Nudging is a concept commonly used in economics and decision-making science. First popularized by the book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" written by Richard Thaler and Cass Sustein, it represents the different interventions and mechanisms used to influence decision-making and drive it toward the desired option. These interventions, at once simple and subtle, are meant to influence one's behavior (sometimes subconsciously) without forcing it. Such techniques do not include law-induced behaviors, such as smoking bans.
Nudging mainly works because we tend, as decision-makers, to use heuristics (that are not necessarily thoroughly thought through) that help make choices. These heuristics are called cognitive biases. Among these heuristics, let us cite:
Nudge policies may work better when adapted to a targeted group, for instance, customers hesitating to buy a new product. One way to define this targeted group is by using machine-learning techniques like scoring, an algorithm that gives a score to a specific observation based on its criteria. For instance, consider a fashion website. By analyzing visitor activity (items viewed, time spent per item, frequency of visits, purchase history, etc.), we can define a score for a visitor’s likelihood of buying a new item they viewed on the website but have yet to purchase. The score is calculated by comparing the visitor’s navigation criteria to those of others on the website and by determining if other customers with similar profiles bought the product.
Based on their interest score, a client will be targeted (or not) by marketing campaigns. If their score is very low, the visitor is likely not interested in the item at all, and therefore, there is no need for targeting. Contrastingly, if their score is very high, they will likely purchase without requiring extra marketing actions. Instead, the brand will focus on visitors with medium scores, those who cannot decide whether to buy. These profiles will be targeted by marketing campaigns to nudge their behavior toward making a purchase. The nudging can take the form of personalized emails, including special offers about the item they checked, for instance.
Nudge techniques are widely used in different fields: public policy, health, sustainability, and marketing, to name a few. Below, we will describe a few specific examples.
In a social experiment, the iNudgeYou, a Danish applied behavior science center, helped people eat healthier. In a company restaurant, they noticed that food was presented in consistent quantities: large pieces of cake and whole apples, making people eat too much cake (94 grams on average per person) rather than apples (13 grams on average per person). They decided to cut the food into smaller pieces. As a result, people started to load their plates with a mix of cake and apples, leading to an increase in the quantity of apples (20 grams on average) and a decrease in the quantity of cake consumed (61 grams instead of the original 94 grams). It can, sometimes, be as simple as that!
When browsing a website, people tend to first broadly scan it before going to the section that interests them. In Western cultures, a website is usually scrolled from the top to the bottom, from the left to the right. Therefore, the right-low section is checked last; this is why call-to-action buttons (subscribe, book now, make a reservation…) are typically placed there.
Setting the targeted option as default is a commonly used tool for nudging in different fields. For instance, it has been proven to increase organ donation rates among the population. Combining experimental tests and real-world data, this paper highlights the impact of setting the organ donor status as the default option to increase the donation rate. This process was far more effective than other policies experimented with. For instance, in the Netherlands, a massive national educational campaign was conducted to encourage people to register for organ donation, yet, the consent rate remained low (27.5%), much lower than in European countries using the default opt-in option (e.g. >99% in France).
The UK government used the same technique to enhance employees' enrollment in the retirement savings program. The effect was particularly remarkable for workers with the lowest income. This category, struggling to be financially stable in the short term, prioritizes immediate financial security over the importance of long-term investment in retirement savings. Consequently, only 22% of this category had a retirement saving program before the default opt-in policy, compared to more than 90% after the default opt-in policy.
When using nudging techniques, one might tend to rely directly on behavioral science insights. However, these insights themselves can be biased, as they are based on studies and research performed on WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) populations most of the time. This cohort only represents about 12% of the world, yet makes up about 80% of the conducted studies.
As these cognitive and behavioral mechanisms studies are biased by the restricted population they examined, they cannot be systematically generalized to other populations with different cultural specificities; cultural and socio-demographic specifications must be taken into account. Nudging cannot be efficient by just simply applying behavioral and cognitive findings. Instead, it requires a deeper understanding of the context of its application as well as the targeted group.
As previously detailed, nudging employs subtle techniques to impact human behavior and drive it toward a targeted choice. As a general tool, it can be employed to benefit the targeted consumer (like the case described above, applied to healthy food consumption). By contrast, it can be used to trick the nudgee into undesired behaviors that primarily benefit the nudger. These techniques are called dark patterns. These patterns include default-ticking automatic renewable subscriptions within forms, for instance, relying on the status-quo bias. Another harmful technique also used in online choice architecture is sludge. The opposite of nudge, sludge aims to develop a complex and exhausting consumer path on a given website to dissuade them from taking an action, e.g., to discourage a visitor from unsubscribing to a program.
These dark patterns emphasize the ethical and regulatory norms that should be respected when using these techniques. Such a topic is quite controversial, as a nudger’s methods and intentions can be as subtle as they are difficult to define.
From a regulatory perspective, several countries are working on regulations defining the limits of nudging techniques. For instance, since April 2021, the CNIL states that websites collecting user data through cookies should no longer be the default. Instead, each user must explicitly consent to data collection, ending decades of data collection based on the status-quo effect.
Although the use of behavioral science and ethical nudging is still being debated, some guidelines exist to help behavioral scientists perform their job ethically, like the “Nudge FORGOOD framework”. As described in this video by its co-designer Liam Delaney, this framework states that nudgers should consider their work’s ethical aspects: Fairness, Openness, Respect, Goals, Opinions, Options and Delegation.
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