nudge

Awareness of a Nudge is not Required for Resistance of a Nudge

by Gabriel De Marco
August 16, 2022

Written by Gabriel De Marco and Thomas Douglas

This blog post is based on our forthcoming paper: “Nudge Transparency is not Required for Nudge Resistibility,” Ergo.

Consider the following cases:

Food Placement. In order to encourage healthy eating, cafeteria staff place healthy food options at eye-level, whereas unhealthy options are placed lower down. Diners are more likely to pick healthy foods and less likely to pick unhealthy foods than they would have been had foods instead been distributed randomly.

Default Registration. In application forms for a driver’s license, applicants are asked whether they wish to be included in the organ donation registry. In order to opt out, one needs to tick a box; otherwise, the applicant will be registered as an organ donor. The form was designed in this way in order to recruit more organ donors; applicants are more likely to be registered than they would have been had the default been not being included in the registry.

Interventions like these two are often called nudges. Though many agree that it is, at least sometimes ethically OK to nudge people, there is a thriving debate about when, exactly, it is OK.

Some authors have suggested that nudging is ethically acceptable only when (or because) the nudge is easy to resist. But what does it take for a nudge to be easy to resist? Authors rarely give accounts of this, yet they often seem to assume what we call the Awareness Condition (AC):

AC: A nudge is easy to resist only if the agent can easily become aware of it.

We think AC is false. In our forthcoming paper, we mount a more developed argument for this, but in this blog post, we simply consider one counterexample to it, and one response to it.

Exercise, Population Health and Paternalism

by Rebecca Brown
March 17, 2022

Written by Rebecca Brown

The NHS is emphatic in its confidence that exercise is highly beneficial for health. From their page on the “Benefits of exercise” come statements like:

“Step right up! It’s the miracle cure we’ve all been waiting for”

“This is no snake oil. Whatever your age, there’s strong scientific evidence that being physically active can help you lead a healthier and happier life”

“Given the overwhelming evidence, it seems obvious that we should all be physically active. It’s essential if you want to live a healthy and fulfilling life into old age”.

Setting aside any queries about the causal direction of the relationship between exercise and good health, or the precise effect size of the benefits exercise offers, it at least seems that the NHS is convinced that it is a remarkably potent health promotion tool.Read More »Exercise, Population Health and Paternalism

Your password will probably be hacked soon, and how to (actually) solve the problem

by Brian D. Earp
February 20, 2013February 20, 2013

By Brian D. Earp

See Brian’s most recent previous post by clicking here.

See all of Brian’s previous posts by clicking here.

Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here.

Your password will probably be hacked soon, and how to (actually) solve the problem

Smithsonian Magazine recently reported: “Your Password Will Probably Be Hacked Soon” and delivered a troubling quote from Ars Technica:

The ancient art of password cracking has advanced further in the past five years than it did in the previous several decades combined. At the same time, the dangerous practice of password reuse has surged. The result: security provided by the average password in 2012 has never been weaker.

After the Twitter accounts for Burger King as well as Chrysler’s Jeep were recently broken into, Twitter apparently issued some advice to the effect that people should be smarter about their password security practices. So: use lots of letters and numbers, passwords should be 10-digits or longer, use a different password for every one of your online accounts and so on.

But this is nuts. Does Twitter know anything about how human beings actually work? Why do you think people reuse their passwords for multiple sites? Why do you think people select easy-to-remember (and easy-to-discover) factoids from their childhoods as answers to security questions?

Nudge Drugs: should the social side-effects of medications weigh into public health?

by Matt Baum
March 23, 2012March 22, 2023

You are a public health official responsible for the purchasing of medications for the hospitals within your catchment area in the NHS. Your policies significantly affect which, out of the serpentine lists of heart disease medications, for example, are available to your patients. Today, you must choose between purchasing one of three heart disease medications: Drug A, Drug B, and Drug C. They are pretty similar in efficacy, and all three have been being used for many years. Drug B is slightly less expensive than Drug A and Drug C, but there is emerging evidence that it increases the likelihood that patients will take “bad bets,” i.e. make large gambles when the chance of winning is low (and thus might contribute to large social costs). Drug C costs a tiny bit more than Drug A, but there is some evidence that Drug C may help decrease implicit racial bias. You have been briefed on the research suggesting that implicit racial bias can lead to people making choices that consistently and unintentionally limit the opportunities of certain groups, even when all the involved parties show explicit commitments to social equality. Finally, there is emerging evidence that drug A both helps people abstain from alcohol and dissociates negative emotional content from memories.

Which drug should you purchase?

Let us begin to think about this question through the lens of the idea of the “Nudge,” which has exploded onto the public sphere (and blogosphere) since Thaler and Sunstein’s published their book, “Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness.” (see the blog here). I briefly and incompletely introduce nudges here, in hopes that we may soon move on to discuss the kind of “nudge drugs” our thought experiment considers.

‘No smoking’ signs trigger urge to light up: Communism, Marriage, Evidence-Based Medicine and the Fate of the World

by Julian Savulescu
May 6, 2011

Before you read the blog, please take:

General Knowledge Ethics Quiz

What is the main cause of climate change?
What is main cause of global poverty?
Why does terrorism exist?
What caused the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster?

Write your answers on a piece of paper for reference. I will provide my answers presently and we can compare.

THE BLOG

Brian Earp, a master’s student at Oxford University’s Department of Experimental Psychology, has found that ‘no-smoking and anti junk food adverts can be counter-productive by encouraging the behaviour they warn against’. Mr Earp asked 29 smokers to look at 25 images, some of which included ‘no smoking signs’. He found that when they viewed images of the signs they were more motivated to smoke than when they did not see the images.