HASAs the effects of climate change become more and more pronounced, we often hear that nudges are the ideal tool to encourage people to adopt behaviors that are more concerned with the future of the planet. A nudge (“nudge” in English) is a discreet mode of incentive using the unconscious psychological springs of human behavior to guide it. The default activation of the double-sided printing option of printers is often mentioned to illustrate their effectiveness. Thanks to this nudge “green”, most organizations have managed to reconcile respect for the environment and cost reduction.
It has long been known that people do not make decisions rationally. In particular, the way we present a choice conditions the way we respond to it. This approach was codified by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, two American academics, in a work published in 2008 (Nudge, Vuibert, 2022).
The more or less avowed objective of nudges is to encourage people to make the decisions expected of them in a non-coercive way. Everyone is free to make their choices, but we can influence them by manipulating what behavioral scientists call “the architecture of choice”. Another example: in most cafeterias, the healthiest dishes are placed at the top of the menu to encourage people to choose them first.
Easy and inexpensive
After businesses, public authorities quickly fell under the spell of behavioral sciences. This is not very surprising. THE nudges are easy and inexpensive to implement. Since the end of the 2000s, the American and English administrations have had their “nudge unit”.
Cass Sunstein worked for the Obama administration. One of its missions was to develop a nudge encouraging American employees to subscribe to a retirement savings plan. In France, there is a “behavioral sciences” division within the interministerial directorate for public transformation. The government notably called on it to encourage the population to wear a mask, to be vaccinated or to download the TousAntiCovid application during the Covid-19 pandemic.
THE nudges have their supporters and detractors, but it is unclear whether they are effective. To settle this debate, a team of researchers synthesized the results of 215 studies published on this subject over the last fifteen years (“The effectiveness of nudging: A meta-analysis of choice architecture interventions across behavioral domains”by Stephanie Mertens, Mario Herberz, Ulf Hahnel and Tobias Brosch, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), nᵒ 119/1, 2022).
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