The I-Frame and the S-Frame: How Focusing on the Individual-Level Solutions Has Led Behavioral Public Policy Astray

"'i-frame' - seeking to change individual behavior; 's-frame' - the system in which they (people) operate"

"Results from [i-frame: individual-focused] interventions have been disappointingly modest."

"The fact that corporations have spent billions of dollars promoting i-frame interventions in the belief that such interventions will fail should make behavioral scientists uneasy."

Editor's note: For ease of access to this SSRN 41-page journal paper, The Communication Initiative has created the following summary. It has not been reviewed by the authors. Click here to download the full paper.

An influential line of thinking in behavioural science holds that many societal problems can be addressed effectively and inexpensively at the level of the individual without modifying the system in which individuals operate. However, such interventions have, on the whole, not only had minimal impacts in most cases but have guided many behavioural scientists to frame policy problems in individual, not systemic, terms: that is, to adopt what the authors of this paper call the "i-frame", rather than the "s-frame". The result, as they argue here, is deflection of attention and support away from s-frame policies, which ultimately furthers the aims of corporate opponents of concerted systemic action such as regulation and taxation. The paper illustrates this argument through several concrete examples in the fields of climate change and pollution, health care, and savings for retirement, among others.

The paper begins by clarifying the difference between (i) the i-frame, with its focus (in the behavioural and brain sciences) on individuals and the neural and cognitive machinery that underpins their thoughts and behaviours, and (ii) the s-frame, which is the system of rules, norms, and institutions by which we live, typically seen as the natural domain of economists, sociologists, legal scholars, and political scientists.

As outlined here, there has been an increasing enthusiasm among both academics and governments to use i-frame insights to create i-frame policies. For instance, slum landlords may - and, crucially, will have an incentive to - see illness among their tenants as arising from poor handwashing or unhygienic food preparation, and behavioural scientists will be able to step in with proposals to increase the use of soap or to provide helpful tips for boiling food and water, probably to little effect. But the landlords' i-frame perspective, which the behavioural scientists may inadvertently be adopting, is itself an obstacle to progressing with tried-and-tested s-frame reform: public health regulations to enforce good-quality housing, with access to heating, insulation, electricity, and safe drinking water.

The authors look at some of the ways in which i-frame interventions undermine s-frame changes, including by shifting standards of what counts as good-quality evidence for public policy. For many i-frame policies, randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are widely viewed as a gold-standard method for evaluating and incrementally improving policy. But the gold-standard of experimental testing provides a further push towards i-frame interventions (where different individuals may be randomly assigned distinct interventions) and away from s-frame interventions, where it is rarely possible to change the "system" for some subset of the population.

Next, the paper provides five case studies that illustrate how corporations that benefit from the status quo have figured out that they can effectively deflect pressure for systemic change by reframing problems from the s-frame to the i-frame. In brief:

• Climate change: The example of the oil company BP's media campaign (with the tag-line "Beyond Petroleum") shows how, rather than opposing climate science directly, BP worked to reframe the problem of carbon reduction in i-frame, not s-frame, terms. By framing (deliberating describing a problem in a particular way to shape the solutions that come to mind) the challenge of combating climate change as a problem for individual citizens, BP ignored the fact that the policy interventions required to have a real impact on climate change will require system changes on a huge scale.
• Obesity: "Focusing attention on individual-level causes and remedies risks displacing researcher time, financial resources and journal pages from what otherwise might be deeper thinking and more in-depth research about what caused the obesity epidemic in the first place, about s-frame interventions that could be implemented to reverse it, and how to marshal behavioral science to make such interventions as successful as possible....Misattributing problems to individual weakness rather than systemic factors has also implicitly blaming individuals - and encouraging them to blame themselves - for their inability to swim against powerful currents they have little hope of resisting."
• Inadequate preparation for retirement: "According to the standard account, people don't save because they are excessively tempted by the immediate pleasures of spending relative to the delayed benefits of saving. As with obesity, however, this story is implausible when evaluated in a historical and cross-national context. Such an analysis makes it obvious that the problem is not one of individual limitations, but of a system (including long-stagnant working class incomes) that renders it virtually impossible for low and moderate income individuals, no matter how far-sighted, to fund a comfortable retirement....A huge array of corporate interests, including both companies that used to pay pensions and the financial service industry, have gained from the current system and would stand to lose, potentially dramatically, from s-frame reform..."
• Plastic waste: This section provides several examples of i-frame communication campaigns, noting that, "While promoting an i-frame perspective publicly, the food, beverage and packaging industries have simultaneously lobbied heavily, and successfully, against s-frame interventions."
• Rising healthcare costs in the United States (US): Behavioural researchers have proposed i-frame inventions to help people to lower healthcare costs by improving their choice of insurance plan. But the reality is that "Healthcare is expensive and low quality in the U.S. because it has not been possible to build the political consensus required to make the difficult choices needed to bring down costs and use the savings to increase equity, and quality."

The paper briefly outlines related points in six further areas: inequalities in education, discrimination, privacy, misinformation, addiction to prescription drugs, and gun violence.

The paper's final substantive section outlines a positive vision of how the behavioural and brain sciences can support and deliver policies focusing on the s-frame. The argument here is that insights into individual human behaviour can aid in the design and implementation of well-established s-level policy measures, providing insights into how public support can be built for systemic change. For example, the behavioural and brain sciences can help policymakers understand and appreciate the "unexpected power of adaptation", which is built into our sensory systems but frequently underestimated. Assuming that threats to the status quo will be powerful messages fails to anticipate that, when s-level changes are actually implemented, people consistently adapt more rapidly than they anticipate and often come to embrace s-level reforms they had previously resisted.

Thus, this paper has made the case that the field of behavioural science has been led astray by working within the i-frame - that is, by developing, testing, and advocating policy interventions that target individual behaviour. It has argued:

1. that many critical public policy challenges arise from systemic policies that are actively maintained by the commercial interests they benefit;
2. that those commercial interests actively promote the view that these problems have i-frame solutions, while lobbying against s-frame reform;
3. that many behaviourally oriented academics with an interest in public policy have inadvertently reinforced the ineffective i-frame perspective; and
4. that behavioural i-frame interventions have generally had disappointing results but, more importantly, can have negative unintended consequences, such as reducing support for policies solutions that are well known to be effective and leading individuals to blame themselves for problems with systemic origins.

The authors conclude that, by previously promoting i-level interventions at the expense of much-needed s-level policy, they and others "have been unwitting accomplices to forces opposed to helping create a better society."