The UK government has a big problem. At present, the cost of electricity in the United Kingdom is almost quadruple the cost of natural gas. In fact, the average Brit pays at least a third more for their electricity than people in Europe and North America. This is a problem, as to become carbon neutral by 2050, the UK government wants everyone to stop using gas to heat their homes. Instead, they want everyone to transition to using more environmentally friendly electric heat pumps.
Sadly, because heat pumps cost more to run in the long term than existing gas boilers, few Brits are willing to abandon their trusty gas boilers just yet. This is why the UK government is putting its morally dubious Behavioral Insights Team on the case.
Also known as the UK government’s “Nudge Unit,” it’s the job of the UK government’s Behavioral Insights Team to slowly and passively “nudge” individuals and groups into making decisions they ordinarily wouldn’t make. And if that sounds a bit like brainwashing, that’s because nudging pretty much is brainwashing.
What Is Nudging and What Are Behavioral Insights Teams?
The concept of nudging originates in a 2008 book called Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by behavioral economist Richard Thaler and Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein.
In Nudge, Thaler and Sunstein make it clear that they believe people generally behave irrationally. As a result, the average member of the public is incapable of smart decision-making. Thankfully, this can be countered, they argue, by having a third party act as an architect who reframes people’s perceptions of the choices available to them.
To demonstrate, we need only look at the success of the UK’s Nudge Unit in adding more people to the UK organ donor register. (And yes, the UK government openly admits to using its Nudge Unit in this way.)
Put simply, when members of the public were encouraged to opt in to being organ donors, the majority didn’t. However, when the government made it obligatory to opt out of being a donor, an extraordinarily small number of people chose to do so. As a result, the vast majority of UK residents are now on the organ donor register, all thanks to the way the government and its Nudge Unit reframed how people agree to be on this register.
In the case of the UK government’s current heat pump dilemma, the answer from the UK government’s Behavioral Insights Team is to reframe any negative chatter online about heat pumps as simple disinformation. It does not matter if newer gas boiler models really are cheaper and less costly to operate (at least in the UK). As far as the UK government and its Nudge Unit are concerned, all such talk should be framed as disinformation spread by legacy gas boiler manufacturers. That’s just one form of nudge, though.
Remember a few years ago when the UK government attempted to ban wood and solid fuel burning stoves as part of the UK’s Clean Air Strategy? Well, that was a nudge too. After all, this would force anyone dependent on solid fuel heating, like thousands of residents in remote areas of Wales and Scotland, to install a heat pump.
Naturally, when heavy resistance to banning wood stoves arose, the UK government quickly began assuring everyone that a complete ban was never on the cards. This was another nudge. The whole point of the government’s Nudge Unit, after all, is to measure resistance to certain policy decisions before implementing them when either there is no resistance or no one is looking.
To demonstrate, there are still groups like “Mums for Lungs,” an apparently grassroots organization, which are still pressuring the UK government to ban wood stoves because their ability to foul the air is (allegedly) greater than that of the average heavy goods vehicle. They just want to see this happen in 2032, not 2022. (When something is far in the future, people don’t really care.)
This is a nudge too, and it’s a pretty obvious one. After all, the only people using wood stoves in the UK in this day and age are those in off-grid locations like the wilds of the Scottish Highlands. They’re not in Brixton, where Mums for Lungs is located and apparently so concerned about children coming into contact with woodsmoke that they want to ban everyone, anywhere, from ever lighting a wood fire.
For the sake of perspective, there have been 1,887 instances of knife crime in Brixton alone in the first six months of 2025. I, personally, would therefore be more worried about any child I raised there being stabbed to death, but what do I know? Apparently, it’s woodsmoke that we should all be worried about.
Are you starting to see how “nudging” works yet?
Most of the time, the UK government doesn’t explicitly admit when or how its Nudge Unit is used to augment public opinion. As a private company owned by the UK government charity Nesta, the UK’s Nudge Unit also doesn’t have to satisfy freedom of information requests. However, the UK has admitted how effective the Nudge Unit can be by publicly hailing some of its past policy successes.
- Remember when people were encouraged to sing “Happy Birthday” when washing their hands during the coronavirus pandemic? That wasn’t bona fide health advice. That entire message was a feel-good “nudge” by the UK Behavioural Insights Team.
- Encouraging people to donate organs and later playing down the fact that everyone in the UK will be on the organ donor register by default unless they opt out is a celebrated Nudge Unit success story.
