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Comment by picardo | Hacker News Reader

I'm not very familiar with how "nudging" is defined in the behavioral economics, and perhaps someone can enlighten me, but personally I find it hard to believe that it can be disproven that the way a choice is presented doesn't play any role in one's decision. The Goldilock principle is well-known. Most people instinctively choose the middle option, when given a three things to choose from.

Does this study imply that choice architecture plays no role in our decisions? Or am I mis-understanding it?

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Defaults are one example of a nudge. One of Thaler's examples is having some default 401(K) contribution for new employees that's greater than zero. While I'm sure there are cases where defaults are less powerful than in others, the idea that defaults don't really matter certainly flies in the face of everything I know about the world.

You give another example of choice architectures though I'm not sure if that's a nudge in the literature or not.

You are misunderstanding. They're saying that there's an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It's just not proof of absence.

For example, if I search your entire house for drugs, using drug sniffing dogs and so on and I don't find any at all, that's pretty good evidence that you don't have any. It's not proof though - you might have just stashed them really well.

Similarly, if people have been looking for nudge effects for ages, doing loads of studies on it for years, and none of them have found any effect, then that's pretty good evidence that the effects don't exist. It's not proof though; they might just have not been very good experiments.

Well said. I'd just change your first sentence to "Absence of evidence can be (but isn't necessarily) evidence of absence.", which is more in line with the rest of your post.

Good point.

OTOH, people have been looking for evidence of nudging, and didn't find it. Since the a priori probability of a more than marginal effect of nudging is unlikely, we can conclude that it's much more likely that nudging doesn't "work" than that it does.

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