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: Nudge
In their popular book Nudge – Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (2008), Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein suggested that if a particular unfortunate behavioral or decision making pattern is the result of cognitive boundaries, biases, or habits, this pattern may be “nudged” toward a better option by integrating insights about the very same kind of boundaries, biases, and habits into the choice architecture surrounding the behavior – i.e. the physical, social, and psychological aspects of the contexts that influence and in which our choices take place – in ways that promote a more preferred behavior rather than obstruct it. In particular, they argue that such nudges may avoid some of the challenges and potential pitfalls of traditional regulation, such as costly procedures and ineffective campaigning, unintended effects of incentivizing behaviors, and invasive choice regulation, such as bans. The advantage, they claim, of applying nudges is that public policy makers might thus supplement – or, perhaps, even replace (Thaler & Sunstein 2008, p. 14) – traditional regulation with nudges to influence people’s everyday choices and behaviors in cheaper, less invasive, and more effective ways. That is, nudging seems to offer policy makers an effective way to influence citizens’ behavior without further restricting freedom of choice, imposing mandatory obligations, or introducing new taxations, or tax reliefs. Thaler and Sunstein coined the seemingly oxymoronic term, libertarian paternalism, to characterize the attractive regulation paradigm that intuitively arises out of the nudge strategy to behavioral change in public policy making, when it is enacted to serve the interests of the citizens as these are judged by themselves, see (Hansen 2016). In their original definition – or rather characterization – of what a nudge is, the absence of traditional policy strategies is even invoked as a formal condition: “A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge.