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…
First of the definition:
> A nudge is a function of (condition I) any attempt at influencing people’s judgment, choice or behavior in a predictable way (condition a) that is motivated because of cognitive boundaries, biases, routines, and habits in individual and social decision-making posing barriers for people to perform rationally in their own self-declared interests, and which (condition b) works by making use of those boundaries, biases, routines, and habits as integral parts of such attempts.
I find this definition overly permissive and overlay reliant on unnecessary cognitive terms (like judgement and choice; which can be shortened to behavior) or economic terms (like rationality and self interest). As a fan of behaviorism this feels like an attempt to introduce epicycle into a theory that doesn’t need it. This effect—if it exists—can probably be adequately explained with good old classical conditioning and conditional reinforcements. This is the first red flag. That is not to say we can’t look for specific cognitive functions which makes some reinforcement contingencies more effective then others, but nudge feels a bit too general to actually be of any use in a model. It in fact reminds me of Albert Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, a theory that seems to have reach a dead-end at this point.
The second red flag is the economic presuppositions. When I skim through the literature it feels like they are creating a band-aid on the thoroughly debunked notion of Homo economicus (the believe that human individuals always behave in a rational way optimized for their own self interest). So instead of recognizing the fact human behavior is more complicated, what they try to do is invent a new term to counter-act the instances where biases are “preventing” such a behavior pattern. I find such an effort to be doomed to fail, as—despite the persistence of economists—rational behavior means a different thing for each individual, and there is no “patch” for what economists call “biases”.