Since the publication of the seminal book Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, several critics have highlighted preference endogeneity as a serious obstacle to nudging. When individuals hold preferences that are dynamic and endogenous to the nudge frame, it is unclear what the normative benchmark for libertarian paternalistic policies should be. While acknowledging this issue, the pro-nudging camp has not yet sufficiently addressed it. This article aims to fill this void by presenting a conditional defence of nudging when preferences are endogenous. We explain the learning process through which individuals establish ‘agentic’ preferences: preferences that are sufficiently stable, reasonable, autonomous and associated with organismic well-being to ground the ‘welfare’ principle of libertarian paternalism. To describe this process, we draw on theories from psychological science, in particular self-discrepancy theory and self-determination theory. We argue that agentic preferences are not only welfare-relevant and thus appropriate to libertarian paternalism but can also be identified by choice architects.

The aim of this article is to better understand how judgements about nudge acceptability are formed and whether they can be manipulated. We conducted a randomized experiment with N = 171 participants to test whether acceptability judgements could be (1) more favourable when the decision to implement the nudges was made following a consultation with the targeted population and (2) influenced by the joint framing of the nudge's purpose and effectiveness (in terms of an increase in desirable behaviour versus decrease in undesirable behaviour). We tested these hypotheses on various nudge scenarios and obtained mixed results that do not clearly support our hypotheses for all nudge scenarios. A surprising result that calls for further work is that by mentioning that a nudge had been implemented through a consultation with the targeted population its acceptability could be lowered.

Dark patterns – design interfaces or features that subtly manipulate people in making suboptimal decisions – are ubiquitous especially in e-commerce websites. Yet, there is little research on the effectiveness of dark patterns, and even lesser studies on testing interventions that can help mitigate their influence on consumers. To that end, we conducted two experiments. The first experiment tests the effectiveness of different dark patterns within a hypothetical single product online shopping context. Results show that, indeed, dark patterns increase the purchase impulsivity across all dark patterns, relative to the control. The second experiment tests the effectiveness of three behaviorally informed interventions on four different dark patterns also in a hypothetical online shopping scenario, but this time offering multiple products instead of a single product. Between-subject analysis shows that not all interventions are equally effective, with uneven impact across dark patterns. However, within-subject results indicate that all interventions significantly reduce purchase impulsivity pre- versus post-intervention, indicating that any intervention is better than none when it comes to combating dark patterns. We then end by discussing the policy implications of our results.

Participatory work structure is a popular concept but its causal impacts in real-world work groups have heretofore been unquantified and research has been Western-centric. We test the hypothesis that participatory group structure increases productivity for blue-collar workers in a context where participation is not a normative default. We conducted a pre-registered longitudinal field experiment with 65 Chinese factory groups (1752 workers). Half of the groups were randomly assigned to a 20-minute participatory meeting once per week for 6 weeks, in which the group's supervisor stepped aside and workers contributed ideas and personal goals in an open discussion of their work. The other half continued with status-quo meetings in which supervisors spoke and set goals, workers listened, and a researcher observed. We found that a participatory versus a hierarchical structure led to a 10.6% average increase in individual treatment workers’ productivity, an increase that endured for 9 weeks after the experiment ended. The brief participatory meetings also increased treatment workers’ retention rate (an 85% vs. 77% retention rate in treatment vs. control groups) and feelings of empowerment such as job satisfaction and sense of control. We found no evidence of informational gains or new worker goals; instead, evidence suggests that the increase in frequency of workers’ voicing opinions may have driven higher productivity. These findings provide rare causal evidence in a setting where participation is not a normative default, indicating the benefits of direct group participation for changing and sustaining behavior and attitudes.

Many proponents of behavioural public policy work within a broadly consequentialist framework. From this perspective, the ultimate aim of public policy is to maximise utility, happiness, welfare, the satisfaction of preferences, or similar; and the behavioural aspect of public policy aims to harness a knowledge of human psychology to make this maximisation more effective. In particular, behavioural insights may be crucial to help policy-makers ‘save us from ourselves’ by helping citizens avoid falling into non-rational choices, for example, through framing effects, failures of will-power, and so on. But an alternative reading of the psychological literature is that human thoughts and actions are not biased from a rational standard, but are simply systematically inconsistent. If so, then utility and similar notions are not well defined either for individuals or as an objective of public policy. I argue that a different, contractarian viewpoint is required: that the determination of public policy is continuous with the formation of agreements we make with each other at all scales, from momentary social interactions, to linguistic and social conventions, to collective decisions by groups and organisations. Behavioural factors do not over-ride, but can (among many other factors) inform, our collective decision-making process. The point of behavioural insights in public policy is primarily to inform and enrich public debate when deciding the rules by which we should like to live.

