[HN Gopher] Evidence for behavioural interventions looks increas...
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Evidence for behavioural interventions looks increasingly shaky
Author : helsinkiandrew
Score : 64 points
Date : 2022-07-28 06:07 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| meltyness wrote:
| This seems like a healthier language for these types of
| incentives.
|
| Without discussion, engineering a system where the elevator is on
| the top floor always is torture, sadism even.
|
| But what of scholarships? Is money truly the common language
| spoken at the tender ages these are issued? How do you convince
| students, once beyond the drudgery of state-mandated public
| school, that the sudden tradition, idolatry, and care of academia
| is even a change? How do you put that fruit at eye-level without
| using cash to whip scholars into meeting minimums, as adjudicated
| by paper examination?
| Vetch wrote:
| What is a nudge? Do dark patterns, tactics employed by casinos or
| loot box games that depend on whales and children of wealthy
| parents count?
| prohobo wrote:
| Fundamentally yes, except that nudge theory is about
| manipulating collective action (or inaction) in populations.
| Promoters of this theory also envision themselves as trying to
| help, not fleece people of their money.
| asimpletune wrote:
| I don't know a lot about this, but would an example be like
| when Draghi was at the ECB and he responded with "Whatever it
| takes" when asked about the S. Europe debt crises?
|
| Or how exactly does nudging look like in practice?
| simonh wrote:
| There's a difference between nudge as in the technical
| meaning here from behavioural psychology, and what we would
| commonly call a nudge in everyday english. An economist or
| politician might describe Draghi's statement as trying to
| nudge the behaviour of the banks, sure, but that doesn't
| conform to what behavioural psychologists mean by a nudge
| in the technical sense.
|
| Which is fine of course, pretty much every specialist
| discipline has special meanings for some everyday words.
| t_mann wrote:
| No, Draghi's statement was signalling, not nudging. He was
| willing to throw billions at the problem (and eventually
| did), his communication was meant to reduce the need for
| such an intervention.
| prohobo wrote:
| Nudging would look like this (excuse the politics, it's
| just the most immediate source of examples): people who are
| up to date on their vaccinations may get perks and be
| allowed to enter certain venues just by showing their card,
| while everyone else gets no perks and has to pay for
| testing to enter venues or are barred entirely.
|
| Another example: instead of regulating testing for travel,
| allow third party companies to manage official testing
| certificates and set their own prices. This happened in the
| UK, where Covid tests were free from the government unless
| you wanted to travel - at which point you had to pay a
| private clinic upwards of PS50 (sometimes more like PS150)
| to get a 24 hour pass.
|
| Nudging looks very much like incentives and restrictions in
| a mobile game.
| cal85 wrote:
| I think your examples are explicit incentives, not
| nudges. From what I've read, a nudge is typically
| something much subtler that works on an emotional level.
| For example the tax office might A/B test different
| wording for a tax demand letter template, finding that
| it's more effective to say "Get a PS100 early-filing
| discount if you pay before $DATE" instead of "An
| additional PS100 late-filing penalty will be charged if
| you fail to pay before $DATE". A strict logician or
| economist might point out they amount to the same thing,
| but the different emotional approach nonetheless makes a
| measurable difference in the aggregate response. That's
| what is usually meant by a nudge.
| prohobo wrote:
| That would simply be PR or friendly copy. The
| implementation of nudge in your example would be to
| create the "discount" itself to push more people to pay
| taxes on time. Even then, in your example everyone
| already understands and agrees with the rules of "pay a
| fee for being late" because it's such a common practice
| and is rational.
|
| Nudges don't need to be rational - at least not directly.
| They need to push people to do what you want them to do
| to attain some opaque goal.
|
| Similar to dark patterns, nudging is not about creating
| reasonable guides for people to follow, it's about making
| them feel less contempt for being shoehorned into taking
| actions they'd otherwise prefer not to. Maybe people
| don't want to pay taxes, but the proverbial "we" decided
| long ago that taxes are a necessity to maintain the state
| and so we punish people with prison time for cheating on
| them. In nudging, "we" don't choose anything, the
| institution quietly forces our hand without any
| democratic process.
| refurb wrote:
| I thought a good example is when you get a drivers license
| and it asks if you'd like to become an organ donor, it
| "pre-checks" the "yes" box rather than leaving it blank.
|
| The idea being people who are on the fence are more likely
| to just accept the "yes" than go through the effort to
| check "yes"
| chasd00 wrote:
| Or why the "subscribe me to all your spam and your third
| party's spam" checkbox is always checked by default.
| yourusername wrote:
| >Or how exactly does nudging look like in practice?
|
| If you want people to take the stairs you might make the
| elevator stay at the top floors so that people always have
| to press the call elevator button, they might choose to
| walk up instead of waiting.
|
| If you want people to eat less animal based proteins you
| can make vegan options the default for catering/meal
| options with meat only available as a option you can
| request. Some people will take whatever is the default.
|
| You want more organ donations you make being a organ donor
| the default with a option to opt-out.
|
| The goal is to make the desired option the easiest way out
| so most people will avoid the cognitive work of doing what
| they would actually prefer if they thought about it.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| Turning the option that most people want into the
| hardest/most tedious/most onerous option for them to
| select is a great way to foster contempt for your system.
| yourusername wrote:
| I think nudges are supposed to be subtle enough that you
| don't notice them. And probably for every not so subtle
| manipulation we notice there are 5 we don't notice.
| cobbzilla wrote:
| Some are meant to be noticed: mandated calorie counts on
| food menus (nudge to health eating), or dire warnings on
| cigarette packs (nudge to quit smoking). Neither of these
| have had any measurable impact on their goals; I welcome
| evidence to the contrary.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Anecdotally I was still smoking when they brought in
| mandated gore on British tobacco pouches, very quickly
| people were joking like 'I got the bloke with a hole in
| his side, just need the curious baby with a cigarette and
| I've got the lot' etc. Those who were really bothered by
| it just got a baccy tin or if they smoked straights, a
| cigarette case.
|
| What led me to quit wasn't any 'nudging' by the
| government but simply that vaping is a lot more
| convenient than smoking and lacked the finger-wagging
| inherent in other nicotine replacement approaches, and
| once I was only vaping I could turn down the nicotine
| over the course of six months or so to spare the worst of
| the grimness of quitting.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| I'm sure that's what professional nudgers like to think,
| but I certainly feel like I see them all over the place.
| djmips wrote:
| I've heard that whales, which might be a thing in casinos,
| isn't really a thing in video game markets.
| tpoacher wrote:
| The problem I see increasingly is the conflation of "X as an
| intervention doesnt work" with "There is no evidence for X",
| which is two entirely different things.
|
| To give a concrete example: "Stop-smoking interventions commonly
| fail" equated to "no evidence that stopping smoking improves
| health".
| winslett wrote:
| Read the article. Retitled article should read "Not all nudges
| work".
|
| The interesting bit from the source article is that changes to
| the mean do not always reflect the value of the nudge. So, when
| judging a nudge, data should be spun various ways to determine
| impact on different segments of the population.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > "Not all nudges work".
|
| The real question being, what's the actual hit rate. If below
| 50%, they'd be better off flipping a coin.
| prohobo wrote:
| The chair of behavioral insights advisory in the WHO is one of
| the co-authors of Nudge Theory. So it's probably safe to say that
| government health programs - in any country that is supported by
| the WHO - also implement Nudge to some extent.
| jansan wrote:
| Freddie Sayers made a really, really good comment at the end of
| his recent UnHerd video about this:
|
| "It's not a conspiracy. It's no a communist plot. But what it
| is, is taking a particular worldview, a view about how society
| should operate, and removing it from the normal democratic
| conversation, where people can battle it out, and instead
| hardwiring it into poerful supranational organizations."
