Decisional enhancement and autonomy: public attitudes towards overt and covert nudges

By Gidon Felsen, Noah Castelo, Peter Reiner. Judgment and Decision Making, 2013

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ubiquitous cognitive biases hinder optimal decision making. Recent calls to assist decision makers in mitigating these biases—via interventions commonly called “nudges”—have been criticized as infringing upon individual autonomy. We tested the hypothesis that such “decisional enhancement” programs that target overt decision making—i.e., conscious, higher-order cognitive processes—would be more acceptable than similar programs that affect covert decision making—i.e., subconscious, lower-order processes. We presented respondents with vignettes in which they chose between an option that included a decisional enhancement program and a neutral option. In order to assess preferences for overt or covert decisional enhancement, we used the contrastive vignette technique in which different groups of respondents were presented with one of a pair of vignettes that targeted either conscious or subconscious processes. Other than the nature of the decisional enhancement, the vignettes were identical, allowing us to isolate the influence of the type of decisional enhancement on preferences. Overall, we found support for the hypothesis that people prefer conscious decisional enhancement. Further, respondents who perceived the influence of the program as more conscious than subconscious reported that their decisions under the program would be more “authentic”. However, this relative favorability was somewhat contingent upon context. We discuss our results with respect to the implementation and ethics of decisional enhancement.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/914f2023379e4a78c79154e7a9370201d7d66255

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Citations in the corpus

Ethically Deployed Defaults: Transparency and Consumer Protection through Disclosure and Preference Articulation (2016, background): “…lower-order decision-making processes, are deemed less acceptable than those that target conscious, higher-order processes, in some contexts (e.g., eating, purchasing, exercising, investing decisions), but not in others (e.g., workplace productivity decisions; Felsen, Castelo, and Reiner 2013).”
Can nudges be transparent and yet effective (2018, unknown): “Felsen et al. (2013) demonstrate in a vignette study that a significant proportion of individuals have reservations towards nudges they perceive as covert.”
Advancing Conservation by Understanding and Influencing Human Behavior (2017, background): “Nudges are also perceived negatively by those who view them as paternalistic and as eroding autonomy (Felsen et al. 2013).”
Public Views on Policies Involving Nudges (2015, background): “The most closely related studies are the studies conducted by Felsen et al. (2013) and Branson et al. (2011).”
A worldwide consensus on nudging? Not quite, but almost (2018, unknown): “Current literature on public acceptance of nudges (e.g., Diepeveen et al. 2013; Felsen et al. 2013; Hagman et al .”
When and why defaults influence decisions: a meta-analysis of default effects (2019, background): “Across many other domains and governments, defaults have also attracted increasing attention from policy-makers (Felsen et al., 2013; Sunstein, 2015; Tannenbaum et al., 2017).”
Green nudges: Do they work? Are they ethical? (2016, background): “Nudgesmay also provoke reactance and result in public resentment, alienating people from the agenda pursued by policy-makers who might be perceived as relying on illegitimate means (Felsen et al., 2013; Arad and Rubinstein, 2015).”
American attitudes toward nudges (2016, background): “Yet despite this criticism, System 1 nudges, such as defaults, have often been shown to be more effective than System 2 nudges at changing behavior (Wisdom et al. 2010; Felsen et al. 2013) and beliefs (Nisbett & Stanley 1966; Nisbett & Wilson 1977).”
The People’s Perspective on Libertarian-Paternalistic Policies (2018, background): “2 Concerns about manipulation were also found in Felsen et al. (2013) who considered interventions carried out by employers. They find that participants were more favorable to an intervention which activates a conscious process than one which activates an unconscious process. 3 Hagman et al. (2015) ”