Debtors were stimulated to contact their creditors to negotiate a repayment plan. Contacting creditors was important because debtors were unlikely to repay the debt immediately and upon contacting, debtors could agree on a repayment plan to repay the debt in the long run. Using insights from scarcity theory and nudging techniques, a standard debt repayment letter was adapted and both letters were compared. Experimental results (N = 3,330) provide support for the use of nudging techniques as more debtors agreed on a repayment plan and response rates increased. The results underline the importance of stimulating debtors to contact their creditors.

As US college costs continue to rise, governments and institutions have quadrupled financial aid. Yet, the administrative process of receiving financial aid remains complex, raising costs for families and deterring students from enrolling. In two large-scale field experiments (N = 265,570), we test the impact of nudging high-school seniors in California to register for state scholarships. We find that simplifying communication and affirming belonging each significantly increase registrations, by 9% and 11%, respectively. Yet, these nudges do not impact the final step of the financial aid process – receiving the scholarship. In contrast, a simplified letter that affirms belonging while also making comparable cost calculations more salient significantly impacts college choice, increasing enrollment in the lowest net cost option by 10.4%. Our findings suggest that different nudges are likely to address different types of administrative burdens, and their combination may be the most effective way to shift educational outcomes.

Evolutionary explanations for behavioral findings are often both fascinating and plausible. But even so, they do not establish that people are acting rationally, that they are not making mistakes, or that their decisions are promoting their welfare. For example, present bias, optimistic overconfidence, and use of the availability heuristic can produce terrible mistakes and serious welfare losses, and this is so even if they have evolutionary foundations. There might well be evolutionary explanations for certain kinds of in-group favoritism, and also for certain male attitudes and actions toward women, and also for human mistreatment of and cruelty toward nonhuman animals. But those explanations would not justify anything at all. It is not clear that in Darwinia (a nation in which departures from perfect rationality have an evolutionary explanation), policymakers should behave very differently from Durkheimian policymakers (a nation in which departures from perfect rationality have a cultural explanation).

Important challenges like climate change require transformative policy responses. According to a growing public policy literature, such transformative responses typically require complex policy packages that bundle various individual policy instruments to complement each other, compensate transition losers, and create positive synergies. Nevertheless, while adding new instruments to a package can increase policy effectiveness, it comes at a price: increased policy design complexity. Increased complexity potentially leads to fundamental public misperceptions that undermine policy legitimacy and feasibility. Here, I argue that complex policy packages affect public opinion through a compensation, policy perception, and design complexity mechanism. To test this argument, this study assesses if citizens evaluate proposals for isolated climate policies related to food and mobility behaviors differently to complex policy packages. Employing a novel two-stage conjoint-experimental approach with 9115 respondents from the USA and Germany, the study shows that policy packaging increases citizens’ perceived policy effectiveness to reduce climate pollutants, but also perceived restrictions on citizens’ lifestyles. Moreover, increased design complexity can lead citizens to pay special attention to salient costly parts of policy packages. However, increased design complexity does not fundamentally reverse preferences. Through packaging desired and undesired policy instruments, policymakers can increase public support for transformative climate policies.

Cass Sunstein's contention that evolutionary explanations for behavioural economic phenomena are of limited relevance to public policy – and his support for soft paternalism – rests on his view that policymakers ought to be pursuing increases in some overarching social planning conception of welfare. In this reply to Sunstein, I argue that people have differing and multifarious desires in life, with the social planner's conception of welfare being, at best, perhaps only a partial consideration for most people. The phenomena that behavioural economists and psychologists have empirically observed may well facilitate people in the pursuit of their own desires in life. Consequently, paternalistic manipulation or coercion to save people from themselves is questionable in the behavioural public policy space, but government intervention is warranted when one party implicitly or explicitly uses these phenomena to exploit others.

