Abstract
Recent years have shown that traditional regulatory techniques alone are not effective in achieving behaviour change in important fields such as environmental sustainability. Governments all over the world have been progressively including behaviourally informed considerations in policy and law making with the aim of improving the acceptance and impact of sustainability-oriented measures. This led to the arrival of alternative regulatory tools, such as nudges. The effectiveness of nudges for environmental sustainability (green nudges) has been widely reported, but the practical and ethical implications are still largely neglected by academic research. In this contribution, “nudges” are conceptually distinguished from “boosts” and their ethics are briefly explained. The analysis is made in light of European and US American academic literature.
Highlights
The Rise of Nudges in the Policy Making ToolboxPrior to the rise of Behavioural Economics, policy and legal instruments focused exclusively on deliberative choice
Behavioural Economics established the insight that money sometimes has a negative effect on behaviour and that market failures may be caused by biases of individual decision making (Frey 1998)
In the impossibility of the policymaker obtaining reliable information about the chooser’s true preferences, it is not safe to assume that policymakers know them (Guala and Mittone 2015; Schubert 2017) and/or know to adequately process them: public officials developing these interventions are, like the objects of these measures, traditionally prone to biases and heuristics (Cserne 2015). This is so when the targeted population of decision makers has heterogeneous preferences (Grüne-Yanoff and Hertwig 2015), as short-term impulsive desires compete with long-term goals (Reijula and Hertwig 2020), preferences that are inconsistent (Sugden 2008; Angner 2016; Schubert and Cordes 2013; Schubert 2015b) over time, incoherent, or incomplete (Schubert 2017), or when the behaviour that is to be changed is the result of collective processes and policies (Furedi 2011)—it is argued that the way individuals answer to nudges depends on the cultural, economic, social, and institutional context of the agent and that they can “counter-nudge” (Baldwin 2014)
Summary
Prior to the rise of Behavioural Economics, policy and legal instruments focused exclusively on deliberative choice. Behavioural Economics established the insight that money sometimes has a negative effect on behaviour and that market failures may be caused by biases of individual decision making (Frey 1998) As for the former aspect, subsidies discourage the right action, as agents fear others will perceive them as motivated by money instead of moral values (Ariely et al 2009). As for the latter aspect, agents may perceive money as a “green light” to misbehave, or a price they may opt to pay, leading to a reinforcement of the behaviour we intend to change (Gneezy and Rustichini 2000). These recent developments show the significance of insights from the behavioural sciences in helping policymakers increase the efficiency of their directives
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