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Comment by impalallama | Hacker News Reader

> The two worked together on a paper about how to "nudge" people to be more honest on things like forms or tax returns. Their trick: move the location where people attest that they have filled in a form honestly from the bottom of the form to the top.

Another strike against the entire concept of "nudges". Its become clear that it was a bit of a liberal pipe dream saying you could accomplish huge changes in people or even society with imperceptible "nudges" that conveniently meant you didn't need to address systemic issues and stone wall any attempts at grander change.

"Be more honest by changing a form." "Make people less fat by moving where the produce is in the store." Turns out things are more complicated.

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> Make people less fat by moving where the produce is in the store

It doesn't? Not even a little bit ? Genuine question. One of the example of data exploitation I was given in university is that retail companies look for patterns in the thing their customers buy, and when they see that people who buy X-kind of thing also tend to buy Y-kind of thing, they tend to put X and Y right next to each other to push the customers to buy X and Y. Wouldn't doing the opposite work ?

Moving single digit volume of sales and "solving" obesity are two orders of magnitude different things.

They may be referring to the research of Brian Wansink, who was exposed a few years ago for at the very least shoddy research practices and at worst active data manipulation [1, 2, 3]. A large body of his work centered around how to rearrange school lunchrooms to promote better dietary decisions. His advice quite literally includes placing healthy food first [4].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-cornell-scientists-downfall-1...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20180307074049/http://www.timvan...

[3] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/who-reall...

[4] http://www.brianwansink.com/for-school-lunches.html

> conveniently meant you didn't need to address systemic issues and stone wall any attempts at grander change

Who is claiming this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory

Good paper on this topic:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4046264

Chater, N., & Loewenstein, G. (2022). The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioral public policy astray. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1–60. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X22002023

Are there countries where behavioral public policy has not been led astray? (I have not read the article)

> bit of a liberal pipe dream

Fail to see any connection here.

I believe it’s a reference to these initiatives:

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/10/obamas-effort-...

This article is talking about things like defaulting options to organ donor or automatically enrolling people into a 401k plan. I'm not sure changing the default option is the same as changing someone's behavior. Sounds like it's about explicitly NOT changing the behavior but rather the outcome of that behavior.

Something you may notice about these fraud cases is that they are simple things that result in _surprising_ outcomes. I don't think people are surprised that texting teens works better given that the only people that call them are parents and telemarketers. There's two fundamental lines in the article too

> government has long been behind corporate America in following up to make sure its policies actually work.

> The SBST team’s report showed that 13 of its projects worked; one didn’t; and one was hard to tell.

And if we're getting down to it, this doesn't sound like an Obama or "liberal" thing, it sounds like a _government_ thing. Can we stop taking general concepts or universal behavior and pretending that when its bad only "my enemies" do it and when good only "my allies" do it? This is just dumb, and it happens even outside the context of politics.

> And if we're getting down to it, this doesn't sound like an Obama or "liberal" thing, it sounds like a _government_ thing. Can we stop taking general concepts or universal behavior and pretending that when its bad only "my enemies" do it and when good only "my allies" do it? This is just dumb, and it happens even outside the context of politics.

I'm all for this, although it does require an agreement on epistemic principles, which seems like a tall order in the current state of our civilization. Which is why we are left with will to power.

Looking for solutions that do not involve any structural change is inherent to liberal politics in our society, since our current political economy is deeply liberal in structure (for a definition of liberal that contains both mainstream "liberals" and conservatives, closer to classical liberalism).

You can see this plainly by looking at the pattern of recuperation and dilution of any proposed structural change - making up non-structural alternatives that don't work but might and then haranguing over them for years is a common pattern in liberal democracies. See for example trying to avoid public healthcare by creating "optimized marketplaces", the entire idea of nudging in economics, the idea of self-regulation, avoiding providing free national tertiary education by instead giving progressively stringent and oddly targeted scholarships, etc...

In my experience doing research, this question should go *at the bottom*.

Why: A basic 101 thing one learns in Market Research is that personal questions _always_ go last.

So, if you want to ask an interviewed person if their answers were honest, researchers should be placing them last, towards the end of the questionnaire.

But, this only works if the questionnaire is oriented towards asking first impersonal questions, then more personal ones.

As another commented said: This is a lot of work. Doing research, asking people questions, gathering and then analyzing data is no walk in the park. It's sad that this happened. And, most important of all: Always being honest, no matter what the results are, even if you don't like them.

There are some types of nudges that have had measurable and durable societal benefits.

The primary one I'm aware of is making 401k a default, people are likely to stay enrolled and increase enrollment.

That's not even a nudge, you're not attempting to change anyone's behaviour (which is: do nothing) you're trying to take advantage of their default behaviour. Basically just putting the bin where people dump trash anyway isn't a "nudge".

Sure, I bring it up though because it's discussed in those behavioral psych books.

>Its become clear that it was a bit of a liberal pipe dream saying [...] that conveniently meant you didn't need to address systemic issues and stone wall any attempts at grander change.

Really? I thought liberals were all about addressing systemic issues (eg. systemic racism), and all about "grander change" (eg. defund the police/ICE, eat the rich, etc.).

The word "liberal" is terribly overloaded to mean all sorts of things. The OP's intended meaning seems to be liberal in the sense of a lack of coercive measures, preferring incentives instead. Your meaning seems to mean "leftist".

FWIW, I use it to describe that which is Lockean in substance (which entails a kind of radical, atomistic individualism that takes the individual to be the basic unit of society, and not the family), which basically means that most of the political spectrum is implicated.

> a liberal pipe dream

Non sequitur political flamebait in the top comment. HN continues its slide.

What's a more neutral phrase for that, IYO?

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