Interventions that tackle ‘last mile’ behaviors in the form of improved choice architecture are fundamental to Behavioral Public Policy (BPP), yet far less attention is typically paid to the nature and design of underlying system conditions and infrastructures that support these interventions. However, inattention to broader conditions that impact participant engagement and intervention functionality, such as barriers to access that deter participation or perverse structural disincentives that reward undesirable behaviors, may not only limit the effectiveness of behavioral solutions but also miss opportunities to deliberately design underlying ‘plumbing’ – the choice infrastructure – in a way that improves overall system efficacy and equity. Using the illustrative case of civic policy in food licensure, this article describes how using a ‘SPACE’ model to address Standards, Process mechanics and policies, Accountability, Culture within systems, and Evaluative and iterative feedback can support the development of improved choice infrastructure, contributing to BPP problem-solving efforts by helping practitioners create system conditions that are more conducive to the success of behavioral solutions.

Self-control failure occurs when an individual experiences a conflict between immediate desires and longer-term goals, recognises psychological forces that hinder goal-directed action, tries to resist them but fails in the attempt. Behavioural economists often invoke assumptions about self-control failure to justify proposals for policy interventions. These arguments require workable methods for eliciting individuals’ goals and for verifying occurrences of self-control failure, but developing such methods confronts two problems. First, it is not clear that individuals’ goals are context-independent. Second, facing an actual conflict between a desire and a self-acknowledged goal, a person may consciously choose not to resist the desire, thinking that spontaneity is more important than self-control. We address these issues through an online survey that elicited individuals’ self-reported judgements about the relative importance of self-control and spontaneity in conflicts between enjoyment and health-related goals. To test for context-sensitivity, the judgement-elicitation questions were preceded by a memory recall task which directed participants’ attention either to the enjoyment of acting on desires or to the satisfaction of achieving goals. We found little evidence of context-sensitivity. In both treatments, however, judgements that favoured spontaneity were expressed with roughly the same frequency and strength as judgments that favoured self-control.

Personal data increasingly serve as inputs to public goods. Like other types of contributions to public goods, personal data are likely to be underprovided. We investigate whether classical remedies to underprovision are also applicable to personal data and whether the privacy-sensitive nature of personal data must be additionally accounted for. In a randomized field experiment on a public online education platform, we prompt users to complete their profiles with personal information. Compared to a control message, we find that making public benefits salient increases the number of personal data contributions significantly. This effect is even stronger when additionally emphasizing privacy protection, especially for sensitive information. Our results further suggest that emphasis on both public benefits and privacy protection attracts personal data from a more diverse set of contributors.

Behavioural science has been effectively used by policy makers in various domains, from health to savings. However, interventions that behavioural scientists typically employ to change behaviour have been at the centre of an ethical debate, given that they include elements of paternalism that have implications for people's freedom of choice. In the present article, we argue that this ethical debate could be resolved in the future through implementation and advancement of new technologies. We propose that several technologies which are currently available and are rapidly evolving (i.e., virtual and augmented reality, social robotics, gamification, self-quantification, and behavioural informatics) have a potential to be integrated with various behavioural interventions in a non-paternalistic way. More specifically, people would decide themselves which behaviours they want to change and select the technologies they want to use for this purpose, and the role of policy makers would be to develop transparent behavioural interventions for these technologies. In that sense, behavioural science would move from libertarian paternalism to liberalism, given that people would freely choose how they want to change, and policy makers would create technological interventions that make this change possible.

Are people more likely to (mis)interpret information so that it aligns with their ideological identity when relying on feelings compared to when engaging in analytical thinking? Or is it the other way around: Does deliberation increase the propensity to (mis)interpret information to confirm existing political views? In a behavioral experiment, participants (n = 1207, Swedish sample) assessed numerical information concerning the effects of gender quotas and immigration either under time pressure or under no time pressure. To measure trait differences in cognitive sophistication, we also collected data on numeric ability. We found clear evidence of motivated reasoning when assessing both the effects of gender quotas on companies’ financial results and the effect of refugee intake on crime rates. Subjects who prioritized equality over liberty on the labor market were 13 percentage points less likely to correctly assess numerical information depicting that companies that used gender quotas when hiring made less profit. Subjects who classified themselves as ‘Swedes’ rather than ‘World citizens’ were 14 percentage points less likely to correctly assess numerical information depicting that crime rates decreased following immigration. Time pressure did not affect the likelihood to engage in motivated reasoning, while subjects with higher numeric ability were less likely to engage in motivated reasoning when analyzing information concerning refugee intake, but more likely to engage in motivated reasoning when analyzing information regarding the effect of gender quotas. Together these results indicate that motivated reasoning is primarily driven by individual differences in analytical thinking at the trait level and not by situational factors such as time pressure, and that whether motivated reasoning is primarily driven by analysis or feelings depends on the topic at hand.

