Title: what is nudging? | Behavioral Science & Policy Association
Headings: what is nudging?
what is nudging?
By PG Hansen, PhD., Behavioural Scientist, Roskilde University
Nudge
Nudging
Ethics and Policy
About the author

Content: A key institution in this development has been the establishment of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) – or the UK Nudge Unit as it is often referred to – in 2009 by UK Prime Minister David Cameron. It is led by Dr. David Halpern and Managing Director Owain Service and rolled out of government to become partly privatized in 2014. However, BIT is part of a broader trend, which since 2009 has seen nudge units, initiatives, and networks emerging in the United States, Denmark, Singapore, France and Canada, to mention just a few of the many exciting places this is happening. Likewise the OECD, The World Bank and the European Union, have published reports, held meetings, and actively supported research to further examine the potential of nudging, see (OECD 2014), (World Bank 2015) and (EU 2016). Taken together all of these efforts have led to the emergence of the field, yet nudging is only in its infancy. [ iii]
Still, it should be noticed that a common scientific framework of reference unites these efforts. In particular, nudging relies heavily on theories and methodology from behavioral economics as well as from cognitive and social psychology, using microeconomic decision theory as a baseline. In particular, a central focus within the field is the biases and heuristics program of Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, which is rooted in dual-process theories of cognition and information processing (Kahneman & Tversky 1979) and made accessible to the wider public by Kahneman’s dual-system theory presented in his famous book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). Dual-process theories vary greatly but generally share the overarching structure of positing two types of human information processing — automatic and nonautomatic — in explaining and predicting human behavior (Evans 2008). Using David Marr’s (1982) distinction between computational, algorithmic, and implementation-level theories of psychology, the explanatory function of dual process theories may be located at the algorithmic level of analysis where mental mechanisms that translate inputs into outputs are identified.