Wow. As a former social scientist with an axe to grind this hits hard. I like to provide that HN community with some context as to what this means. There are some 300 “research” departments in each of the major social sciences: psychology, sociology, economics and anthropology. If you believe what they say, about half of their mission is teaching and the other half is research. That’s a lot, tens of billions of dolla…
> This meta-analytic finding turns on the authors’ method for measuring publication bias. Because I accept that, I must believe that this entire body of research, probably the signal behavioral economics work, is essentially worthless! I strongly disagree with this statement, even as someone who believes “nudge” effects are wildly overblown. It means “these studies failed to find evidence” - NOT that there is nothing…
Perhaps due to the PR efforts of leading researchers, it was much more than “set defaults intelligently.” The interpretations were more like: we can use social science to shape peoples’ behavior at the margins. Further these marginal changes would cumulate to substantive and lasting societal improvement.
On reflection, it seems to me that the value of this paper stems from its attempt to measure or quantify publication bias. In this case, the bias was positive in the direction of with studies confirming nudge effects.
Taking that a step further implies that the actual net nudge effects across published and unpublished studies were statistically and therefore substantively insignificant. Hence the use of the term worthless, i.e. non-findings.
To say that it is costless to implement a nudge scheme in the behavioral economics sense is simply untrue. In the retirement case it required a lengthy ethical and legal debate; some study and political argument as to the best outcome, which is in part a redistributive question, hard costs associated with revision or development of messages and other materials, etc.
Worse I believe is the damage done from attention and action predicated on now seemingly faulty social science. What could’ve been done instead and what will happen in the next time a social scientist claims an ‘easy’ way to make things better are costs.