The Responsibility-Power-Justice Nexus: A Framework for Reorienting Behavioral Science Toward Power and Justice.

Abstract

Behavioral science has achieved remarkable policy influence, yet the problems it addresses, such as climate change, health inequality, and financial precarity, have worsened. We argue this is no coincidence. The field suffers from systematic power-blindness: it treats individuals as abstract decision makers while bracketing the structural forces that shape their behavioral possibilities. This article develops the responsibility-power-justice (RPJ) nexus framework as a corrective, advancing two foundational claims. First, power is not external to behavior but constitutive of it; every behavioral intervention embeds claims about who bears responsibility for problems and solutions. Second, justice is not a normative standard applied after behavioral analysis, but a causal mechanism operating within it: Tax compliance depends on perceived fairness, health behaviors reflect institutional trust, and cooperation requires beliefs about equitable burden-sharing. Across climate policy, public health, and economic governance, we demonstrate a consistent pattern: powerful actors reframe structural problems as individual failures, behavioral science supplies the intellectual tool kit, and interventions redistribute responsibility downward while leaving power structures intact. We trace this pattern to the field's roots in methodological individualism, its privileging of individual-level experiments, and its institutional entanglement with prevailing governance arrangements. We conclude by outlining what a justice-oriented behavioral science would require.