|
| Here is the part of the video that I am referring to:
| https://youtu.be/Lm-S5zlnHIk?t=528
| brandmeyer wrote:
| > It's not a conspiracy ... poerful [sic] supranational
| organizations.
|
| Come on. You can't claim that something isn't a conspiracy
| and then invoke world-government conspiracies in the same
| paragraph and expect to be taken seriously.
| nradov wrote:
| It's not a conspiracy. These powerful supranational
| organizations are doing it out in the open and have
| publicly stated their intentions. Many of us disagree with
| their goals, and consider their methods unethical.
| [deleted]
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Following the same erroneous line of thought the next strategies
| might now situate themselves between nudging and strong
| enforcement. Something to really look forward to.
|
| Asking people or setting an example are of course ideas that have
| to be discarded, applied statistical analysis is far more
| convenient and you have to write some kind of paper. They don't
| strictly have to but are certainly decisively nudged to do that.
| In the interest of their career of course, you got to get that
| numbers up.
|
| At least nudging worked for pissoirs though. I like the subtlety
| of the critic saving the theory. It would be good to do something
| against publication bias as suggested in the article.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| It seems weird to me that no one mentions the importance of
| timing and source of "nudging". I hoped govs and agencies would
| learn not to go overboard with nudging when trust levels in
| their policies was low to begin with.
| taylorius wrote:
| Honest debate and persuasion is so 20th Century.
| ariendj wrote:
| I kind of miss honesty, though.
| winReInstall wrote:
| Honest debate was the ultimate adventure. Sad its gone,
| replaced by yelling matches in feeling hive-mind choirs.
| Guess this how medieval times felt, with oppossing faiths.
| nervousvarun wrote:
| "Guess this how medieval times felt, with oppossing
| faiths."
|
| And we all know that led to...crusades?
|
| Welp.
| klibertp wrote:
| At least for now we still have the yelling matches where
| people of different faiths can yell at each other without
| fear of burning at a stake. Getting "cancelled" as a result
| of yelling the unpopular thing is still less painful than
| torture and execution on the town's plaza.
|
| "For now" and "still" are the words which I had to insert
| in the above, and their forced presence seriously scares
| me.
| martingoodson wrote:
| This is a poor headline (from The Economist) that does not
| reflect the referenced work. The correct interpretation is that
| nudges need to be tested in the field to find out if they work.
| This is common knowledge in behavioural science.
|
| Experts are not good at predicting which nudges are going to work
| in practice[1]. Trials are always needed.
|
| This is no different to the requirement for drug trials. Drugs
| are not released just on the say so of pharmacologists, empirical
| evidence is needed. And yet nobody says pharmacology is looking
| 'shaky'.
|
| [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2115126119
| vintermann wrote:
| I wonder if the problem with "nudge" is that for publicity
| reasons, people only call it a nudge if it sounds like a tiny
| thing that doesn't sound like it would work. If it's an obvious
| intervention, such as a default option in a pension form, or
| higher prices on tobacco, or condom vending machines in hotel
| restrooms, they don't call it a nudge anymore.
|
| And I also have the feeling some of these may be babies that
| the Economist's editors would _like_ to throw out with the
| bathwater.
| t_mann wrote:
| Default options in forms are the standard example of a nudge,
| a tax however is definitely not a nudge, the article actually
| explicitly says so.
| vintermann wrote:
| In that big meta study that questioned the efficiency of
| nudges, it was said in the discussion on HN that they
| excluded default options from the definition of nudges.
|
| Either way, the line seems arbitrary to me, and it's part
| of why I think they're moving the goalposts.
