[HN Gopher] No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publicat... ___________________________________________________________________ No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias Author : ororm Score : 184 points Date : 2022-07-24 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.pnas.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.pnas.org) | lifeisstillgood wrote: | Their summary csv listing all the studies reviewed is at | https://osf.io/ubt9a | | And boy am I struggling - I am amazed it's even possible to group | all of these studies under the same umbrella unless that is | "misc". | | Claiming that how people choose to treat their cancer, portion | sizes at restaurants, rural Kenyan maternal health and Dutch | childrens vegetable choices are even in the same field seems - | incredible. | | Maybe I am agreeing with the study in a roundabout way. If all of | these things are under the heading "nudge" then it is too broad a | heading. It's probably impossible to say one way or another that | nudging works because you can never unpick all the confounding | factors. Did the Dutch children have a popular TV show about | vegetables while the Kenya media ran months long articles about | unsanitary hospital conditions? | | With my cynical hat on Nudge is a way for politicians to try | something even when the real fix is intractable. I don't oppose | "do something positive" - Injust oppose abusing power, violence | for political gain, and all the other reasons why we can agree on | a nudge in the right direction but cannot agree on a structural | fix in the right direction. | | I guess if they worked then they would solve the problems without | structural chnage and so would defeat the forces that benefit | from the status quo. so yeah. it does not work. | | looks like we will have to go back to the old politics and | revolt. | SeanLuke wrote: | Links to references are entirely broken in Firefox on the PNAS | website. Does nobody test for these things? | mikkergp wrote: | it seems like what they are saying is here is some statistics | that suggests that maybe there's a bunch of missing data that | would Show that nudge doesn't have an effect. Like most science | it seems like the conclusion should be, go do more research to | see if we're right, not, you should conclude that nudging doesn't | work. | mcswell wrote: | They're implying that some such research has already been done, | but wasn't published because of publication bias against | negative results. So the data exists, but is missing from | publication. (I suspect it's also possible that more skeptical | researchers have been dissuaded from even doing the research, | for fear they'd be wasting their time and research budget | because after they did the research, it wouldn't get | published.) | mikkergp wrote: | Right but they're implying that statistically, they don't | have a pile of said research on their desk that they're | pointing too. | picardo wrote: | I'm not very familiar with how "nudging" is defined in the | behavioral economics, and perhaps someone can enlighten me, but | personally I find it hard to believe that it can be disproven | that the way a choice is presented doesn't play any role in one's | decision. The Goldilock principle is well-known. Most people | instinctively choose the middle option, when given a three things | to choose from. | | Does this study imply that choice architecture plays no role in | our decisions? Or am I mis-understanding it? | hackerlight wrote: | You are misunderstanding. They're saying that there's an | absence of evidence, not evidence of absence. | tgv wrote: | OTOH, people have been looking for evidence of nudging, and | didn't find it. Since the a priori probability of a more than | marginal effect of nudging is unlikely, we can conclude that | it's much more likely that nudging doesn't "work" than that | it does. | IshKebab wrote: | Absence of evidence _is_ evidence of absence. It 's just not | _proof_ of absence. | | For example, if I search your entire house for drugs, using | drug sniffing dogs and so on and I don't find any at all, | that's pretty good evidence that you don't have any. It's not | proof though - you might have just stashed them really well. | | Similarly, if people have been looking for nudge effects for | ages, doing loads of studies on it for years, and none of | them have found any effect, then that's pretty good evidence | that the effects don't exist. It's not proof though; they | might just have not been very good experiments. | ghaff wrote: | Defaults are one example of a nudge. One of Thaler's examples | is having some default 401(K) contribution for new employees | that's greater than zero. While I'm sure there are cases where | defaults are less powerful than in others, the idea that | defaults don't really matter certainly flies in the face of | everything I know about the world. | | You give another example of choice architectures though I'm not | sure if that's a nudge in the literature or not. | walterbell wrote: | Nudging is like