“I was surprised how momentous it felt. I didn’t expect to feel as much as I did. I felt excited and I felt the weight of what I was doing.”

That’s not normally how citizens react to the end of a mountain of government paperwork. But the UK’s citizenship ceremonies act as milestones at the end of a particularly stressful period of bureaucracy: receiving your stamp of approval to become a UK citizen.

First implemented in 2004, now behavioural insights and civic engagement expert Professor Peter John has been experimenting with the ceremonies, testing whether they can be used to nudge new citizens to further engage within their local communities.

But behavioural insights are normally trialled on individuals making private, personal decisions, like paying taxes or saving into a pension. John is tinkering with the system — working to use nudges in a collective, celebratory environment. Beyond the ceremony, what happens when people experience a nudge together, in a public space?

Civic experimentation

John was approached by the Greater London Authority (GLA), London’s devolved governance body, to see whether ceremonies could stimulate in its participants a more active sense of citizenship.

Ceremonies are a compulsory rite of passage for any new citizen in the UK, and are seen as the final rung on the ladder to becoming British. Citizens must swear oaths to queen and country, and can do so in the presence of their relatives. Ireland, Canada and Australia all have their own versions of citizenship ceremonies.

"It’s the end of a long journey, especially when you consider all of the bureaucracy involved"

John tested various tweaks to ceremonies across six London boroughs, informed by behavioural insights. The result? “People were more willing to do one of three outcomes,” said John. “Register to vote, volunteering and the donation of blood.”

For example, John found that those who experienced behavioural interventions were 15% more likely to say that they intended to volunteer,  and 14% more likely to say they would register to vote.

One insight played on the role of the messenger. The person delivering the message can be as impactful as the message itself — and in the London Borough of Barking, they found the ideal candidate.

A former mayor, and a naturalised citizen himself, was chosen as a relatable and aspirational messenger for the listening citizens, who gave a speech at the ceremony. Embedded in the speaker’s words were strong messages on civic engagement — around registering to vote, volunteering, and donating blood.

In Southwark, John played on the notion of reciprocity. Citizens were given a gift — in this case, a photograph of them at the ceremony, normally costing £20 — in exchange for them agreeing to take part in an active citizenship activity like volunteering or donating blood.

In another, more subtle innovation, the ceremony included testimony from someone who had recently become a UK citizen, who was encouraged to draw out inclusive words like “family” “duty” “us” and “together” in their speech to invoke a sense of community belonging in the new citizens.

One group was given access to voter registration staff and literature, to explain one-on-one to new citizens the importance of partaking in the democratic process, to test a more minimal innovation. John also left a control group for comparison.

It was hard for John to pick out which intervention worked best. The study was a pilot, involving just under 500 new citizens. But the work has given him momentum to do more research and thinking into behavioural insights in collective spaces.

Collective, positive action

John was interested in the study as researchers were often more likely to consider behavioural insights for individual, personal tweaks — like paying taxes or beginning a personal pension — than collective activity. He also came across very little research into encouraging brand new citizens to participate in society.

“Individual-based interventions can miss out on the collective experiences of citizens as they experience the political system and its institutions,” writes John in an upcoming paper. He gives the example of a young person taking citizenship classes at school or taking part in assemblies, where their role in society was discussed.

"At the back of my mind, I thought there would be more questions to answer. It was a nice end to a stressful process."

John’s research showed that mobilising citizens in collective spaces can be achieved by fostering a sense of togetherness and duty, tapping into the sense of awe new citizens might have in this collective arena. 2015 research used by John to help build his case for action found that tapping into the sense of awe increased ethical decision making, generosity and prosocial values.

Participants must line up to each swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen and declare a loyalty pledge to the country. Both their functionality and positive place in the citizen’s mind made them fruitful places for experimentation.

John experienced this personally when he attended a ceremony and found himself surprisingly moved at the occasion. “It’s the end of a long journey, especially when you consider all of the bureaucracy involved,” he said. “This is the one occasion where they can feel a bit more relaxed.”

Participants were also surprised at their positive reactions to the ceremony. “It was surprisingly friendly,” said one. “At the back of my mind, I thought there would be more questions to answer. It was a nice end to a stressful process.”

Next steps and scaling

The next step in the project is to take it wider. “To do it more robustly, you need to randomly assign ceremonies,” said John. “We need a lot more ceremonies over a longer time period.”

John also recognised that the next stage was about going above and beyond motivation, exploring whether citizens actually did register to vote, give blood or go out and volunteer as a result of the interventions.

Reflecting on the process, John said that the biggest problem in testing is that people are fallible. “Sometimes, the person administering might just forget that they’re doing the experiment today,” he said. “It’s the nature of organisations and people doing their jobs.”

In terms of the ceremonies themselves, they aren’t going away anytime soon, giving John a wider source of future tests. In the wake of Brexit, the Citizen and Integration Initiative (CII), a partner in John’s research, is now also developing a “Settled Status Ceremony” to celebrate settled EU citizens.

John has left the experiment feeling more positive about the role of the ceremony in collective British citizenship. “I think it’s really encouraging that in this fairly torrid political environment, where people are fighting each other, people are taking a broader view about citizenship,” he said. “This little known reform actually has quite good potential.” — Emma Sisk