Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink: Nudging is Giving Reasons

Nudges are, roughly, ways of tweaking the context in which agents choose in order to bring them to make choices that are in their own interests. Nudges are controversial: opponents argue that because they bypass our reasoning processes, they threaten our autonomy. Proponents respond that nudging, and therefore this bypassing, is inevitable and pervasive: if we do not nudge ourselves in our own interests, the same bypassing processes will tend to work to our detriment. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the premise common to opponents and proponents: that nudging bypasses our reasoning processes. Rather, well designed nudges present reasons to mechanisms designed to respond to reasons of just that kind. In this light, it is refusing to nudge that threatens our autonomy, by refusing to give us good reasons for action. R oughly, a nudge is a way of influencing people to act that works by chang- ing aspects of the "choice architecture" (Thaler & Sunstein 2008: 6)-the context in which agents choose-rather than by giving them explicit reasons, changing their incentives, or removing options. Nudges work by taking advantage of predictable dispositions of human beings to make decisions in ways that are influenced by (apparently) irrelevant features of the environment in which they find themselves. As a framework for public policy, nudges usually aim to solve widespread failures of individuals to act in their own best interests. There are many examples of such failures: for instance, very many people fail to save enough money for a comfortable (or even an adequate) retirement. They may do so despite judging that they ought to save more. There is evidence that they may be nudged to save much more. For example, changing the defaults on the superannuation policies they sign up to on taking up employment changes the savings rate, because people tend to accept the default (see Smith, Goldstein, &