On the one hand, default nudges are proven to strongly influence behavior. On the other hand, a number of consumer autonomy and welfare concerns have been raised that hinder public policy applications. Both nudge success and ethical concerns depend heavily on the design of defaults. We identify six taxonomic characteristics that matter to the ethical and the nudge success dimension. We review the default nudge literature (N = 61) and review ethical studies to assess both dimensions concerning the taxonomy. When designing a default, a choice architect inevitably makes a decision concerning the characteristics. Among others, the results show three main findings. (1) The initial choice architecture regularly imposes welfare losses and impedes consumer autonomy. Forced active choosing can mitigate both issues. (2) Empirical evidence suggests that transparent defaults are similarly effective as the non-transparent counterparts. (3) The framing of the choice in combination with a choice structuring default leads to greater nudge success and tends to involve the reflective decision-making patterns. Choice architects can trade-off nudge success for legitimacy but a design change may also benefit one without harming the other. We discuss further options of choice architects to legitimize a default.

In this paper, I reflect on the implications that ultimatum and dictator game experiments might have for public policy and for the debates over egalitarianism. Experiments suggest that people are more inclined to redistribute when outcomes are influenced by luck than effort. This can create difficulties for public policy when people hold contrasting views over whether luck or effort determine outcomes. The results also appear to play into forms of luck egalitarianism. However, they may also be consistent with an alternative understanding of egalitarianism as the impulse to have rules that treat people equally.

Although there has been a proliferation of research and policy work into how nudges shape people's behaviour, most studies stop far short of consumer welfare analysis. In the current work, we critically reflect on recent efforts to provide insights into the consumer welfare impact of nudges using willingness to pay and subjective well-being reports and explore an unobtrusive approach that can speak to the immediate emotional impacts of a nudge: automatic facial expression coding. In an exploratory lab study, we use facial expression coding to assess the short-run emotional impact of being presented with calorie information about a popcorn snack in the context of a stylised ‘Cinema experience’. The results of the study indicate that calorie information has heterogeneous impacts on people's likelihood of choosing the snack and on the emotions they experience during the moment of choice which varies based on their level of health-consciousness. The information does not, however, affect the emotions people go on to experience while viewing movie clips, suggesting that the emotional effects of the information are short-lived. We conclude by emphasising the potential of automatic facial expression coding to provide new insights into the immediate emotional impacts of nudges and calling for further research into this promising technique.

In a previously published article, I reported some tests of prospect theory's reflection effect over outcomes defined by money and life years gained from treatment. Those results suggested qualified support for the reflection effect over money outcomes and strong support over longevity outcomes. This article reruns those tests while accounting for the intensity of individual risk attitudes, and, overall, show consistency with the reflection effect. However, I argue that these results do not necessarily offer support for the explanatory power of prospect theory. Rather, the results may be driven by evolved responses to circumstances that provoke perceptions of scarcity and abundance. Therefore, from an ecological perspective, behavioral patterns such as those that are consistent with the reflection effect, which, by extension, tend to be considered as erroneous or biased by most behavioral economists because they conflict with the postulates of rational choice theory, may not be unreasonable. Recognizing as such is important when considering how behavioral insights ought to inform public policy design and implementation.

The ultimatum and dictator games were developed to help identify the fundamental motivators of human behavior, typically by asking participants to share windfall endowments with other persons. In the ultimatum game, a common observation is that proposers offer, and responders refuse to accept, a much larger share of the endowment than is predicted by rational choice theory. However, in the real world, windfalls are rare: money is usually earned. I report here a small study aimed at testing how participants react to an ultimatum game after they have earned their endowments by either building a Lego model or spending some time sorting out screws by their length. I find that the shares that proposers offer and responders accept are significantly lower than that typically observed with windfall money, an observation that is intensified when the task undertaken to earn the endowment is generally less enjoyable and thus perhaps more effortful (i.e., screw sorting compared to Lego building). I suggest, therefore, that considerations of effort-based desert are often important drivers behind individual decision-making, and that laboratory experiments, if intended to inform public policy design and implementation, ought to mirror the broad characteristics of the realities that people face.