SEO, both nudges and perception filters are | constantly evolving. Yesterday's nudge is today's fodder for | memes. | Angostura wrote: | I'm just in the process of reading 'Nudge - the final edition' - | definitely worth a read - it's thought-provoking, funny, | insightful and enjoyable. It would be a shame if it all turned | out to be bullshit as the examples given in the book seem | straightforward and plausibly effective. | h2odragon wrote: | Awww, someone ran over the Dogma again. | icegreentea2 wrote: | The linked study (and the Merten's study it's built ontop of) | classifies defaults as "structural" interventions. In the linked | meta-analysis, after stripping out estimates of publication | basis, structural interventions have the most "robust" evidence | left (95% CI of 0.00-0.43), and as their paper text says "whereas | the evidence is undecided for "structure" interventions". Other | structural interventions include, making it easier to select the | desired outcome (or make it harder to switch away from desired | out come), changing the range of options to facilitate | evaluation, or trying to compensate for biases and loss aversion | in choice structure. As you can see, this is a broad range of | interventions. | | A little bit further they say "However, all intervention | categories and domains apart from "finance" show evidence for | heterogeneity, which implies that some nudges might be effective, | even when there is evidence against the mean effect", which makes | sense. People understand stakes generally, and will likely apply | different care/effort in different context, modifying the context | specific effect of any given intervention. | | I think the paper makes a reasonable argument: | | 1. There is significant publication bias in nudging studies 2. | The effect of providing additional information at time of | selection, or providing reminders/affirmations for self control | is basically non-existent 3. The effect of modifying choice | structure is indecisive. Likely we'll find that some structural | modifications have strong effects in some context, but others | have little or no effect is other context. | rayiner wrote: | Remember, Obama appointed a regulatory czar based on this | science: | https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/magazine/16Sunstein-t.htm... | pessimizer wrote: | Really one of the creepiest people connected to government. | gumby wrote: | And a million advertisers and designers cry out. | | We should spread this widely in the hope that the pop ups and | banners die off. | findalex wrote: | This is why I think nudging must work on some level. What are | trends, advertising, fads, etc. if not nudges? Is the existence | of an intelligent nudger required or can the hive nudge itself? | oxfordmale wrote: | Reading this article, it is good that the UK COVID policy wasn't | based on behavioural nudging /sarcasm. The UK COVID policy | heavily relied on this and one of the unwanted side effects was | scaring a certain section of the population into submission. | Although that may have been effective during COVID, it made it a | lot harder for that segment of society to return back to normal. | themitigating wrote: | For what purpose? | gsatic wrote: | If they can be nugdged one way why not the other? | renewiltord wrote: | Wait, you're arguing that it does have an effect but the effect | direction is unpredictable. | | As an example to differentiate: drinking a homeopathic solution | for health has no effect; driving a radium solution for health | hurts. | asdff wrote: | At this point seeing mask usage e.g. outdoors on a hiking trail | is a little disturbing, because at this point people are | thinking they are fighting the good fight but are now on the | other side of the evidence (which says you are pretty safe | outdoors or in a big room or while merely interacting briefly | in passing with people, as one does with strangers in public). | I wonder what the messaging will be given that this supposedly | "scientifically minded" mask wearing subset of the population | is no longer listening to the science. | | I hope this doesn't lead to weakened immunity overall in the | population. If you wear a mask every time you go out into the | world, that doesn't give you much of a chance to build up | acquired immunity to all the other bugs that are out there. | There are stories from the early 1900s of native americans | coming out of the woods and joining western society. They of | course have spent decades in isolation versus just two years, | but that's enough for them to end up perennially sick and in | poor health when they were actually integrated into western | society, and eventually die young of common disease. A lack of | acquired immunity is what killed Ishi: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi | lozenge wrote: | Isn't locking down the obvious departure from a "nudge policy"? | | I've seen the claim a lot but it all goes back to documents | like this one which discusses strategies for communicating to | increase compliance with