“Comprehensive Healthcare for America” is a largely single-payer reform proposal that, by applying the insights of behavioral economics, may be able to rally patients and clinicians sufficiently to overcome the opposition of politicians and vested interests to providing all Americans with less complicated and less costly access to needed healthcare.

To successfully select and implement nudges, policy makers need a psychological understanding of who opposes nudges, how they are perceived, and when alternative methods (e.g., forced choice) might work better. Using two representative samples, we examined four factors that influence U.S. attitudes toward nudges – types of nudges, individual dispositions, nudge perceptions, and nudge frames. Most nudges were supported, although opt-out defaults for organ donations were opposed in both samples. “System 1” nudges (e.g., defaults and sequential orderings) were viewed less favorably than “System 2” nudges (e.g., educational opportunities or reminders). System 1 nudges were perceived as more autonomy threatening, whereas System 2 nudges were viewed as more effective for better decision making and more necessary for changing behavior. People with greater empathetic concern tended to support both types of nudges and viewed them as the “right” kind of goals to have. Individualists opposed both types of nudges, and conservatives tended to oppose both types. Reactant people and those with a strong desire for control opposed System 1 nudges. To see whether framing could influence attitudes, we varied the description of the nudge in terms of the target (Personal vs. Societal) and the reference point for the nudge (Costs vs. Benefits). Empathetic people were more supportive when framing highlighted societal costs or benefits, and reactant people were more opposed to nudges when frames highlighted the personal costs of rejection.

This article reports on a survey study comparing the general public's attitude towards nudging to its attitude towards the traditional tools of government: information, subsidies, taxes and mandates. The study was based on responses from a representative sample of the adult Swedish population. In separate evaluations, the respondents rated how positively or negatively they perceived a set of specific policy tools, traditional and behavioral, across different policy goals. Overall, information and subsidies were more positively perceived than the other types of policy tools, nudging included. Respondents’ attitudes towards the policy tools were partly explained by individualistic ideological views, whether they agreed with the intended policy goals, and certain socio-demographic variables. Implications for future research and public policy are discussed.

Since the publication of the seminal book Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, several critics have highlighted preference endogeneity as a serious obstacle to nudging. When individuals hold preferences that are dynamic and endogenous to the nudge frame, it is unclear what the normative benchmark for libertarian paternalistic policies should be. While acknowledging this issue, the pro-nudging camp has not yet sufficiently addressed it. This article aims to fill this void by presenting a conditional defence of nudging when preferences are endogenous. We explain the learning process through which individuals establish ‘agentic’ preferences: preferences that are sufficiently stable, reasonable, autonomous and associated with organismic well-being to ground the ‘welfare’ principle of libertarian paternalism. To describe this process, we draw on theories from psychological science, in particular self-discrepancy theory and self-determination theory. We argue that agentic preferences are not only welfare-relevant and thus appropriate to libertarian paternalism but can also be identified by choice architects.

Self-control failure occurs when an individual experiences a conflict between immediate desires and longer-term goals, recognises psychological forces that hinder goal-directed action, tries to resist them but fails in the attempt. Behavioural economists often invoke assumptions about self-control failure to justify proposals for policy interventions. These arguments require workable methods for eliciting individuals’ goals and for verifying occurrences of self-control failure, but developing such methods confronts two problems. First, it is not clear that individuals’ goals are context-independent. Second, facing an actual conflict between a desire and a self-acknowledged goal, a person may consciously choose not to resist the desire, thinking that spontaneity is more important than self-control. We address these issues through an online survey that elicited individuals’ self-reported judgements about the relative importance of self-control and spontaneity in conflicts between enjoyment and health-related goals. To test for context-sensitivity, the judgement-elicitation questions were preceded by a memory recall task which directed participants’ attention either to the enjoyment of acting on desires or to the satisfaction of achieving goals. We found little evidence of context-sensitivity. In both treatments, however, judgements that favoured spontaneity were expressed with roughly the same frequency and strength as judgments that favoured self-control.

People often fail to make the choices that best satisfy their preferences. The design of the social environment inevitably makes some choices easier than others. According to Libertarian Paternalists, these facts justify governments nudging people towards better choices through changes to the so-called choice architecture. This is a form of means paternalism. However, the social environment affects not only people's choices or means, but also the preferences they adopt in the first place. Call this the problem of ‘preference architecture’. This article argues that preference architecture constitutes a fundamental challenge to the justificatory basis of Libertarian Paternalism. More generally, it explores when, if ever, government paternalism that influences preference formation can be justified. While Libertarian Paternalism cannot provide a satisfactory answer, the author defends a contractualist account of paternalism based on a notion of primary goods and democratic deliberation.

Behavioural public policy (BPP) has come under fire by critics who claim that it is illiberal. Some authors recently suggest that there is a type of BPP – boosting – that is not as vulnerable to this normative critique. Our paper challenges this claim: there's no non-circular way to draw the distinction between nudge and boost that would make the normative difference required to infer the permissibility of a policy intervention from its type-membership. We consider two strategies: paradigmatic examples and causal mechanisms. We conclude by sketching some suggestions about the right way to approach the normative issues.

The effectiveness of heuristics has received contradicting interpretations in the behavioural sciences. We study the policy implications of two programmes that dispute the effectiveness of heuristics – the biases and heuristics and the fast and frugal heuristics programmes. While the first blames heuristics for most errors in judgement, the second posits heuristics as simple mental algorithms that work well in a range of environments. We argue that the fast and frugal programme is less paternalistic insofar as it models humans as effective decision-makers in a range of environments. However, in the rapidly changing environments of the 21st century, both are needed to inform evidence-based policies.