The Nudgerism section seems to be mushing together various psychology-related things which don’t have much to do with nudging.
Things like downplaying risks in order to prevent panic are at most very loosely related to nudging, and at least as ancient as the practice of placing objects at eye-level. Seems like an over-extension of focusing on “morale” and other Leaders of Men style attributes.
The main overlaps between the book Nudge and the awful The Cognitive Bias That Makes Us Panic About Coronavirus Bloomberg article are 1) they were both written by Cass Sunstein and 2) the one intervention that’s explicitly recommended in the Bloomberg article is publicizing accurate information about coronavirus risk probabilities.
One of the main themes of the nudge movement is that human behavior is an empirical field that can be studied, and one of the main flaws of the thing being called “nudgerism” is making up ungrounded (and often inaccurate) stories about how people will behave (such as what things will induce a “false sense of security”). These stories often are made by people without relevant expertise who don’t even seem to be trying very hard to make accurate predictions.
The British government has a Behavioural Insights Team which is colloquially known as the Nudge Unit; I’d guess that they didn’t have much to do with the screwups that are being called “nudgerism.”
I had nudging cached in my memory as, more or less, a UX movement.
Want to increase charity donation at your company? Make it opt-out, rather than opt-in. Want to increase completion rates of your survey? Make it shorter.
And so forth.
So I was surprised by Jacob Falkovich claiming that nudgerism caused the elaborate psychological theorising used to inform covid policy. Many such policies mostly seemed to be about oddly specific, second-order claims. Like, in the case of expected resistance to challenge trials, or vaccine hesitancy. Those arguments venture more heavily into psychoanalysing people; rather than appealing to simple behavioural economics and basic UX.
(My cached memory of the nudge movement might be too narrow, though)
During COVID the UK government has been heavily advised by the SAGE committee (an emergency committee of scientists), including a subcommittee of behavioural scientists who advised on what the reaction to measures like lockdowns might be. I don’t know how reliable behavioural science is at the moment (with the replication crisis) but this seemed like a reasonable move—being guided by them rather than politicians’ own hunches.
Hmm, I do think I honestly believe that behavioral scientists might be worse than the average politician at predicting public response. Like, I am not totally confident, but I think I would take a 50% bet. So this strikes me as overall mildly bad (though not very bad, I don’t expect either of these two groups to be very good at doing this).
Habryka, is the reasoning that politicians have a real incentive to accurately predict public response—because it entirely determines whether they remain in power—whereas behavioral scientists have a much weaker incentive, compared to the dominant incentive of publishing significant results?
The Nudgerism section seems to be mushing together various psychology-related things which don’t have much to do with nudging.
Things like downplaying risks in order to prevent panic are at most very loosely related to nudging, and at least as ancient as the practice of placing objects at eye-level. Seems like an over-extension of focusing on “morale” and other Leaders of Men style attributes.
The main overlaps between the book Nudge and the awful The Cognitive Bias That Makes Us Panic About Coronavirus Bloomberg article are 1) they were both written by Cass Sunstein and 2) the one intervention that’s explicitly recommended in the Bloomberg article is publicizing accurate information about coronavirus risk probabilities.
One of the main themes of the nudge movement is that human behavior is an empirical field that can be studied, and one of the main flaws of the thing being called “nudgerism” is making up ungrounded (and often inaccurate) stories about how people will behave (such as what things will induce a “false sense of security”). These stories often are made by people without relevant expertise who don’t even seem to be trying very hard to make accurate predictions.
The British government has a Behavioural Insights Team which is colloquially known as the Nudge Unit; I’d guess that they didn’t have much to do with the screwups that are being called “nudgerism.”
I had nudging cached in my memory as, more or less, a UX movement.
Want to increase charity donation at your company? Make it opt-out, rather than opt-in. Want to increase completion rates of your survey? Make it shorter.
And so forth.
So I was surprised by Jacob Falkovich claiming that nudgerism caused the elaborate psychological theorising used to inform covid policy. Many such policies mostly seemed to be about oddly specific, second-order claims. Like, in the case of expected resistance to challenge trials, or vaccine hesitancy. Those arguments venture more heavily into psychoanalysing people; rather than appealing to simple behavioural economics and basic UX.
(My cached memory of the nudge movement might be too narrow, though)
Why not send out ‘surveys’ to a large audience which have a random subset of questions included, randomized separately for each person?
During COVID the UK government has been heavily advised by the SAGE committee (an emergency committee of scientists), including a subcommittee of behavioural scientists who advised on what the reaction to measures like lockdowns might be. I don’t know how reliable behavioural science is at the moment (with the replication crisis) but this seemed like a reasonable move—being guided by them rather than politicians’ own hunches.
Hmm, I do think I honestly believe that behavioral scientists might be worse than the average politician at predicting public response. Like, I am not totally confident, but I think I would take a 50% bet. So this strikes me as overall mildly bad (though not very bad, I don’t expect either of these two groups to be very good at doing this).
Habryka, is the reasoning that politicians have a real incentive to accurately predict public response—because it entirely determines whether they remain in power—whereas behavioral scientists have a much weaker incentive, compared to the dominant incentive of publishing significant results?
Why not do polls?
They do, but the committee was trying to predict future reactions.