Consider removing a branch of the United States government, says the Supreme Court. What are the various ways that such an upheaval could alter people’s lives? Before erasing the Supreme Court, policymakers and researchers would most likely want to know what the consequences would be. However, “deep structural changes like that cannot be tested in an experiment,” according to behavioral decision–making expert David Gal of the University of Illinois Chicago.
Similarly, less wildly hypothetical but potentially far-reaching societal changes, such as expanding Social Security or providing universal parental leave, cannot be tested using traditional experiments with control and experimental groups. As a result, many behavioral scientists are now focusing on “nudges” — smaller interventions that work within existing policies. Nudges, according to research, can influence human behavior and can be easily tested using experiments before being implemented.
However, Gal and marketing expert Derek Rucker of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., argue in a commentary published in Nature Reviews Psychology that the recent overreliance on nudges has stifled broader behavioral science research and insights into how to create a better society.
Nudges gained popularity after economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago and law professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard University published a book on the subject in 2008. Thaler’s research earned him the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and inspired governments around the world to establish nudge units to modify or create public policies.
Changing our country’s approach to penal and welfare policy will necessitate interventions that are far more radical than cost-neutral behavioral nudges on which everyone can agree. Nudges are popular among policymakers; they don’t have to make any fundamental changes.
Kohler-Hausmann
Offering small cash rewards to encourage people to get a new vaccine or sending text reminders about a looming deadline are two examples of nudges. For example, in New York City, researchers recently redesigned a court summons form and sent text reminders to encourage people to attend mandatory court appointments. According to the researchers, the intervention increased court attendance by about 20% compared to previous years.
However, such nudges ignore thornier societal issues, such as over-policing in low-income neighborhoods where these summonses are typically issued, wrote Yale University lawyer and sociologist Issa Kohler-Hausmann in a perspective piece accompanying the research.
“Changing our country’s approach to penal and welfare policy will necessitate interventions that are far more radical than cost-neutral behavioral nudges on which everyone can agree,” Kohler-Hausmann wrote. Nudges are popular among policymakers, according to Gal. “They don’t have to make any fundamental changes.”
In terms of behavioral scientists, Gal and Rucker attribute nudges’ popularity to the scientists’ desire to replicate the precision of other researchers. Medical researchers, for example, can use randomized controlled trials to test pharmaceutical drugs. Researchers use that scientific gold standard to compare outcomes among patients who received the drugs versus a placebo. Similarly, nudge researchers can create a small change — the drug — and compare outcomes between those who experience the change and those who do not.
“We value experiments because they give us statistically precise estimates,” Gal says.
However, the authors point out that nudges that work in academic studies frequently fail in practice. Researchers reported in a 2020 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that an analysis of 74 nudge experiments involving roughly half a million participants found that nudges increased desired behavior by an average of 8.7 percentage points. However, an analysis of 243 real-world studies of nudges involving over 23 million people revealed that nudges increased desired behavior by only 1.4 percentage points on average.
Rather than pursuing statistical precision, Gal would like to see behavioral scientists develop broad theories that apply beyond a single context. In the United States, juries must reach a unanimous verdict to convict a defendant. However, conformity research suggests that people copy others as a result of social pressure. Unlike nudges, that research, according to Gal, can generate insights into how human behavior interacts with existing practices and raise critical questions. Is the push for unanimity in this case preventing jurors from raising valid concerns during deliberations? “Even a single dissenter can reshape the debate and put a stop to this tendency toward conformity,” Gal says.
There is room in the field for both theoretical and applied behavioral scientists, says data scientist Kevin Wilson of Brown University’s Policy Lab, a policy research institute in Providence, R.I. “We need people who think about theory, who are really synthesizing these lessons and extrapolating insights,” they say. But we also need people who will… put these insights to use.”
Right now, nudges are getting all of the attention, according to Kohler-Hausmann. She claims that policymakers, funding agencies, and research journal editors, among others, prefer the quantifiable results that nudges provide, and that this near singular focus has hampered transformational change. “The cost of a narrowly defined intervention precludes the investigation of more compound, complex interventions.”