- The Nudge Unit openly celebrates on its website how it has been instrumental in encouraging more people to attend court and benefit appointments, as well as the enrollment of over 10 million UK workers onto private pension schemes.
Nudging You to Go Cashless – Whether You Like It or Not
The UK government isn’t the only government to utilize Behavioral Insights Teams to augment public opinion and sway policy decisions.
According to the World Bank, the UK is one of several Western powers utilizing “nudging” to influence everything from the public’s views on sustainable energy to government policy decisions on combating poverty and inequality. The World Bank also has its own behavioral science team, eMBED, which supports the work of other behavioral insights teams around the world. (Basically, the World Bank is embedded in your government.)
Of course, when the World Bank markets its use of behavioral insights teams and nudging to address poverty and inequality, this makes nudging sound wholly positive. However, the reality on the ground in several African countries is that fighting poverty typically involves groups like the World Bank Group, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Commonwealth & Development Office, (among others), incentivizing local populations to adopt cashless payment systems, e-money, and digital tokenization of physical commodities.
It is, of course, relatively easy to incentivize entire populations to do away with physical cash completely when cash is already scarce to begin with. However, it is not so easy in Western countries. That’s why, in places like the UK, nudging starts to become more of a violent shove toward acceptance of a completely new financial paradigm.
The Soft Nudge vs. The Hard Shove
Growing up in a small market town in the Northeast of England, I was spoiled for choice when it came to choosing a local bank. In less than half a mile on the high street, there were no fewer than two Lloyds TSB branches, one NatWest, one HSBC, and one branch of Santander. Walk a little further, and I’d also find a Barclays bank, Post Office, and local building society.
Today, most of these branches are closed. Likewise, working ATMs are in considerably short supply. This is not, however, a natural reaction to the changing economic landscape of my hometown. We can see this by looking at thousands of other small towns across the UK where Brits are increasingly being cut off from even basic financial services.
More tellingly, we can also look across the border to Ireland, where bank closures and restricted access to ATMs have been proven to be part of a banking industry-wide push to encourage people to rely more on cashless payments.
- In Ireland, the Financial Services Union (FSU) discovered that banks intentionally understaff branches and refuse to answer telephones to create long queues that frustrate customers.
- The FSU has also highlighted how banks are intentionally slow to fix faulty in-branch ATMs while removing ATMs completely from some branches. This has led to hundreds of new ATMs being bought by private-sector actors who charge high fees for withdrawals.
- Across the banking industry, the FSU found that even competing banks are collaborating to discourage members of the public from using cash and brick-and-mortar branches in favor of cashless payments and wholly online banking services.
Cryptocurrency and the War on Cash
One of the fundamental things to remember when looking at how governments and financial institutions routinely nudge us to go cashless is that if this happens, the money in your bank won’t be the same as it is today. It will be a form of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), which will never truly be under your ownership.
Unlike the cash in your bank today, banks will be able to dictate where and how you spend your CBDC balance. If they want, they will even be able to put expiry dates on cryptocurrency balances, where after a certain amount of time, some or all of your bank balance will expire if you haven’t spent it already. Your every transaction will also be monitored, and you can say goodbye completely to cash-in-hand side hustles like yard sales or car boot sales. Every single penny you ever acquire will be taxable.
Of course, CBDCs immediately sound wholly different from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which many people are currently familiar with. However, it is my personal belief that the creation of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin has itself been nothing but a nudge to make the general population more accepting of cashless payments and CBDCs in the long run.
To demonstrate, in a 2009 paper titled “Could Nudges Steer Us Towards a Cashless Society,” its author, Leo Van Hove, Professor of Economics at the University of Brussels, explicitly mentions e-purses and electronic wallets, despite Bitcoin itself being new and still incredibly obscure at the time.
In Van Hove’s 2009 paper, he also theorizes how governments might eventually start nudging populations to accept cashless payments, specifically by “increasing the hassle factor” of using cash. (This is exactly what happens when bank branches and ATMs become scarcer.)
Van Hove even theorized that the banking industry itself might play a role in “nudging,” just as it can be seen doing today in places like Ireland, as exposed by Ireland’s Financial Services Union.
In fact, Van Hove’s 2009 paper on how nudges might help governments one day steer society toward a cashless future reads almost like a blueprint for how they are doing so today. The only question is: wouldn’t you rather have a real choice about your financial future?