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 Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more