5 - The digital future of nudging

Summary

Ed Bradon (2022) has suggested that despite being with us for over decade we have only scratched the surface of what nudging could do as a policy tool. In the context of the still limited rollout of nudging and the fact that the vast majority of attempts to change and reform people's behaviour are unsuccessful, Bradon argues that in the future we would be foolish not to explore the potential benefits of nudging more widely. In this chapter we consider what the future of nudging may look like. Critically we claim that the future power of nudging is likely to be more significant than it has been in the past, and that its future iterations will likely raise new and more troubling ethical and political issues than its older forms.

In broad terms there are a series of future trajectories that nudging could take. First, it could diminish in popularity and fade from use as other policy techniques have done in the past. We think that this is unlikely. Second, it may gradually grow in significance and become an accepted part of behaviour changing programmes in the public and private sectors. We think that this trajectory is more likely, but only really tells part of the future story of nudging. There is a third direction of travel: one which sees nudging undergo radical transformation in both its reach and functionality to become a very significant source of power and influence. It is this third trajectory that provides the focus for this chapter. It is our contention that nudging has already radically transformed (one may even say mutated) and is playing a much more significant role in our lives they we may realize.

The last 20 years have witnessed a series of experimental fusions between the data and behavioural sciences. These developments go by many names. Shoshana Zuboff (2015, 2016, 2019) has described these developments in terms of “surveillance capitalism” and the emergence of a whole new brand of economics devoted to the digital monitoring and shaping of human behaviours (see Text Box 5.1). Others have labelled these developments as “micro-”, “continuous-” or “hyper”-nudging (see Yeung 2019; Whitehead & Collier 2022: 75–98).