Karin Bornett
The English term "nudge" means something like "push" or "nudge". In their 2008 book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness”, economists Richard Thaler and lawyer Cass Sunstein describe in detail how Nudging can influence consumer behavior with a "push" while observing ethical aspects and steer it in a certain direction - without prohibitions or penalties. The authors assume that the pushing must be transparent and not mislead the consumer. In addition, consumers must always be able to decide against a nudge as easily as possible if they so wish. Ultimately, the influence should only take place for the benefit of society.
Nudging in practice
But what does a nudge look like? There are numerous examples: It has been shown, for example, that a picture of a fly in the urine basin considerably increases the marksmanship of men. The cleaning effort in restaurants and bars that use this trick could be significantly reduced.
Or a display that a Swiss company manufactures for showers playfully motivates consumers to save water. A polar bear on an ice floe can be seen on the screen. The longer and hotter the shower, the faster the ice floe melts and the polar bear falls into the water.
An effective one Nudging Another method is the specific establishment of standard settings. This allows companies or states to make decisions for consumers. Thaler and Sunstein cite a few examples which clearly show how strongly standard specifications influence the decision-making of individuals. A university in New Jersey, for example, set the printer to "double-sided" as the default. For the users, switching the printer to "one-sided printing" was possible, but relatively cumbersome. Usually, double-sided printing was done automatically. This saved the university in question a total of 55 million sheets of paper compared to the previous four years, which corresponds to a reduction of 44 percent and the protection of 4.650 trees.
Nudging can therefore protect the environment or save costs with defaults, i.e. standard settings, and with incentives. But important social aspects, such as organ donation, can also be addressed by setting the standard in the sense of Nudging be steered. Different rules apply here depending on the nation. You either have to actively advocate a donation just in case, as in Germany, or is automatically a donor and must actively object to this, such as in Austria. As expected, the proportion of donors is higher in the latter example. Nudges can therefore also be used very specifically by politicians. Some countries even have their own for this Nudging Units founded to study the effects of nudges in detail.
With all the transparency and freedom of choice that Thaler and Sunstein for Nudging presuppose, critics complain that this is ultimately manipulation and that it is patronizing if a decision architecture is designed in such a way that it steers people in one direction. Another difficult question is how and who defines what is and what is not useful for the individual and the common good.
Economist Philipp Nagels is one Article in the "world" at least to consider that decisions are always made anyway and consciously or unconsciously influenced: "The circumstances under which this happens must be carefully considered and discussed, but avoiding influencing our actions by the context in which we're moving, not anyway. "
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