Social Nudges: Their Mechanisms and Justification

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the use of social nudges, policy interventions to induce voluntary cooperation in social dilemma situations, can be defended against two ethical objections which I call objections from coherence and autonomy. Specifically I argue that the kind of preference change caused by social nudges is not a threat to agents' coherent preference structure, and that there is a way in which social nudges influence behavior while respecting agents' capacity to reason. I base my arguments on two mechanistic explanations of social nudges; the expectationbased and frame-based accounts. As a concrete example of social nudges I choose the "Don't Mess With Texas" anti-littering campaign and discuss in some detail how it worked.

From Libertarian Paternalism to Nudging—and Beyond

“…For behavioural policies, such mechanisms will often be psychological mechanisms-describing cognitive processes that lead from the policy intervention through the agent's perception, feelings, cognition, to her forming an intention and instantiating behaviour. As some of the authors of this special issue argue, neurophysiological mechanisms (Felsen and Reiner 2015 this issue) and social mechanisms (Nagatsu 2015, this issue) also are relevant for assessing behavioural policies. More generally, mechanisms of interaction between the nudges and the environment may also be relevant-for example, does the nudge record as input private information?…”

“…Note that a particular intervention might belong to several of these kinds: think for example about shocking tobacco health warnings, which at the same time inform and exploit various cognitive shortcuts like availability heuristics (Barton 2013); or think about the nudge informing students that their peers do binge-drink less often than what they would assume, in order to trigger a conformist heuristics leading to a healthier behaviour (Haines and Spear 1996). Most of the analysis on nudges has focused on the heuristics-triggering kind, which is often considered ethically and politically problematic (e.g., Rebonato 2012;Saghai 2013, as well as Mills 2015Whitman and Rizzo 2015;Gigerenzer 2015;Nagatsu 2015;Felsen andReiner 2015 andLepenies andMalecka 2015 in this issue).…”

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“…Andere hingegen untersuchen, inwiefern Nudges gegen liberale Prinzipien verstoßen (GrüneYanoff 2012), oder erforschen das Verhältnis von Nudges und den "fundamental rights of citizens to freedom of expression, privacy, and self-determination" (Alemanno & Spina 2014, p. 431). Jüngst sind die ersten Beiträge erschienen, in denen über die Bedeutung sozial determinierter Präferenzen gesprochen wird (Guala & Mittone 2015;Nagatsu 2015 (Kahneman & Tversky 1982). Availability heuristics wurden unter anderem von Tversky & Kahneman (1974) Wir wenden dagegen ein, dass die "Einverleibung" von Rawls' Publizitätskriterium durch T&S fehlgeleitet ist.…”

Nudge, Boost, or Design? Limitations of behaviorally informed policy under social interaction

“…Johnson et al (2012) discuss factors involved in designing choice architectures, and Bhargava and Loewenstein (2015) raise worries about the effectiveness of nudge interventions in contrast to more traditional policy tools. Also Chetty (2015) brings up some issues discussed in our paper, and Nagatsu (2015) provides an insightful discussion of the ethics of social nudges. To our knowledge, the only papers explicitly comparing nudge and boost interventions are Grüne-Yanoff and Hertwig (2016) and Hertwig and Grüne-Yanoff (2017).…”