Skip to main content

Nudge: The final edition - Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein ***

I've come late to this updated 'classic' popular psychology book from 2021, updating the 2008 original. If I'd read it when the first version came out, I would probably have been really positive about it. Much of what's in here sounds very sensible and effective. And all sorts of people followed the concept of 'nudging', from hotels telling us that most people reuse towels to reduce laundry costs to governments setting up 'nudge units' like the UK's Behavioural Insights Team. But the reality has proved rather different from the assertions made here.

One problem is sorting out what a nudge is. According to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, a nudge should 'alter people's behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.' Nudges should be both easy and cheap, making them 'libertarian paternalism'.

There is no doubt that some nudges work, some do something but not what is claimed, some don't work at all... and many never were nudges in the first place.

A classic pre-nudge nudge is painting broken white lines down the middle of the road. There is good evidence that this improved road safety in classic nudge fashion. Probably the poster child of nudge, opt-out organ donation fits in the second category. There is no doubt that it did increase sign up - but it didn't increase organ donation significantly because there wasn't the foundation of a good supply and match ability to back up those extra sign-ups. Thaler and Sunstein acknowledge the need to go beyond the nudge, here but fail to admit that this underlines the power of nudging in isolation is often limited.

A wonderful example of the 'never worked' type is the idea of having a rewards system to encourage recycling. We are told that 'in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, a London suburb' (I suspect the residents of Windsor and Maidenhead would have something to say about this description) recycling increased by 35% as a result of a reward scheme. But clearly the authors never followed this up, as it was abandoned years ago and academic reviews of these schemes found their effectiveness doubtful.

As for the 'not a nudge in the first place' category, quite of few of the examples given here are not nudges by the authors' own definition. For example a scheme they describe did result in a reduction of littering in Texas - but we are not told that this 'nudge' included an up-to-$2,000 fine, and a program of volunteer litter pick up days. The way the use of nudges is described, it appears that something is a nudge if it works and not if it doesn't.

Making things worse is the replication crisis in psychology and other soft sciences, which has rendered much the original research in this kind of field of doubtful value. The updated version of the book, despite coming well after the realisation than many social sciences studies were underpowered or had manipulated results that had little or no value, does not give us any sense of taking a step back from original assertions.

I was disappointed by this book - while I used to love its ilk (for example, Leavitt and Dubner's Freakonomics), I have come to be highly suspicious of the claims made in popular social sciences books which claim to give amazing and surprising insights into everyday behaviour that will change your life, your work and your government. So much for innocence of youth...

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Premonitions Bureau - Sam Knight ****

Not everyone would class this as popular science, but it concerns an attempt to take a scientific approach to paranormal abilities - notably premonitions (aka clairvoyance) and as such, it fits the category. Writing in the typical dramatic storytelling style of a US magazine, Sam Knight brings to life the remarkable tale of the work of two British figures from the 1960s. The central one is psychiatrist John Barker, with a supporting role given to newspaper and TV science reporter Peter Fairley. Barker had a long interest in extra sensory phenomena - the story takes off when he was inspired by a number of people claiming to have foreseen the Aberfan disaster (which terrible tragedy Knight covers movingly). As a result of the Aberfan premonitions, the pair were responsible for London's Evening Standard newspaper setting up a long-running experiment in the form of 'The Premonitions Bureau.' Aware that the Aberfan predictions were only reported after the event, and hence flawe...
Post a Comment
Read more