018).

These pair with Zuboff in the psychology domain and with Deleuze's modulation in control after discipline.