The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad | Hacker News Reader

The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad

nytimes.com

24 pointslujim11 comments

Once again Capitalism trumps Ethics ;-)

It'd be easy to dismiss this as "nudges are just marketing", but I do think he has a point. If a nudge is the ui trying to be a knowledgeable assistant, it shouldn't be dishonest. Similar to dark patterns, but maybe even more overt.

To me the question is, how do we reward ethical behavior (as opposed to shaming violators)? Capitalism is all about monetary rewards, so can Ethics beat out dark patterns? I kinda think this goes along with the rise of ad blockers. No idea what to do about it.

> how do we reward ethical behavior (as opposed to shaming violators)

Pretty simple. Buy products from ethical companies. Don't buy products from unethical ones.

Please try harder (or be less sarcastic?). How do I know which is which?

He holds up the mortgage industry in the early 2000's as an example of how "nudging" in private industry can backfire worse than in government. It completely overlooks how the government was using the mortgage industry to do its own nudging. If anything it confirms the opposite of what he intended.

>, I have no beef with pay walls. But before signing up, I read the fine print. [...] United went a step further, though. It asked me to select “yes” or “no” before buying a ticket and highlighted the “yes” option as “recommended.” Required choice plus a recommendation qualifies as a strong nudge.

For examples like those, I think the meme "dark pattern"[1] has more currency[2] and I wish the author chose to use it (or at least mention it) instead of expanding his "nudge" meme into "bad nudge".

An author will stick to their own terminology because of ego, or because of ignorance. I don't know which is applicable in R. Thaler's case so we can be charitable and assume it's ignorance.

[1] http://darkpatterns.org/

[2] ~263000 hits for "dark pattern" and ~930 for "bad nudges"

https://www.google.com/search?q="dark+pattern"

https://www.google.com/search?q="bad+nudges"

"Dark pattern" is a phrase that's only been applied to web design, whereas Thaler's definition of "nudge" is much broader (he certainly applies it to offline design, and I think also to direct financial incentives).

Thaler comes from the behavioral economics world, and I'd say his work on "nudging", and even the term "nudge" predates the dark patterns site. His book nudge is from 2008[1], while the DNS info for dark patterns shows creation in 2010. His mentioning of the UX examples was probably a brief crossover example between worlds that occurred to him to highlight an instance, but I'd say it didn't occur to him to scour the software development UX world for existing terminology because, well, it's probably not familiar to him at all.

Popularity on a Google search of a software term is of course going to win the popularity contest, it's the Internet. Do the same search of economic journals and you'll probably find the bias toward "nudge" over "dark patterns" in an extreme way. Different ideas proliferate on different mediums.

I do strongly recommend checking out some of the Freakonomics podcasts[2] and blog posts that involve Thaler. Extremely interesting and useful across many disciplines!

[1] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/102715/richar...

[2] http://freakonomics.com/?s=thaler&x=0&y=0

Convincing people to buy things using psychological manipulation is what marketing is all about.

There is a difference between psychological manipulation and cultivating confusion or blatantly misleading. An ethics still applies to marketing's use of psychological manipulation that asks the customer to participate.

Arguing names is the boringest kind of disagreement, unless the name is misleading.

I'm not arguing names. I'm a live-&-let-live descriptivist when it comes to language usage by the masses. E.g. I have no problem with most people calling RC helicopters "drones", etc.

In this case, I'm pointing out that "dark patterns" already has a rich accumulation of psychological tricks on web transactions. Thaler can build on top of that shared knowledge. For example, people can go to darkpatterns.org and then click on "Browse Library" and learn many more variations of what Thaler is discussing. If a reader is only exposed to the phrase "bad nudge", he/she knows less instead of more.

Do people want to eventually converge on "bad nudges" instead of "dark patterns"? I don't care. But at the moment, "dark patterns" is the phrase that has attracted the bulk of discussion. (E.g. see previous cited google search links and HN itself[1])

[1]https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dark%20patterns&sort=byPopular...

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