Warning: You are about to be Nudged

By George Loewenstein, C. Bryce, David Hagmann, Sachin Rajpal. Behavioral Science & Policy, 2015

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Presenting a default option is known to influence important decisions. That includes decisions regarding advance medical directives, documents people prepare to convey which medical treatments they favor in the event that they are too ill to make their wishes clear. Some observers have argued that defaults are unethical because people are typically unaware that they are being nudged toward a decision. We informed people of the presence of default options before they completed a hypothetical advance directive, or after, then gave them the opportunity to revise their decisions. The effect of the defaults persisted, despite the disclosure, suggesting that their effectiveness may not depend on deceit. These findings may help address concerns that behavioral interventions are necessarily duplicitous or manipulative.

Subfields: General Decision Sciences, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dbaac624a8f43b15b20e988ca6f02d0256631b61

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Citations in the corpus

Behavioural science and policy: where are we now and where are we going? (2018, background): “Loewenstein et al. (2015) showed that emphasising to people that their behaviour had been influenced by a particular default setting did not undermine the effectiveness of the nudge (see also Bruns et al., 2016).”
Can nudges be transparent and yet effective (2018, unknown): “Although several recent studies link nudges to psychological reactance, they do so either indirectly, or they deal with hypothetical and attitudinal, instead of behavioral outcomes (Haggag and Paci, 2014; Arad and Rubinstein, 2015; Loewenstein et al., 2015; Hedlin and Sunstein, 2016).”
Green nudges: Do they work? Are they ethical? (2016, background): “The, otherwise important,finding that transparency does not eliminate, but merely reduces, the behavioral impact of nudges (Loewenstein et al., 2015; Bruns et al., 2016) does not make a difference in this regard.”
Which Healthy Eating Nudges Work Best? A Meta-Analysis of Field Experiments (2018, background): “Finding that consumers welcome these interventions as some studies suggest they do (Loewenstein et al. 2015) and that they are compatible with commercial goals would go a long way to encourage their adoption.”
The People’s Perspective on Libertarian-Paternalistic Policies (2018, result): “This finding differs from that of Loewenstein et al. (2015), who find that alerting individuals to the existence of a default option did not change their behavior.”
A Review of Nudges: Definitions, Justifications, Effectiveness (2020, unknown): “Marchiori et al. (2017) examine the nudge literature from a psychological perspective, and do not address the definition of a nudge and libertarian paternalism.”
Ethically Deployed Defaults: Transparency and Consumer Protection through Disclosure and Preference Articulation (2016, background): “Indeed, pointing out the existence of a default and what decision will go into effect if decision makers do not actively choose something else does not reduce the default’s efficacy (Loewenstein et al. 2015).”
When to consider boosting: some rules for policy-makers (2017, background): “How people respond when being told about either an intervention or its underlying mechanisms is an empirical question (for evidence, see Loewenstein et al., 2015), but also raises ethical concerns.”