Articles curated for Behavioral Science Enthusiasts

  Building the Behavior Change Toolkit: Designing and Testing a Nudge and a Boost By Henrico van Roekel , Joanne Reinhard , and Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen October 18, 2021        Changing behavior is challenging, so behavioral scientists and designers better have a large toolkit. Nudges—subtle changes to the choice environment that don’t remove options or offer a financial incentive—are perhaps the most widely used tool. But they’re not the only tool. More recently, researchers have advocated a different type of behavioral intervention: boosting. In contrast to nudges, which aim to change behavior through changing the environment, boosts aim to empower individuals to better exert their own agency. Underpinning each approach are different perspectives on how humans deal with bounded rationality—the idea that we don’t always behave in a way that aligns with our intentions because our decision-makin...

  Making Sense of the “Do Nudges Work?” Debate by Michael Hallsworth     The concept of nudge has proved wildly popular since Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein published their book of the same name in 2008. Over the past 14 years, hundreds of studies have been published that could be categorized as testing nudges (although the term has been applied quite loosely).  Back in January 2022, the journal PNAS published an attempt to combine these nudge studies into a meta-analysis . This analysis concluded that the studies had an overall effect size of d  = 0.43. That’s fairly substantial—it’s about the same as the effect of interventions to increase motor skills in children or the effectiveness of web-based stress-management interventions . The study also cautioned that there was some evidence of publication bias. This problem, which affects many scientific disciplines, is where academic studies are consistently more likely to be published if...