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Nudge and the Manipulation of Choice

A Framework for the Responsible Use of the Nudge Approach to Behaviour Change in Public Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Pelle Guldborg Hansen  and
Andreas Maaløe Jespersen
Pelle Guldborg Hansen
Affiliation:
Institute for Marketing & Management, University of Southern Denmark
Andreas Maaløe Jespersen
Affiliation:
The Initiative for Science, Society & Policy (ISSP)
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Abstract

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In Nudge (2008) Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein suggested that public policy–makers arrange decision–making contexts in ways to promote behaviour change in the interest of individual citizens as well as that of society. However, in the public sphere and Academia alike widespread discussions have appeared concerning the public acceptability of nudgebased behavioural policy. Thaler and Sunstein's own position is that the anti–nudge position is a literal non–starter, because citizens are always influenced by the decision making context anyway, and nudging is liberty preserving and acceptable if guided by Libertarian Paternalism and Rawls’ publicity principle. A persistent and central tenet in the criticism disputing the acceptability of the approach is that nudging works by manipulating citizens’ choices. In this paper, we argue that both lines of argumentation are seriously flawed. We show how the anti–nudge position is not a literal non–starter due to the responsibilities that accrue on policy–makers by the intentional intervention in citizens’ life, how nudging is not essentially liberty preserving and why the approach is not necessarily acceptable even if satisfying Rawls’ publicity principle. We then use the psychological dual process theory underlying the approach as well as an epistemic transparency criterion identified by Thaler and Sunstein themselves to show that nudging is not necessarily about “manipulation”, nor necessarily about influencing “choice”. The result is a framework identifying four types of nudges that may be used to provide a central component for more nuanced normative considerations as well as a basis for policy recommendations.

Type
Articles
Information
European Journal of Risk Regulation , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 3 - 28
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
© Pelle Guldborg Hansen and Andreas Maaløe Jespersen 2013 This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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123 Bovens does in fact briefly comment on this type of nudges, where the preference for consistency between actions and reflected preferences lead to behavioural change. However, since Bovens overemphasizes the cases where one is nudged toward some end that one does not agree to, his point becomes that when behavioural change occur in these instances due to consistency, this may lead to a fragmented self.

124 The cause of his mistake seems partially to be found in a conflation between the psychological sense of manipulation and the more comprehensive, neutral and technical sense, i.e. the intentional manipulation of a straightforward cause–and–effect relationship. It should be noted that nudging usually only changes frequencies and thus the effect is probabilistic rather than deterministic. In regard to manipulation, this is both good and bad news. The good news is that a deterministic change would render nudging more intrusive/manipulative, since it would indicate that we have no way to avoid its influence. However, this is not the case. Looking at the above typology, the closest one comes to such a deterministic relationship seems to be type 1 nudges, where the cause–andeffect relationship may be conjectured to be more deterministic than for type 2 nudges, since there is no active decision–making that could interfere with the Behaviour change pursued. Especially, when a type 2 nudge is epistemic transparent does this possibility seem to arise. Hence, in this “technical” sense of manipulation, type 1 nudges in general seem more robust and thus manipulative than type 2 nudges in general. The case for nudging as manipulation in the “technical” sense seems more probable when applied to automatic behaviour than to choice. Yet, the reason why transparency may undermine the efficacy or robustness of a nudge does not seem to hang solely on the distinction between type 1 and type 2 nudges. In the cases for which Bovens claims that transparency undermines effect, it rather seems to be the combination of the transparency of a type 2 nudge with the fact that the aim nudged towards do not square with the reflected preferences of the citizen, that is at fault. For instance, a reader of Spiked may recognize the fly–in–the–urinal and decide to pee on the wall as a response to the intervention. Bovens claim thus seems to result from an over–emphasis on transparent type 2 nudges that seek to promote behavioural changes the end or means of which citizens do not agree with, rather than from nudging as such.

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136 Ibid, at p. 244.

137 Ibid, at p. 245.

138 Ibid, at p. 246.

139 Ibid, at p. 246.

140 In fact this road to behavioural change may be evaluated as even less invasive and less manipulative than the provision of information. Information is hard to provide in an objective way, and for instance in the case of prompted choice for organ donation, it is only the act of taking a stand on the issue which is highlighted as important, rather than what public policy–makers deem as the right information about this.

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