NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Penguin Books, 2009, 312 pp, ISBN 978-0-14-311526-7This book is best described formally as a general explanation of and advocacy for libertarian paternalism, a term coined by the authors in earlier publications. Informally, it is about how leaders, systems, organizations, and governments can nudge people to do the things the nudgers want and need done for the betterment of the nudgees, or of society. It is paternalism in the sense that "it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better", (p. 5) It is libertarian in that "people should be free to do what they like - and to opt out of undesirable arrangements if they want to do so", (p. 5) The built-in possibility of opting out or making a different choice preserves freedom of choice even though people's behavior has been influenced by the nature of the presentation of the information or by the structure of the decisionmaking system. I had never heard of libertarian paternalism before reading this book, and I now find it fascinating.Written for a general audience, this book contains mostly social and behavioral science theory and models, but there is considerable discussion of structure and process that has roots in mathematical and quantitative modeling. One of the main applications of this social system is economic choice in investing, selecting and purchasing products and services, systems of taxes, banking (mortgages, borrowing, savings), and retirement systems. Other quantitative social choice systems discussed include environmental effects, health care plans, gambling, and organ donations. Softer issues that are also subject to a nudge-based approach are marriage, education, eating, drinking, smoking, influence, spread of information, and politics. There is something in this book for everyone.The basis for this libertarian paternalism concept is in the social theory called "science of choice", the study of the design and implementation of influence systems on various kinds of people. The terms Econs and Humans, are used to refer to people with either considerable or little rational decision-making talent, respectively. The various libertarian paternalism concepts and systems presented are tested and compared in light of these two types of people. Two foundational issues that this book has in common with another book, Network of Echoes: Imitation, Innovation and Invisible Leaders, that was also reviewed for this issue of the Journal are that 1 ) there are two modes of thinking (or components of the brain) - an automatic (intuitive) process and a reflective (rational) process and 2) the need for conformity and the desire for imitation are powerful forces in human behavior. …

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

How to ... be a reflective practitioner.

Doing Qualitative Research

It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

This paper examines visions of ‘learning’ across humans and machines in a near-future of intensive data analytics. Building upon the concept of ‘learnification’, practices of ‘learning’ in ...

/pdf/machine-behaviourism-future-visions-of-learnification-and-kgdgxscjpk.pdf

Machine Behaviourism: Future Visions of 'Learnification' and 'Datafication' across Humans and Digital Technologies.

A behavioural insights community has emerged within a growing number of governments. While this community helps to make policies more behavioural science based, its frontstage role models tend to assume a straightforward, instrumental and apolitical view of the science–policy relationship that seems unrealistic. This article therefore examines what goes on backstage in this community, based on an ethnographic study of behaviour experts in Dutch central government. The article argues that their work consists of a complex palette of practices (that is, choice architecture; analysis; capacity building). Because these practices resemble typical knowledge brokerage work, the article pushes for an envisaging of 'behaviour experts as knowledge brokers'.

Brokering behaviour change : The work of behavioural insights experts in government

A ‘Behavioural Insights’ movement has emerged within governments. This movement infuses policymaking with behavioural scientific insights into the rationally bounded nature of human behaviour, hoping to make more effective and cost-efficient policies without being too obtrusive. Alongside sustained admirations of some, others see in Behavioural Insights the threatening revival of technocracy, and more particularly a ‘psychocracy’: a mode of public decision-making that wrongfully reduces the world of policymaking to a rational-instrumental and top-down affair dictated by psychological expertise. This article argues, however, that the claims of technocracy and psychocracy are overgeneralizations, emanating from a frontstage-focused debate that ignores a vast backwater of emerging behavioural policy practices. Grounded in four case studies on behavioural policymaking in Dutch governance, it will be demonstrated that at least part of this backwater is neither so technocratic nor so psychocratic as the critics claim.

/pdf/the-behavioural-state-critical-observations-on-technocracy-2olsrrz82f.pdf

The behavioural state : critical observations on technocracy and psychocracy

In this paper, we critically review three assumptions that govern the debate on the legitimacy of nudging interventions as a policy instrument: (1) nudges may violate autonomous decision-making; (2) nudges lend themselves to easy implementation in public policy; and (3) nudges are a simple and effective mean for steering individual choice in the right direction. Our analysis reveals that none of these assumptions are supported by recent studies entailing unique insights into nudging from three disciplinary outlooks: ethics, public administration and psychology. We find that nudges are less of a threat to autonomous choice than critics sometimes claim, making them ethically more legitimate than often assumed. Nonetheless, because their effectiveness is critically dependent on boundary conditions, their implementation is far from easy. The findings of this analysis thus suggest new opportunities for identifying when and for whom nudge interventions are preferable to more conventional public policy arrangements. * Correspondence to: Utrecht University – Social, Health, and Organizational Psychology, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Email: d.t.d.deridder@uu.nl Behavioural Public Policy, Page 1 of 19 © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1017/bpp.2020.36

Simple nudges that are not so easy

Public policy design takes place in a complex ‘ policy swamp ’ that is not easily analyzed, let alone controlled. Nonetheless, recent scienti fi c advances in understanding human behavior have led some to believe there is a way out of this swamp. A ‘ Behavioural Insights ’ movement has emerged, pushing a seemingly neo- rationalist strategy that clashes with the hitherto incrementalist strategy of policy-making. This article investigates how upcoming behavior experts in Dutch government grapple with this clash, based on long-term ethnographic fi eldwork. The article points out that these behavior experts, despite their clear-cut rationalist impression, in the backstage take on the challenge of negotiating competing institutional logics.

/pdf/rationalized-incrementalism-how-behavior-experts-in-3jlc8ihvn3.pdf

‘Rationalized incrementalism’. How behavior experts in government negotiate institutional logics

Public policy design takes place in a complex ‘policy swamp’ that is not easily analyzed, let alone controlled. Nonetheless, recent scientific advances in understanding human behavior have led some...

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19460171.2018.1557067

Joram Feitsma

Papers

Brokering behaviour change : The work of behavioural insights experts in government

The behavioural state : critical observations on technocracy and psychocracy

Simple nudges that are not so easy

‘Rationalized incrementalism’. How behavior experts in government negotiate institutional logics

‘Rationalized incrementalism’. How behavior experts in government negotiate institutional logics