Behavioral Field Trials in Urban Dental Care

• In Event: Landscapes of Urban Laboratization: Governing the City Through Labs

Abstract

In the course of a still ongoing experimental turn in public policy (van Ryzin et al. 2017) and the proliferation of nudge-based policies (Thaler und Sunstein 2008), behavioral field trials have become an often used tool in evidence-based regulation (James et al. 2017). In my presentation I will offer an in depth discussion of one behavioral field trial that was conducted in Copenhagen. The goal of this field trial was to make young Danes more price sensitive when choosing a dentist. At the age of eighteen, Danes pass from public into private dental care. This pint of passage was used by behavioral scientists to strategically introduce price information in order to increase price competition in the dental care sector.
Based on ethnographic interviews and document analysis, I reconstruct the planning, execution and outcomes of this field trial. I will put a specific focus on the socio-material infrastructures and describe, how existing databases and regulations are assembled (Latour 2005) in order to construct experimental systems that can then be manipulated in order to achieve certain, politically wanted, outcomes. I will describe the type of knowledge that is being produced in this trial and how it is strategically used again other sources of information. Setting up field trials becomes understandable as a form of meta-expertise (Collins und Evans 2008: 45) that regulates the knowledge of citizens and influences decisions they make. My presentation ends with a discussion of the epistemic, political and practical effects of the field trial and how boundaries of science and governance become blurred.

Author

• Tim Seitz, Technical University Berlin