Who nudges the nudgers?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? When governments try to influence mass behaviour via psychological nudging, we could add an entirely obvious version of Juvenal's phrase - "Who nudges the nudgers?" Frances An has a CAPX piece on the dubious effectiveness of this kind of manipulation.


Nudge, nudge – who’s there?

Ever since Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein published Nudge in 2008, the theory that bears the same name has been all the rage.

Briefly put, ‘nudge theory’ is the idea that small adjustments in the environment (‘nudges’) can influence people’s behaviour, often beyond conscious awareness. A simple example Thaler gives is putting healthy foods in a more prominent position in a supermarket to encourage better diet choices.

Thaler and Sunstein call the ideology that underpins their theory ‘libertarian paternalism’, a somewhat oxymoronic label that denotes ‘an approach that preserves freedom of choice but that authorises both private and public institutions to steer people in directions that will promote their welfare’.

The piece suggests that evidence for the effectiveness of this idea is pretty thin. Not a surprise, but the piece is worth reading as another reminder that governments are particularly poor at digesting evidence they don't like.

But whether we call it nudge theory or subliminal influence, the evidence that manipulating people through subconsciously targeted gimmicks remains weak. University of Cambridge researcher Magda Osman eloquently set out some of the problems with nudging in this recent piece.

‘…scientists overly rely on certain types of experiments. And they often don’t consider the benefits relative to the actual costs of using nudges, or work out whether nudges are in fact the actual reason for positive effects on behaviour.’

In America, a July 2022 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that once ‘publication bias’ towards positive results is removed ‘no evidence for the effectiveness of nudges remains’. As Osman writes, this doesn’t mean we should abandon the study of nudge-type interventions, but it does suggest there should be a good deal more caution when it comes to outsized claims for what nudging can or can’t do.