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Governments have traditionally relied on two main tools to change behaviour: rules and money. They ban things, require things, tax some activities and subsidise others. In 2008, the economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein popularised a third approach in their book Nudge. A nudge, they argued, is any feature of the way a choice is presented that predictably changes people's behaviour without forbidding any options or significantly changing their costs.
The most powerful nudge is often the default: what happens if a person does nothing. Consider workplace pensions. When employees have to actively sign up, many never get round to it, even if they intend to. When they are enrolled automatically but free to leave, most stay. After the United Kingdom introduced automatic enrolment for workplace pensions in 2012, the proportion of eligible private-sector employees saving into a pension rose dramatically. Nobody was forced to save; the default had simply changed.
Other nudges work by making information more visible or by drawing on social comparison. Letters telling people that most of their neighbours have already paid their taxes have been found to increase payment rates. Placing fruit at eye level in a school canteen, rather than hiding it behind the desserts, can increase the amount of fruit children choose.
The approach proved attractive to governments, partly because nudges are usually cheap. In 2010, the British government set up a Behavioural Insights Team, widely known as the "Nudge Unit", and many other countries followed. In 2017, Thaler received the Nobel Prize in Economics, partly for this work.
Nudging has its critics, however. Some argue that it is manipulative: if governments design choices to steer people in particular directions, who decides which direction is right? Thaler and Sunstein respond that there is no neutral way to present a choice; something has to be the default, and food has to be placed somewhere. Others question how powerful nudges really are. A 2022 analysis suggested that, once studies with disappointing results that had never been published are taken into account, the average effect of nudges may be much smaller than earlier reviews had claimed.
Perhaps the fairest conclusion is that nudges are neither a miracle cure nor a sinister trick. Some, like automatic enrolment, have had large and lasting effects; others have achieved little. Nudges seem to work best as a complement to traditional policies, not as a replacement for them. Changing a default may encourage people to save, but it cannot make up for wages that are too low to save from.