lockdowns. | | https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... | | Yes, the UK government received such shocking insights as | "Messaging needs to emphasise and explain the duty to protect | others", and "Messaging about actions need to be framed | positively in terms of protecting oneself and the community, | and increase confidence that they will be effective". | | Of course, the government did pick and choose what to follow, | so it would be absurd to say the entire COVID policy was "based | on behavioural nudging". The UK's adherence to isolating after | positive tests was thought to be one of the lowest of any | country. When SPI-B pointed out that financial support would | increase adherence to isolating, no reaction from the | government. | https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/government-su... | oxfordmale wrote: | There are articles like this: | | https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/13/why- | is... | | Or from the other side of the political spectrum: | | https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/28/grossly- | unet... | lozenge wrote: | The first one is from before the first lockdown. The | strategy was completely replaced when lockdown happened. It | was unrecognisable from then on. | | The second one is about "deploying fear, shame and | scapegoating" which the document I linked specifically | calls out as a communication strategy with more downsides | than any of the others they mentioned. However, Priti Patel | just can't resist such activities. | bilsbie wrote: | How do we know this study wasn't "nudged"? | svnt wrote: | That's not the nudge you're looking for. | mcswell wrote: | because it's a meta-study? | a_simm wrote: | Wow. As a former social scientist with an axe to grind this hits | hard. | | I like to provide that HN community with some context as to what | this means. | | There are some 300 "research" departments in each of the major | social sciences: psychology, sociology, economics and | anthropology. If you believe what they say, about half of their | mission is teaching and the other half is research. That's a lot, | tens of billions of dollars. | | The nudge findings were among the few to not only reach the level | of public knowledge but, more importantly, directly influence on | public policy. To use the one I most familiar with: the so called | default for defined contribution retirement plans, eg 401k. These | government regs assumed, for good reason, that maximizing | contributions was in the public interest. Based on the nudge | findings, after much debate and effort, they were updated to | dictate that the max options forms was pre selected in the brief | it would cause more individuals would opt for that as opposed to | contributing zero. | | So far so good, right? In fact nudge has become a canonical | example in introductory public policy courses as to how their | research can in some sense make things better. | | This meta-analytic finding turns on the authors' method for | measuring publication bias. Because I accept that, I must believe | that this entire body of research, probably the signal behavioral | economics work, is essentially worthless! Thus, all that effort | has not only been wasted but the credibility of social science in | general is damaged. | | Adding this to the well/known gamesmanship in peer review, debate | over tenure and etc. means it's past time to reform a large chunk | of academia. | TameAntelope wrote: | Isn't this just one specific analysis using a very narrow | definition of "nudge", one that doesn't even begin to encompass | the work being done at those "300 "research" departments"? Why | would this, alone, undo decades of research and clear, bright- | line conclusions such as the ones cited in my sibling comments? | | Just seems like an overreaction on your part, more than, "All | 'nudge' research is now worthless" especially given how vocal | and... you-sounding the "anti-nudge" crowd often is. | | To take a wider view, a comment like yours is a more malicious | form of nerd-sniping[0], especially on HN. Claim to have | relevant credentials, voice a contrarian-but-popular-here | opinion, and make a wild conclusion to give those reading it a | feeling of "inside baseball." | | [0] https://xkcd.com/356/ | pm_me_your_quan wrote: | Except that's not what the study says. Quoting a comment below, | "The linked study (and the Merten's study it's built ontop of) | classifies defaults as "structural" interventions. In the | linked meta-analysis, after stripping out estimates of | publication basis, structural interventions have the most | "robust" evidence left (95% CI of 0.00-0.43)" | pid_0 wrote: | fatherzine wrote: | "credibility of social science" | rmatt2000 wrote: | > ... the credibility of social science in general is damaged. | | Umm, I have some news for you. | xhkkffbf wrote: | Hah. Reform academia. Good one. When people have tenure, | they'll be there teaching their version of this stuff for a | long time and it's all but impossible to reform them without | shutting