| t_mann wrote:
| I don't know what people on HN said, but it's the first
| example of nudges of you look here (and pretty much
| anywhere else):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#Types_of_nudge
| s
| vintermann wrote:
| The article in question was "No evidence for nudging
| after adjusting for publication bias". That study
| apparently counted default choices on forms as
| "structural interventions" - a term wide enough to
| usually include immunisation programs and taxes.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Nudge does seem to imply some degree subtlety. In a
| colloquial sense, >100% tax rates on cigarettes is more of a
| shove than a nudge.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Pretty much every policy stick short of a bullet seems to
| be sailing under the flag of a nudge these days.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Nudges are basically the opposite of dark patterns.
|
| If a headline seems dubious when you swap the two then it's
| probably got an agenda.
|
| "Dark Patterns don't work anyway, so we should carry on using
| them" vs "Nudges don't work anyway, we should stop using
| them"
|
| https://www.simpleusability.com/inspiration/2019/03/dark-
| pat...
| simonh wrote:
| I don't follow. The Economist's editors aren't the ones
| deciding what is or isn't counted as a nudge in the academic
| literature.
| vintermann wrote:
| The headline doesn't say nudges. It says behavioural
| interventions.
|
| (and as far as I can tell, the academic literature isn't
| consistent on what counts as a nudge or not)
| simonh wrote:
| Nudges are behavioural interventions. It's just a
| headline.
| [deleted]
| simplMath10 wrote:
| Germans speak German; wow people store information and take up
| the routines their understanding of that information implies.
| Field test complete.
|
| Social science is based on observing the same world as "hard"
| science. We already have plenty of models and theory about
| information transmission.
|
| Human biology retains information it's structure encounters;
| social science solved.
|
| Wrapping hard science in cultural semantics does not exclude
| the hard science explanation from being the right explanation.
| The social science explanation is superfluous and almost
| intentionally manipulative; professors will give extra fake
| points for jumping higher. But if the fake points are of little
| real world value, people don't care. It's a parlor trick that
| works on the ignorant, not a fundamental cognitive function of
| everyone.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Can an expert in the field dissuade me of my pessimism about
| psychology as a science? From the outside looking in, it appears
| to be a field populated by grifters and incompetents who churn
| out junk knowledge.
|
| Power Posing (Amy Cuddy) Priming (Bargh, Kahneman, and others)
| Outright fraudsters (Diederik Stapel, Dirk Smeesters)
| Precognition (Daryl Bem) Disgust & Homophobia (Yoel Inbar)
| Anchoring (Kahneman and Jacowitz)
|
| Or is it all of human sciences (the scandal of Alzheimer's
| research comes to mind)?
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| > _about psychology as a science?_
|
| You can easily have the opposite point of view: The so called
| hard sciences deal with human concepts and not reality. An
| alien society would not have the same physic or math. Many
| concepts of our physic are a bit circular or need ad hoc
| parameters.
|
| Kepler make a good model from data by Tycho Brahe. Newton made
| an even larger model from Kepler's laws, yet it's only a model.
| Einstein... you get it. Without Tycho Brahe all the rest would
| be simply speculations. Without Michael Faraday, would we have
| Maxwell, and Heaviside?
|
| The Romans did not liked math, and the Bantu migration did not
| even used writing scripts as we know them. Gengis Khan was able
| to conquer and create the greatest empire of the world and
| Mongols of that time used little scripts.
|
| The so called human sciences on contrary deal with reality,
| it's incredibly complex. There is no real way for us to
| understand the complexity of reality.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > An alien society would not have the same physic or math
|
| They would have the same math. They might have a different
| number system.
| robocat wrote:
| The "human sciences" are just freaking hard - for all the
| reasons you are pessimistic. The "hard sciences" are much
| easier - less of that soft stuff to work around.
|
| Agree that the humanities are often pants-on-head whacko.
|
| Disclaimer: hard science engineer type.
| slim wrote:
| not an expert but around age 17 a psychologist saw I carried a
| knife and asked if I got separated from my father when I was 9
| months old. he blew my mind because it was true. till that
| moment I was thinking of psychology as some sort of fortune
| telling, now suddenly it's in the realm of science because you
| can make deductions
| not_knuth wrote:
| http://archive.today/cuHfh
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