Nudge and the Manipulation of Choice

By P. G. Hansen, A. Jespersen. European Journal of Risk Regulation, 2013

633 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In Nudge (2008) Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein suggested that public policy–makers arrange decision–making contexts in ways to promote behaviour change in the interest of individual citizens as well as that of society. However, in the public sphere and Academia alike widespread discussions have appeared concerning the public acceptability of nudgebased behavioural policy. Thaler and Sunstein's own position is that the anti–nudge position is a literal non–starter, because citizens are always influenced by the decision making context anyway, and nudging is liberty preserving and acceptable if guided by Libertarian Paternalism and Rawls’ publicity principle. A persistent and central tenet in the criticism disputing the acceptability of the approach is that nudging works by manipulating citizens’ choices. In this paper, we argue that both lines of argumentation are seriously flawed. We show how the anti–nudge position is not a literal non–starter due to the responsibilities that accrue on policy–makers by the intentional intervention in citizens’ life, how nudging is not essentially liberty preserving and why the approach is not necessarily acceptable even if satisfying Rawls’ publicity principle. We then use the psychological dual process theory underlying the approach as well as an epistemic transparency criterion identified by Thaler and Sunstein themselves to show that nudging is not necessarily about “manipulation”, nor necessarily about influencing “choice”. The result is a framework identifying four types of nudges that may be used to provide a central component for more nuanced normative considerations as well as a basis for policy recommendations.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4a844fefbf5069bbc7e4a3d25458eb513bacb5cc

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Citations in the corpus

The ethics of nudging: An overview (2020, background): “Hansen and Jespersen distinguish between “type 1 nudges” that mostly rely on “arational” heuristics and biases and “type 2 nudges” that appeal to both more automatic and faster and to more deliberative and slower capacities (Hansen & Jespersen, 2013; John, 2018, pp. 128–133; Schmidt, 2019).”
Can nudges be transparent and yet effective (2018, positive): “On the other hand, when the government sets an opt-out system instead of an opt-in system to promote certain behavior (e.g. organ donation) it exploits different psychological biases, often without people’s awareness (Hansen and Jespersen, 2013).”
Preference purification and the inner rational agent: a critique of the conventional wisdom of behavioural welfare economics (2016, background): “Discussion of the legitimacy of such policies has focused on issues of transparency and democratic accountability (Hansen & Jespersen, 2013; Sunstein, 2014).”
The Definition of Nudge and Libertarian Paternalism: Does the Hand Fit the Glove? (2016, positive): “87 So returning to the revised definition we may now follow Hansen and Jespersen 2013 by integrating a more precise and viable condition substituting the passiveaspectof“choicearchitecture”withcondition (I) stipulating that a nudge is a function of any ( intentional ) attempt at influencing…”
Nudge: Concept, Effectiveness, and Ethics (2017, background): “We end the review by discussing how the issues we raise also have implications for ethical debates (Saghai, 2013) and their impact on applied social policy issues (Hansen & Jespersen, 2013).”
A Review and Taxonomy of Choice Architecture Techniques (2016, background): “…functioning in a mindful versus mindless way from the perspective of the target person, being transparent or non-transparent to the subject (Hansen & Jespersen, 2013; Ly, Mažar, Zhao, & Soman, 2013), structuring the choice task versus describing the choice options (Johnson et al., 2012),…”
Behavioural science and policy: where are we now and where are we going? (2018, neutral): “(It is worth noting, therefore, that these concerns relate mainly to approaches that require attention from the individual, rather than those that are not immediately apparent – like default changes [see Hansen & Jespersen, 2013].”
Unresolved questions in nudging research: Putting the psychology back in nudging (2017, background): “Finally, Hansen and Jespersen describe how nudges are part of an attempt to intentionally and predictably influence choices and behaviors (Hansen & Jespersen, 2013).”
Green nudges: Do they work? Are they ethical? (2016, background): “Note that the nudge agenda still lacks a satisfactory notion of ‘transparency’ (Hansen and Jespersen, 2013: 23–27, Bovens, 2009), an issue to which we will return at the end of this paper.”
Exposure diversity as a design principle for recommender systems (2018, neutral): “Hansen and Jespersen (2013) have developed a useful categorization of nudges that is also instructive for our analysis.”
From Libertarian Paternalism to Nudging—and Beyond (2015, positive): “Many nudges satisfy this conditions, but many others do not (see Hansen and Jespersen 2013 for a categorization, and also Lepenies and Malecka 2015, this issue).”
23 Ways to Nudge: A Review of Technology-Mediated Nudging in Human-Computer Interaction (2019, positive): “For instance, electronic boards that make one’s real-time speed public, nudge users to adjust their speed and comply to the norms [42].”