down the departments. | | In many schools, these social science departments are a | favorite for the weaker students who don't really do so well | with math. They're usually filled with athletes. They love to | absorb pop psych results like Amy Cuddy's Power Pose and so | they don't want to listen to anyone question their results with | lots of meta analysis. They want some basic ideas from class in | between lots of time on the playing field. | | I'm afraid that their demands will far outweigh any desire to | force the fields to search for absolute truth. | bbarnett wrote: | _Adding this to the well /known gamesmanship in peer review, | debate over tenure and etc. means it's past time to reform a | large chunk of academia._ | | But we are reforming, right? Merit based learning is over, and | so really, what's it matter? | runarberg wrote: | I left psychology around the time that nudging was gaining | traction and I haven't really been following it. But it seems | to have a couple of red flags: | | First of the definition: | | > A nudge is a function of (condition I) any attempt at | influencing people's judgment, choice or behavior in a | predictable way (condition a) that is motivated because of | cognitive boundaries, biases, routines, and habits in | individual and social decision-making posing barriers for | people to perform rationally in their own self-declared | interests, and which (condition b) works by making use of those | boundaries, biases, routines, and habits as integral parts of | such attempts. | | I find this definition overly permissive and overlay reliant on | unnecessary cognitive terms (like _judgement_ and _choice_ ; | which can be shortened to _behavior_ ) or economic terms (like | _rationality_ and _self interest_ ). As a fan of behaviorism | this feels like an attempt to introduce epicycle into a theory | that doesn't need it. This effect--if it exists--can probably | be adequately explained with good old classical conditioning | and conditional reinforcements. This is the first red flag. | That is not to say we can't look for specific cognitive | functions which makes some reinforcement contingencies more | effective then others, but _nudge_ feels a bit too general to | actually be of any use in a model. It in fact reminds me of | Albert Bandura's theory of self-efficacy, a theory that seems | to have reach a dead-end at this point. | | The second red flag is the economic presuppositions. When I | skim through the literature it feels like they are creating a | band-aid on the thoroughly debunked notion of _Homo economicus_ | (the believe that human individuals always behave in a rational | way optimized for their own self interest). So instead of | recognizing the fact human behavior is more complicated, what | they try to do is invent a new term to counter-act the | instances where biases are "preventing" such a behavior | pattern. I find such an effort to be doomed to fail, as-- | despite the persistence of economists--rational behavior means | a different thing for each individual, and there is no "patch" | for what economists call "biases". | t_mann wrote: | Yes, nudging is an extremely well established concept, all the | way from theory to policy - there's a Nobel (memorial) prize | for the theory, and the UK government explicitly established a | 'nudge unit' (the Behavioural Insights Team) to turn it into | policy. | curiousllama wrote: | > This meta-analytic finding turns on the authors' method for | measuring publication bias. Because I accept that, I must | believe that this entire body of research, probably the signal | behavioral economics work, is essentially worthless! | | I strongly disagree with this statement, even as someone who | believes "nudge" effects are wildly overblown. | | It means "these studies failed to find evidence" - NOT that | there is nothing to find. | | The distinction is important because, as it turns out, the | policies that the research influenced did work, in many cases. | 401k contributions did go up, in many cases. More people became | organ donors. More Europeans got stronger privacy protections. | | "The power of defaults" is such a cliche because, in many | cases, it works. | | The problem with these studies is overstating the effect - not | spewing worthless BS. | glitchc wrote: | Changing the defaults is not the same as nudging. There is a | logical error in your thinking here. | a_simm wrote: | I defend and elucidate. Worthlessness I would define here | relative to the amounts of public and of policy attention the | nudge findings have received vs net value add modified by | these results. | | Perhaps due to the PR efforts of leading researchers, it was | much more than "set defaults intelligently." The | interpretations were more like: we can use social science to | shape peoples' behavior at the margins. Further these | marginal changes would cumulate to substantive and lasting | societal improvement. | | On reflection, it seems to me that the value of this paper | stems from its attempt to measure or quantify publication | bias. In