5 ms·

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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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?
    • t_mann 4y ago
      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.
    • simonh 4y ago
      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.
    • prohobo 4y ago
      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 £50 (sometimes more like £150) to get a 24 hour pass. Nudging looks very much like incentives and restrictions in a mobile game.
      • cal85 4y ago
        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 £100 early-filing discount if you pay before $DATE” instead of “An additional £100 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 4y ago
          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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Or why the “subscribe me to all your spam and your third party’s spam” checkbox is always checked by default.
    • yourusername 4y ago
      >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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          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.
          • AmericanChopper 4y ago
            I’m sure that’s what professional nudgers like to think, but I certainly feel like I see them all over the place.
          • cobbzilla 4y ago
            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.
            • 4y ago
• djmips 4y ago
  I've heard that whales, which might be a thing in casinos, isn't really a thing in video game markets.
  • benibela 4y ago
    I mostly hear about whales in video games