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"Couldn’t this bias also happen in the other direction?" The general notion is that positive results ("we tried nudging and succeeded in getting people to beha

"Couldn’t this bias also happen in the other direction?" The general notion is that positive results ("we tried nudging and succeeded in getting people to behave more in X way") are more publishable than negative results ("we tried nudging, and nothing much happened"). It is a common and well-attested problem in many areas of science, but probably particularly in behavioral sciences; I have not heard of cases where publication of negative results is more likely than publication of positive results, although there are obviously heated debates over some results. Whether publication bias is the explanation in this example, I don't pretend to know.

mikkergp 4y ago
I guess the question would be are positive results missing for another reason, like they are harder to test for, therefor the data looks better than it should because in the aggregate they are better, but yeah this is probably unlikely.
ghaff 4y ago
There's also an implicit assumption with nudges/defaults that you're nudging people towards a reasonable place for some combination of policy and preference reasons. But imagine that a company would just as soon not pay out more 401k matching than it has to, so it makes the default zero. (Which of course is often the norm for different reasons.) That's as valid a nudge as anything but we shouldn't be surprised if a lot of people don't go with the default. We probably also shouldn't be surprised if a lot of people maybe wouldn't go with a maxed out default. Defaults wouldn't be nearly so powerful if they weren't typically chosen to be fairly reasonable for the average person in the target audience.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  But I don’t think the goal is “most people can be nudged” so much as “a nudge is a cheap way to increase a behavior by 5-10% which is probably quite significant in policy circles. Low single digit percentage increase in people who pay their taxes would be huge.

mikkergp 4y ago

I guess the question would be are positive results missing for another reason, like they are harder to test for, therefor the data looks better than it should because in the aggregate they are better, but yeah this is probably unlikely.

ghaff 4y ago

There's also an implicit assumption with nudges/defaults that you're nudging people towards a reasonable place for some combination of policy and preference reasons. But imagine that a company would just as soon not pay out more 401k matching than it has to, so it makes the default zero. (Which of course is often the norm for different reasons.) That's as valid a nudge as anything but we shouldn't be surprised if a lot of people don't go with the default. We probably also shouldn't be surprised if a lot of people maybe wouldn't go with a maxed out default. Defaults wouldn't be nearly so powerful if they weren't typically chosen to be fairly reasonable for the average person in the target audience.

mikkergp 4y ago
But I don’t think the goal is “most people can be nudged” so much as “a nudge is a cheap way to increase a behavior by 5-10% which is probably quite significant in policy circles. Low single digit percentage increase in people who pay their taxes would be huge.