this case, the bias was positive in the direction of | with studies confirming nudge effects. | | Taking that a step further implies that the actual net nudge | effects across published and unpublished studies were | statistically and therefore substantively insignificant. | Hence the use of the term worthless, i.e. non-findings. | | To say that it is costless to implement a nudge scheme in the | behavioral economics sense is simply untrue. In the | retirement case it required a lengthy ethical and legal | debate; some study and political argument as to the best | outcome, which is in part a redistributive question, hard | costs associated with revision or development of messages and | other materials, etc. | | Worse I believe is the damage done from attention and action | predicated on now seemingly faulty social science. What | could've been done instead and what will happen in the next | time a social scientist claims an 'easy' way to make things | better are costs. | runarberg wrote: | Can these effects be explained without inventing a new term? | Because if they can then these studies didn't really find | anything did they? | | Whenever I see a new term being introduced as an explanation | I am hesitant to accept it, as it may turn out to just be | explaining the planetary motions with epicycle, when the | motions can be easier explained by moving the sun to the | center of the solar system instead of the earth. | turns0ut wrote: | People born in Germany speak German. | | That we need to "create" the idea of a "nudge effect" when | it's clear people take on commonly encountered social | behaviors is bizarre. | | Cognitive experience is a for loop with memory; for time | spent in situation X, memory forms at rate Y. Social science | solved. | | Social science derives all it's conclusions by studying the | same old physical world as physical science. It's restatement | of science customized to cultural tradition. It's cultural | tradition to over hype our specialness selling books and big | ideas, when the math is the same everywhere. Creating | cultural objects of obvious math is a commodity now. | mikkergp wrote: | > This meta-analytic finding turns on the authors' method for | measuring publication bias. Because I accept that, I must | believe that this entire body of research, probably the signal | behavioral economics work, is essentially worthless! | | This is a pretty short article, how are you confident of such a | broad conclusion? What makes you that confident that this meta- | analysis is decisive? | kingkawn wrote: | Does academic social science research have credibility to | damage? | JusticeJuice wrote: | > Thus, all that effort has not only been wasted but the | credibility of social science in general is damaged. | | I don't think that's entirely true If anything this just | highlights how complex behavioural science really is, as | they're dealing with surprisingly complex humans and their | surprisingly complex lives. Behavioural science is a young | field. | mcswell wrote: | "Behavioural science is a young field." As was chemistry up | until, say, Robert Boyle. | anigbrowl wrote: | 'Social sciences as Sorcery' indeed. | xyzzy123 wrote: | In the example you cited I don't think that's a nudge? Or is | it? | | I ask because I am sure that changing defaults DEFINITELY | works, especially if the user does not have a strong existing | preference. | | You're not really changing user behaviour most of the time, | you're changing the outcome of what they're trying to do, which | is to reduce their cognitive load by ignoring as much as they | possibly can. | adamisom wrote: | Yeah, I am also confused by the statement that nudges theory | doesn't replicate and I'm afraid that statement won't | replicate haha, or rather, there are basic, indisputable | findings with mindboggling effect size that countries with | different defaults for organ donors have different donation | rates. | | Now, you can say all day long that those aren't causal | studies, but there is just no way that confounding factors | like different cultures explain it, because cultures just | aren't sufficiently different, or rather cultures that are | otherwise pretty similar have vastly different donation | rates. | | A lot of the replication crisis imo is just realizing that | landmark studies were underpowered. That is, they don't prove | what they meant to prove, but that is very different from | whether the effect exists i.e. an effect may exist yet be | hard to prove and social scientists are rarely rigorous in | study design, from training and from inherent difficulty. | badrabbit wrote: | 401k is a good example, I have had it for my whole career but | if there was a form at any point asking me how much of my pay | I want to contribute I would have said 0 because I prefer | cash at hand than cash some day and all the b.s. health | insurance is already taking a lot. But 401k doesn't bother me | enough to change the default so I leave it be as some kind of | rainy day fund. I didn't like paying the penalty to withdraw | it, unless