|
|
Pelle Guldborg Hansen and Andreas Maaløe Jespersen
Nudge and the Manipulation of Choice
| European Journal of Risk Regulation 1/2013: pp. 3-28 |
€ 41,65 (including 19 % tax)
|
A Framework for the Responsible Use of the Nudge Approach
to Behaviour Change in Public Policy
In Nudge (2008) Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein suggested that public policy-makers
arrange decision-making contexts in ways to promote behaviour change in the interest of
individual citizens as well as that of society. However, in the public sphere and Academia
alike widespread discussions have appeared concerning the public acceptability of nudgebased
behavioural policy. Thaler and Sunstein’s own position is that the anti-nudge position
is a literal non-starter, because citizens are always influenced by the decision making
context anyway, and nudging is liberty preserving and acceptable if guided by Libertarian
Paternalism and Rawls’ publicity principle. A persistent and central tenet in the criticism
disputing the acceptability of the approach is that nudging works by manipulating citizens’
choices. In this paper, we argue that both lines of argumentation are seriously flawed. We
show how the anti-nudge position is not a literal non-starter due to the responsibilities that
accrue on policy-makers by the intentional intervention in citizens’ life, how nudging is
not essentially liberty preserving and why the approach is not necessarily acceptable even
if satisfying Rawls’ publicity principle. We then use the psychological dual process theory
underlying the approach as well as an epistemic transparency criterion identified by Thaler
and Sunstein themselves to show that nudging is not necessarily about “manipulation”, nor
necessarily about influencing “choice”. The result is a framework identifying four types of
nudges that may be used to provide a central component for more nuanced normative considerations
as well as a basis for policy recommendations.
Find out more about EJRR here |
|
|
| Your cart is currently empty. |
|
EStAL
Journal
Publication frequency: quarterly
Subscription: € 442,-
ISSN 16 19-52 72
Further information
Reading of Intimate
Brussels - Living amongst Eurocrats
30 March 2011, 18.30 pm @ European Parliament
For one year, Martin Leidenfrost explored Europe’s capital and wrote fifty
personal – tender, alienated, mischievous – portraits.
“Entertaining, amusing, insightful.” The Gap
|
