Am I alone in finding this seriously creepy?
For the council leader, Mike Freer, this approach is an idea whose time has come.
He says: “The role of the council has shifted away from being a provider of services to being responsible for helping local citizens improve their lives. Nudging people along is a terrific idea, we’ve got to stop nagging. If nagging worked we’d all be skinny, we’d all be recycling and we’d all be walking to work.”
No, Mr Freer, it is not your role to poke about in local citizens’ lives. A provider of local services is all that you are and all that you should be. Nothing more.
Thus Professor Cialdini believes that talk of an “obesity epidemic” simply encourages more obesity.
“Instead of normalising the undesirable behaviour, you want to marginalise it,” he adds.
All this may mean that we have to learn a new item of political terminology.
“I’m starting to hear local authorities that were quite recently using the phrase ‘place-shaping’ as the jargon for what they did now talk about ‘person-shaping’,” says Matthew Taylor, a former Downing Street policy aide to Tony Blair.
The term “person-shaping” probably won’t appeal to politicians, but it could increasingly describe what they are trying to do.
Thank fuck I left the UK. Anyone knocking on my door asking me to pledge anything in the hope of “person shaping” me would have received a very short, sharp response. Fortunately, in France, they don’t seem to be going in for this intrusive behaviour.
These people really are evil.
No, you are NOT alone in finding it seriously creepy. But there is so much that is seriously creepy about life today.