I turn 65, it will always be worth significantly | less than it says on paper, I am not even convinced it is | beating inflation. My point is, because people don't change | the default it does not mean they have accepted it or like | it, that is an incorrect conclusion. | | Food is another example, I like cheese sometimes but when | there is an option for it I take it out of the food most | times but I won't go out of my way to ask for its removal | otherwise, this has a real health impact. | mikeiz404 wrote: | If you're worried about beating inflation, have a long time | horizon, and don't mind some risk you might looking into | investing in total market index funds. An index fund for | the S&P 500 has averaged ~10% returns when looking back 30 | years [1]. | | If you're just concerned about inflation, don't like risk, | and don't mind locking you money up for a little bit | Treasury Inflation Protected Securities [2] are also a | thing. Their returns are tied to the Fed's measurement of | inflation (CPI). | | 1: https://www.fool.com/investing/how-to-invest/index- | funds/ave... | | 2: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tips.asp | JusticeJuice wrote: | Nudges are often imagined as just how choices are presented, | but yes the default option is considered part of nudge | theory. As also is social proof ("Your friends picked this | choice"). | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#Types_of_nudges | clairity wrote: | also, the question is how much structural elements | influence outcomes (not merely decisions), not whether they | do or not. that's the extra complexity of a social system | built atop a biological system built atop a chemical | environment built atop a physical one. we're complicated. | physics is nigh child's play in comparison. | mikkergp wrote: | Some other poster posted that they must have a pretty | specific definition of nudge, because it defies credulity | that defaults don't change outcome if only because half the | time I don't read the defaults or know where to find them. | | I mean I just found out two weeks ago you could change the | hacker news banner color. Are you telling me I'm in a | statistically insignia can't minority of hacker news users? | | Also how many settings are there in the average application, | you can't tell me most users go through all of those settings | to get exactly what they want. | SilasX wrote: | > Some other poster posted that they must have a pretty | specific definition of nudge, because it defies credulity | that defaults don't change outcome if only because half the | time I don't read the defaults or know where to find them. | | My pet theory is, these results hinge on, "does it scale?" | | Like, yes, you can do nudges and see behavioral changes. | But what about when everyone is doing it constantly? _Then_ | people will get fatigued and form countermeasures. | | Imagine this dynamic in another context: | | "Guys, guys check this out, people are guaranteed to buy | your product if you show arguments for it to random | people!" | | But, oops, centuries of marketing later, advertising isn't | automatically effective enough to cover its costs, people | don't automatically believe the ads. | analog31 wrote: | It seems quite possible for two things to be true: 1) The | common sense notion that manipulation works; and 2) Social | science couldn't find the signal above the noise. | rad88 wrote: | The hacker news banner color doesn't matter and few have | ever wanted to change it. But your financial position and | needs, what % of your salary you can afford to money-hole | until retirement, does matter and is pretty individual. It | doesn't defy credulity to me that generally people would | make a choice about this (when can I retire?), and that the | default doesn't influence it. | | I grant that it would be surprising if it had no influence | at all, but I think the effect is more the social signal | that you should want to save the max, that your neighbors | probably do (it's the default after all), etc., rather than | people completely ignoring/missing it. | IMSAI8080 wrote: | I'm guilty of not reading this paper in any detail but it | feels that the default setting "nudge" idea should work as | described. So if you e.g. nudge people by setting up a | pension plan by default (that they can opt out of) does | that seriously fail to cause more people to have a pension? | Or is this claiming something else? | xyzzy123 wrote: | If defaults don't work then Google wasted 15 billion | dollars last year paying Apple to be in the search bar... | | I guess there must be further detail in the paper and I | will have to read it to understand the nuance. | Gustomaximus wrote: | Also fair to recognise google also pays Apple to not make | or promote a competitor that may offer far more | competition. | | Id say this is a large part of the reason Gmail, Android | and Chrome exist. | pessimizer wrote: | Or Google is using the search bar as a pretense for | paying Apple for something else. | greggsy wrote: | Suggesting that there is