Making Sense of the “Do Nudges Work?”
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...