There's a lot of confusion here about what this article is talking about. Nudges aren't just defaults. We've known for over a century that people are influence

There's a lot of confusion here about what this article is talking about. Nudges aren't just defaults. We've known for over a century that people are influenced by defaults. Nudges also aren't anchoring, where choices influence one another. Kahneman & Tversky won a Nobel prize for that and other behavioral economics ideas a decade before the idea of nudges. Nudges are a bigger idea that many small changes lead to huge behavioral changes. Like providing a social reference point (see the average electricity use of your neighbors), surfacing hidden information (a red light to remind you to change your A/C filter), change the financial effort involved in something (deposit your drinking money into an account that you lose when you drink again; health plans that pay to stay healthy), change the physical effort of making bad choices (a motorcycle license for people who don't want to wear helmets that is much harder to get), change the consequences of options (pay a teenager $1/day to not get pregnant), provide reminders (check if an email is rude and have someone confirm they want to send it), public commitments (say you are doing X makes you more likely to do X), etc. There are various examples of each of these working to some extent in specific circumstances. But we have a lot of other tools for changing people's behavior. We have education campaigns. We have fines. We have taxes. We have tax breaks. The idea behind nudges is that they're an easy replacement for many of these other tools. But the meta-analysis shows that nudges aren't a general-purpose tool that leads to significant changes in people's behavior. The behavioral changes are small, the same as we get from a fine, a tax, or an education campaign. Aside from specific circumstances, nudges don't work better (and may be much worse) compared to our usual tools for getting people to behave.