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No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias

pnas.org

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Re: No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias

#2
If publication bias is the exclusion of publishing results that doesn’t support your hypothesis, how are they taking that into account?

If I’m interpreting this correctly(and I by no means am sure that I am), I infer that they are saying in a fair publishing environment you’d expect to see more results that show less decisive results, therefor the current set of results is likely biased.

Couldn’t this bias also happen in the other direction? It sounds like they’re saying the results are too good and don’t match other scientific patterns of publishing results.

Re: No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias

#3
I'm not very familiar with how "nudging" is defined in the behavioral economics, and perhaps someone can enlighten me, but personally I find it hard to believe that it can be disproven that the way a choice is presented doesn't play any role in one's decision. The Goldilock principle is well-known. Most people instinctively choose the middle option, when given a three things to choose from.

Does this study imply that choice architecture plays no role in our decisions? Or am I mis-understanding it?

Re: No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias

#5
post #3

I'm not very familiar with how "nudging" is defined in the behavioral economics, and perhaps someone can enlighten me, but personally I find it hard to believe that it can be disproven that the way a choice is presented doesn't play any role in one's decision. The Goldilock principle is well-known. Most people instinctively choose the middle option, when given a three things to choose from. Does this study imply that…

You are misunderstanding. They're saying that there's an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.

Re: No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias

#6
post #3

I'm not very familiar with how "nudging" is defined in the behavioral economics, and perhaps someone can enlighten me, but personally I find it hard to believe that it can be disproven that the way a choice is presented doesn't play any role in one's decision. The Goldilock principle is well-known. Most people instinctively choose the middle option, when given a three things to choose from. Does this study imply that…

Defaults are one example of a nudge. One of Thaler's examples is having some default 401(K) contribution for new employees that's greater than zero. While I'm sure there are cases where defaults are less powerful than in others, the idea that defaults don't really matter certainly flies in the face of everything I know about the world.

You give another example of choice architectures though I'm not sure if that's a nudge in the literature or not.

Re: No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias

#9
Reading this article, it is good that the UK COVID policy wasn't based on behavioural nudging /sarcasm. The UK COVID policy heavily relied on this and one of the unwanted side effects was scaring a certain section of the population into submission. Although that may have been effective during COVID, it made it a lot harder for that segment of society to return back to normal.

Re: No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias

#10
What's exactly "nudging" here?. For example it has been shown that for organ donation, if the default is affirmative (opt-in) and you have to opt-out, then organ donors double https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1091721 , I think this is one of the "nudge" example in pop-science books.
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