Everyone has their things that you should do, but somehow it never really happens. Eating more fruit, for example. Visit the gym more often and exercise more overall. Spend less money and save more. Some people want to make their coffee at home in the morning instead of spending four euros every day at a café on the go. Others finally want to fill out an organ donor card. Almost every long-held plan that makes for a New Year’s resolution is also a demonstration of human weakness.
But a remedy seemed to have been found, at least that’s how it worked in 2008. This remedy was called “nudge”, in German: a nudge. A little nudge to do the right thing more often. If the canteen places the chocolate bars a little further back and moves the fruit to the front, for example. When there is a picture of a fly stuck in the urinal of the men’s toilet that men can aim at. When the ATM waits for the card to be withdrawn before spitting out the money so that users don’t forget their card. When the tax office states in the tax notice: “Most people pay their taxes on time.”
Such small changes are enough to help people behave better – better in the sense that they themselves like it that way. “Nudge – how to initiate smart decisions” was the title of a 2008 book by behavioral economist Richard Thaler and lawyer Cass Sunstein. “To be considered a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to circumvent,” they wrote.
Should everything really be that simple?
Dozens of successful examples were found in the coming years. When American employers automatically enrolled their employees in a private retirement program, employees saved more money for retirement than without. And if people in a country were considered organ donors by default, then there were more organ donors in that country. The main thing is that those affected can easily object to all of this.
The philosophy was called “liberal paternalism”: you can talk people into their lives, you just can’t make it too difficult for them to break away from it. That also sounded attractive to governments. So-called “nudging units” were founded around the world to investigate how states could encourage their citizens to live a better life. The industrialized countries organization OECD counted 200 of them in 2019.
Should everything really be that simple? People are just a little too weak to take care of everything themselves – and if well-meaning employers or governments take care of it for them, then everything will be fine?
Doubts about nudging
But then January 2020 came and with it a lunch in San Diego. Around 13,000 economists met there for the world’s largest scientific conference. It was 21 degrees outside and sunny on the harbor, but even at lunch hundreds sat in a windowless conference room to listen to a speech by David Laibson, a well-known behavioral economist from Harvard who has been studying nudging for years. Laibson stood up – and took stock of the nudging with scientific objectivity.
For example, he talked about an attempt to motivate people to exercise. An American fitness studio chain spent two years looking for new approaches with a team of economists. Different researchers carried out 54 individual experiments with a total of 61,000 studio members – but their effect was primarily short-term. Sustained successes were so small that they were little better than chance.
And he talked about companies that automatically enroll their employees in retirement programs. After a year, the auto-enrolled employees had actually saved more than their predecessors. But they also took more money out of it. The employees who had to enroll themselves didn’t miss out on coverage – they just took longer to enroll. After two years, the difference had disappeared: both groups had saved the same amount. The nudge hadn’t worked.
Organ donation doesn’t work
A study soon followed with results from state nudging units. It turned out that the results in practice were not nearly as outstanding as in the scientific experiments. On average, a nudge out of 1,000 affected citizens only moved 14.
And what about organ donations? It soon became clear that if a country automatically turns its citizens into organ donors, then there will be more organ donors in the country – but by no means more organs being donated.
Spain is often cited as a model for such a reform. But the current head of the Spanish organ donation center, Beatriz Domínguez-Gil, and her predecessor have made a major appeal against drawing the wrong conclusions from their example. The FAS sent Domínguez-Gil the warning sentence last year: “The contradiction solution distracts from the really necessary changes that are required to make organ donation from the deceased work.”
A country receives more organ donations if it organizes its hospitals better. There is hardly anything to be gained from organ donor status. It turns out that if you want to donate organs, you don’t always need a law. In Germany, 85 percent of citizens have a positive attitude towards organ donation. In large international studies, up to 88 percent of relatives surveyed agree to organ donation. And the rest would probably explicitly object to organ donation.
A different picture of people: People aren’t that stupid
All of this paints a completely different picture of people: In this picture, people aren’t that stupid. Sometimes you have a lot to do and can’t always take care of everything right away. But they keep their eyes open, can inform themselves – and if it is important, then they can make their wishes heard. But this will is not always what others expect. Some people just don’t want to donate their organs. Some people would rather enjoy their life now than save it for an old age that they can never be sure they will live to see.
And which image now reflects reality? Maybe both. Nudge advocate Cass Sunstein warns against taking the averages too seriously. He tells the FAS: “When I was a baby, my mother had cancer. Some treatments didn’t work, but one did, and she lived to be 80 years old. The treatments had an average effect of zero.”
It can be true: most of the time people aren’t that stupid, but sometimes a nudge still helps.
Beware of paternalism
The Bonn economist Matthias Sutter and two colleagues have just presented a thesis on why so many approaches fail. Roughly summarized, he says: Sometimes people actually have a will that they don’t realize. But sometimes they get what they want – but they want something different than what politicians and scientists thought. This distinction is important.
But maybe not that easy. A few years ago, Sutter’s colleague Axel Ockenfels, together with Sandro Ambuehl and Douglas Bernheim, did a nice experiment: He gave students the chance to help other students save. Many were quite robust in ensuring that the affected students actually saved the money instead of spending it straight away – regardless of whether those affected might urgently need the money now. After further investigation, he discovered that the helpers hadn’t even considered that other people might have different priorities.
And this is obviously a human weakness: not in others, but in ourselves. In psychology, this is called “false consensus”: We think that the same things are important to others as they are to us. But it’s not always like that. So we have to remember: other people have different priorities. And anyone who tries to dissuade them from these priorities, be it with nudges or with harsher methods, could face a surprising amount of resistance.
Ockenfels’ team repeated his experiment with real representatives who actually decide on laws. And they didn’t behave any differently. They also forgot that different people have different priorities.
And if you’re thinking about nudging now, remember: people aren’t always weak, but sometimes they are. Also the people who decide on nudges.
