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Evidence for behavioural interventions looks increasingly shaky
51–59 of 59 posts
Re: Evidence for behavioural interventions looks increasingly shaky
#52Read the article. Retitled article should read “Not all nudges work”. The interesting bit from the source article is that changes to the mean do not always reflect the value of the nudge. So, when judging a nudge, data should be spun various ways to determine impact on different segments of the population.
> “Not all nudges work”.
The real question being, what's the actual hit rate. If below 50%, they'd be better off flipping a coin.
Re: Evidence for behavioural interventions looks increasingly shaky
#53Can an expert in the field dissuade me of my pessimism about psychology as a science? From the outside looking in, it appears to be a field populated by grifters and incompetents who churn out junk knowledge. Power Posing (Amy Cuddy) Priming (Bargh, Kahneman, and others) Outright fraudsters (Diederik Stapel, Dirk Smeesters) Precognition (Daryl Bem) Disgust & Homophobia (Yoel Inbar) Anchoring (Kahneman and Jacowitz) O…
not an expert but around age 17 a psychologist saw I carried a knife and asked if I got separated from my father when I was 9 months old. he blew my mind because it was true. till that moment I was thinking of psychology as some sort of fortune telling, now suddenly it's in the realm of science because you can make deductions
Re: Evidence for behavioural interventions looks increasingly shaky
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nudging would look like this (excuse the politics, it's just the most immediate source of examples): people who are up to date on their vaccinations may get perks and be allowed to enter certain venues just by showing their card, while everyone else gets no perks and has to pay for testing to enter venues or are barred entirely. Another example: instead of regulating testing for travel, allow third party companies to…
I think your examples are explicit incentives, not nudges. From what I’ve read, a nudge is typically something much subtler that works on an emotional level. For example the tax office might A/B test different wording for a tax demand letter template, finding that it’s more effective to say “Get a £100 early-filing discount if you pay before $DATE” instead of “An additional £100 late-filing penalty will be charged if…
That would simply be PR or friendly copy. The implementation of nudge in your example would be to create the "discount" itself to push more people to pay taxes on time. Even then, in your example everyone already understands and agrees with the rules of "pay a fee for being late" because it's such a common practice and is rational.
Nudges don't need to be rational - at least not directly. They need to push people to do what you want them to do to attain some opaque goal.
Similar to dark patterns, nudging is not about creating reasonable guides for people to follow, it's about making them feel less contempt for being shoehorned into taking actions they'd otherwise prefer not to. Maybe people don't want to pay taxes, but the proverbial "we" decided long ago that taxes are a necessity to maintain the state and so we punish people with prison time for cheating on them. In nudging, "we" don't choose anything, the institution quietly forces our hand without any democratic process.
Re: Evidence for behavioural interventions looks increasingly shaky
#55Can an expert in the field dissuade me of my pessimism about psychology as a science? From the outside looking in, it appears to be a field populated by grifters and incompetents who churn out junk knowledge. Power Posing (Amy Cuddy) Priming (Bargh, Kahneman, and others) Outright fraudsters (Diederik Stapel, Dirk Smeesters) Precognition (Daryl Bem) Disgust & Homophobia (Yoel Inbar) Anchoring (Kahneman and Jacowitz) O…
1. Evidence based psychology is legit. Non-evidence based psychology, probably not (except for coincidence).
2. Same with other fields, which ironically may not suffer from the same credibility problem (notably medicine).
3. The Alzheimer's thing was about outright fraud. Totally different kettle of fish.
4. All sciences are human sciences.
Re: Evidence for behavioural interventions looks increasingly shaky
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> about psychology as a science? You can easily have the opposite point of view: The so called hard sciences deal with human concepts and not reality. An alien society would not have the same physic or math. Many concepts of our physic are a bit circular or need ad hoc parameters. Kepler make a good model from data by Tycho Brahe. Newton made an even larger model from Kepler's laws, yet it's only a model. Einstein...…
> An alien society would not have the same physic or math They would have the same math. They might have a different number system.
I disagree.
All arguments I have seen that math are universal are in my opinion circular or using assumptions that are specific to our species or even to our western culture.
For example communication with alien, by assuming that math is universal, has been proposed by sending string of prime numbers that represent 2D pictures with this algorithm: (https://math.dartmouth.edu/~carlp/PDF/extraterrestrial.pdf)
1* Create a rectangle
=> Assumes a 2D picture has the same meaning for aliens, even for some humans it is not true.
https://theconversation.com/blind-in-the-mind-why-some-peopl...
2* Divide it into units, such that each side has the length of a certain prime number.
=> Again this is a very visual way to think, even insects would have problems with that.
=> We have an interest in prime numbers which may not be shared. Factorization of prime numbers considers couples of numbers --typically 2D mindset-- what if aliens are more interested in factorization of triplets? After all it would be more logical to send graphic information
=> We have also a way to understand numbers and operators which might not be universal, for example "zero" is a weird number with some properties different from other numbers. Even IEEE had to invent NaN (Not A Number) which is not a mathematic concept in our culture. Aliens might see zero as a null operator (instead of a number) that could be composed with multiplication and division operators.
3* Encode images into the rectangular grid by making each square black or white (or a dot or a dash).
=> Again this is a very visual way to operate
4* Take apart the image row-by-row or column-by-column and make it into one long pattern.
=> Again a very visual way to operate, in addition more symbols will be needed to mark the end-of-line and end-of-picture. This is not told as the whole idea is to transmit symbols through math, so the need for extra mathematical symbols ruins the full concept. Indeed if there are end-of-line and end-of-picture, there is no need for the factorization of prime numbers trick
5* Transmit the message.
Re: Evidence for behavioural interventions looks increasingly shaky
#57What is a nudge? Do dark patterns, tactics employed by casinos or loot box games that depend on whales and children of wealthy parents count?
I've heard that whales, which might be a thing in casinos, isn't really a thing in video game markets.
I mostly hear about whales in video games
Re: Evidence for behavioural interventions looks increasingly shaky
#58I love when Idiots like google misunderstand nudge to mean “shove”. It doesn’t work and makes me hate you. Good job. Worst of both worlds.
Re: Evidence for behavioural interventions looks increasingly shaky
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if the problem with "nudge" is that for publicity reasons, people only call it a nudge if it sounds like a tiny thing that doesn't sound like it would work. If it's an obvious intervention, such as a default option in a pension form, or higher prices on tobacco, or condom vending machines in hotel restrooms, they don't call it a nudge anymore. And I also have the feeling some of these may be babies that the…
Nudge does seem to imply some degree subtlety. In a colloquial sense, >100% tax rates on cigarettes is more of a shove than a nudge.
Absolutely: the definition of a nudge (Thaler and Sunstein’s “libertarian paternalism”) was meant to include that it is cheap and easy to avoid, and therefore makes no difference to the (mythical) fully rational consumer. Taxes or other price interventions absolutely do not qualify.