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That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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Tldr: car steering and breaking didn't work, it was a repeatable problem, none of the mechanics could repeat it. After 108 days Ford re-bought the car and issued a refund to the owner.
Read the books nudge, and sludge.
Actually, don't read the books. The concept is pretty much made up. Here is an entertaining podcast about that:
https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/cc36ce12d2fd1a171630d1733998b414
I've read nudge, whats wrong with behavioral economics to influence behavior? it seems to work
No, it doesn't work - that is exactly the problem. If you don't want to listen to the podcast (which would be a shame), they list a number of studies in the show notes.
There are a few select cases for which personal nudges work, but only to a miniscule degree which is far less than what the authors claimed. And naturally, proposing nudge theory hinders actual, much more effective, systematic changes that would really benefit people - and that is a major problem.
It's a face, fake feel good strategy that can be employed to claim improving a given system - like attaching a little plastic string to the plastic cap of your beverage container so companies can claim to have improved the plastic littering problem.
Where do I find the show notes? This is all i see at the link you provided
I'd really like to see and engage with the thesis here, but it's not presented in a accessible way. Could you give the argument please?
The papers are listed at the bottom of the screenshot you posted, I agree it's badly formatted so not immediately obvious / visible.
However, I can provide sources later on, I actually still have to get back to another post to provide some papers, but it'll be a while until I have the time to do that.
ok, guess its these three papers
So the meta-analysis says nudging works, but not to some massive degree.
Given that you quoted from the last paper, there was a response from Maier et al. to that paper explicitly, correcting for publication bias and finding no effect when "nudging":
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9351501/
Maier's letter to the editor is not peer reviewed; it counts as opinion, the original authors have not retracted their paper - so the matter is at best "divided"
The original paper might have other issues, e. g. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/01/07/pnas-gigo-qrp-wtf-approaching-the-platonic-ideal-of-junk-science/
But I'm not here to discuss effect size or quality of sources, I think it is much more important to understand that there is no good proof that nudging enables people to make good, lasting changes, while at the same time offering policymakers an easy and cheap way out of applying uncontested, proven methods that would be a lot more beneficial.