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4 Eur. J. Risk Reg. 3 (2013)
Nudge and the Manipulation of Choice: A Framework for the Responsible Use of the Nudge Approach to Behaviour Change in Public Policy

handle is hein.journals/ejrr2013 and id is 9 raw text is: Nudge and the Manipulation of Choice | 3 Nudge and the Manipulation of Choice A Framework for the Responsible Use of the Nudge Approach to Behaviour Change in Public Policy Pelle Guldborg Hansen* and Andreas Maaloe Jespersen** 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 nudge- based behavioural policy. Thaler and Sunstein's own position is that the anti-nudge posi- tion 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 con- siderations as well as a basis for policy recommendations. I. Introduction In the last three decades, advances in behavioural economics and psychology have revealed how our decision-making and behaviour are systematically biased by the interplay of psychological with what * Director of The Initiative for Science, Society & Policy (ISSP); In- stitute for Marketing & Management, University of Southern Den- mark. ** The Initiative for Science, Society & Policy (ISSP). The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers at EJRR as wellas Prof. Robert Sugden (UEA), Prof. Bent Creve (RUC) and John Parkinson (Bangor University) and colleagues from the Insti- tute for Marketing and Management (SDU) who all have provided helpful comments and question. ought to be, from the perspective of rationality, ir- relevant features of the decision-making context. In general, these behavioural insights teach us how decision-making contexts may systematically lead us to fail in acting on our well-informed intentions or achieve our preferred ends. In the area of public policy-making, particularly, such advances teach us how neglecting these insights may be responsible for failures of public policy to reach intended effects, and why paying more attention to them seems likely to provide a key to dealing effectively with important societal challenges such as global-warming, obesity epidemics, and poor economic decision-making. The seminal book that brought the idea to a broader audience was Nudge: Improving Decisions EJRR 1|2013

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