Expanding the Nudge : Designing Choice Contexts and Choice

Expanding the Nudge: Designing Choice Contexts and Choice Contents*

To nudge is to design choice contexts in order to improve choice outcomes. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein emphatically endorse nudging but reject more restrictive means. In contrast, I argue that the behavioral psychology that motivates nudging also motivates what may be called jolting—i.e. the design of choice content. I defend nudging and jolting by distinguishing them from the sometimes op...

Salvaging the concept of nudge.

In recent years, 'nudge' theory has gained increasing attention for the design of population-wide health interventions. The concept of nudge puts a label on efficacious influences that preserve freedom of choice without engaging the influencees' deliberative capacities. Given disagreements over what it takes genuinely to preserve freedom of choice, the question is whether health influences rely...

Nudging by Shaming, Shaming by Nudging

In both developing and developed countries, health ministries closely examine use of so-called nudges to promote population health and welfare. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, who developed the concept, define a nudge as “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. ...

Nudge, Embarrassment, and Restriction—Replies to Voigt, Tieffenbach, and Saghai

Is nudge an effective public health strategy to tackle obesity? No.

Over the past decade a common picture on the aetiology of obesity has become largely agreed. After years of competing analyses, most people now accept that obesity is the result of a complex multifactoral interplay. 2 It is not either food intake or physical activity but both. It is not just food oversupply or pricing or domestic culture or food marketing or poor consumer choice or genetic pote...