a corporate or government | conspiracy without actually saying what it might actually | be is the worst type of conspiracy. | pessimizer wrote: | That's not a conspiracy. When two companies, or | countries, or individuals have business dealings on many | different levels, a lot of things can be negotiated at | the same time. | inglor_cz wrote: | Defaults very clearly work in matters such as consent to | organ donation. In countries where you need to opt out of | organ donation, few people bother to do so. | | Another question is whether this increases the total | amount of successful donations. I was looking around for | studies and found this one [1], which basically says "in | some countries, yes". | | [1] https://behavioralpolicy.org/wp- | content/uploads/2020/01/Does... | jolux wrote: | You have to have a certain amount of karma to change the | banner color. | kristianc wrote: | This seems to be the standard response to anything that seeks | to debunk nudge. Any time you say 'This example of a nudge | doesn't work / isn't replicable / isn't actually socially | helpful' someone will say 'Ah but that's not really nudge | tactics.' | mcswell wrote: | No true Scotsman. | mikkergp wrote: | How does a meta analysis of something like this avoid, I don't | know what it would be called but like regression to the mean. A | "nudge" isn't a singular thing, it's a very diverse process | requiring a competent administrator. My gut would say when you | averaged all those out, you'd see no effect because your | experimenting, some work some don't work, some backfire. It | seems like you'd have to do a meta analysis on a specific | nudge, not on groups of nudges. | svnt wrote: | They aren't summing effects. An effect is not cancelled by an | inverse effect or as you put it, backfire. | | The methodology should (I haven't investigated theirs in | detail) not be susceptible to this, and I doubt a mean of | effects would make it through peer review for reasons | including the ones you've mentioned. | mikkergp wrote: | Where are they getting an effect size of .08 if not by | mathing a bunch of other effect sizes. | lazyant wrote: | What's exactly "nudging" here?. For example it has been shown | that for organ donation, if the default is affirmative (opt-in) | and you have to opt-out, then organ donors double | https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1091721 , I think | this is one of the "nudge" example in pop-science books. | tgv wrote: | > A nudge, according to Thaler and Sunstein is any form of | choice architecture that alters people's behaviour in a | predictable way without restricting options or significantly | changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, | the intervention must require minimal intervention and must be | cheap. | | Thaler and Sunstein wrote the book on nudges, quite literally. | So their definition counts, and it's the one from the article. | The opt-in/out decision you mention isn't a nudge in this | sense. You're not asked what you prefer, you have to be aware | that you can opt-in/out and then actively pursue that option. | svnt wrote: | A nudge is naive if not circularly defined then as it | presumes at least two permanently distinct classes of humans: | informed humans who can architect nudges and learn about them | and other humans who must respond in the same way every time | and cannot do this meta-learning. | ghaff wrote: | In the case of organ donation, Thaler has written that he | actually prefers mandated choice--i.e. there is no default | but you have to either opt in or opt out--in this case. [1] | But I'm not sure why a system where the government creates a | default of either opt-in or opt-out (which you can change) | wouldn't be a nudge. | | [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/business/economy/27vie | w.h... (The issue being that in countries that are opt-out, | doctors still often ask families for permission on the | grounds that the deceased never made an affirmative choice to | donate.) | Nasrudith wrote: | Wouldn't it not be a nudge because it outright changes the | unspoken costs? If the public is largely apathetic about | what happens to their bodies post death, if the situation | would leave them viable having to take an action vs inertia | is an added costs. This could make deciding "not worth it" | for low rewards, let alone preferring not to think of the | possibility of their own demise. | [deleted] | tgv wrote: | The system is that you're by default in some register. The | choice has already been made. Many people aren't even aware | of it, or only remotely. You have to undertake action to | change it. That's not a "choice architecture" in the nudge | sense. That would require that you are presented with both | options simultaneously, and are forced to choose. A nudge, | e.g. on a web form, would then be to have one option | already checked. | ghaff wrote: | >A nudge, e.g. on a web form, would then be to have one | option already checked. | | Yes. But an alternative is to present choices on a web | form without one being