Sugden v. Sunstein on Nudging, Round 1

Robert Sugden, “Do People Really Want to be Nudged towards Healthy Lifestyles?” International Review of Economics 64(2): 113-123, June, 2017.

[Round 2 here; Round 3 here; an earlier, related Sugden contribution here]

• The notion that nudges should be designed to push folks in favorable directions, where what constitutes “favorable” should be “as judged by themselves,” is ambiguous and potentially misleading. Thaler and Sunstein employ the phrase to reassure us that they don’t want to impose their goals, they only want to help people avoid errors.

• Thaler and Sunstein, and others, speak as if people have rational, latent, true preferences, but these are wrapped in faulty psychological garments, including attention deficits and self-control shortcomings. But we have no independent method of identifying when people make errors from the point of view of their posited latent preferences.

• Thaler and Sunstein just pronounce that much obesity arises from a mistake, without evidence. Why should we think that obese people are making a mistake, “as judged by themselves”?

• Or maybe latent preferences are those that the individual endorses (in the cold state, say) – people suffer from akrasia. But Sunstein and Thaler discuss mistakes in many contexts not involving self-control shortcomings, such as those involving rare decisions. But why should people view their own decisions in these rare, low-feedback situations, as mistakes?

• Consider a questionnaire for obese people, asking them why they eat cake instead of fruit, against the advice of health experts. Most of the responses, presumably, would not center on repeated losses of self-control, nor would most involve self-reported errors. Admitted self-control shortcomings are not as common as many behavioral scientists think.