Making Sense of the “Do Nudges Work?” Debate - By Michael Hallsworth - Behavioral Scientist

A recent pair of articles offer wildly different verdicts on nudges, and show how we urgently need a new kind of debate.

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 childre

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