pre-selected but with a choice | mandatory. Which is essentially what I understand Thaler | to be arguing for. | | >The choice has already been made. | | I'd say that still is a default but one which requires | more effort to change than a pre-selected option on a | webform. And arguably sufficient effort that it may no | longer be reasonable to default to organ donation in that | manner. | lozenge wrote: | The full list and criteria is here- https://osf.io/fywae/ | endominus wrote: | I think that's more narrowly defined as "status quo bias" - | people tend to take the lowest energy path, so generally accept | default choices. The definition of nudging that I could | determine from the original book's Wikipedia page includes | that, as well as other forms of nudges. I wonder if separating | out these nudges by type would result in different results in | this metaanalysis. But that is also analogous to p-hacking, | isn't it? | adammarples wrote: | I think Newton covered that in his first law. Nobody is | actually being nudged, which implies a behavior change, at all. | akyu wrote: | No evidence for nudging =/= nudging doesn't exist. | | I'm fairly sure anyone who has done A/B testing at scale has | plenty of evidence that nudging works. Perhaps not up to the | standard of science, but there are literally people who | manipulate choice architecture for a living and I'm fairly | convinced a lot of that stuff actually works. | aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: | >I'm fairly sure anyone who has done A/B testing at scale has | plenty of evidence that nudging works | | Lol! A/B testing in practice is rife with P-hacking and various | other statistical fallacies. | [deleted] | dr_dshiv wrote: | Seriously, what about that kind of publication bias: A/B tests | don't get published. | | If you run a useful system where it would be meaningful and | interesting to know whether a social science theory actually | applied, you might run an A/B test to see if it works. If it | works, it is adopted--but it is almost never published. And | that is for two reasons: 1. no incentive to publish and 2. | major incentive not to publish. #2 is recent (post Facebook | experiment) and it is specifically because a large portion of | the educated public accepts invisible A/B testing but recoils | with moral indignation at the use of A/B testing results in | published science. Too bad: Facebook keeps testing social | science theories, but no longer publishes the results. | MereInterest wrote: | The standards of selecting a result of an A/B test are less | stringent than those of publication for the advancement of | knowledge. For publication, the goal is to determine whether | a model is accurate. For A/B testing, the goal is to select | the best design/intervention. The difference is that for | scientific testing "inconclusive" means that there isn't | enough evidence to consider it a solved problem and it should | have more research, while in A/B testing "inconclusive" means | that any effect is small so you should pick an option and | move on. | | As an example, suppose I flip a coin 1000 times and get heads | 525 times. The 95% confidence interval for the probability of | heads is [0.494, 0.556], so from a scientific standpoint I | cannot conclude that the coin is biased. If, however, I am | performing an A/B test, I would conclude that I'll bet on | heads, because it is at worst equivalent to tails. | dr_dshiv wrote: | I think you are missing the point. With academic | publication bias, sometimes an unbiased coin gets heads 600 | times by chance. Those studies get published. But, if you | ran the test again, you might only get 525. That study | won't get published. | | And, in opposition to your assumption: there is nothing to | prevent A/B tests being published with high academic | standards-- like a low p value and tons of n. In an | academic context, that's just fine-- it's a small but | significant effect. | | A/B tests are simply controlled experiments--which are the | gold standard of scientific evidence generation in | psychology. My point is that the main generators of this | evidence are only permitted to use this evidence to inform | commerce not public knowledge. That is a loss for science | and public policy, in my opinion. | themitigating wrote: | You don't have to prove something doesn't exist , you have to | prove it exists. | akyu wrote: | Absolutely. | omginternets wrote: | What exactly makes you convinced that it works? To be specific: | why wouldn't there be bias in the A/B testing results, too? | | There are literally people who give astrological analyses for a | living. | akyu wrote: | I cannot share the reason I am convinced it works. But I can | tell you I am convinced it works. | | I'm sure many people here are in similar situations. | mcswell wrote: | Great minds! I was writing more or less the same thing, you | beat me to publication by three minutes. | lIl-IIIl wrote: | We are talking about publication bias, where the decision | whether to publish something is biased by the outcome of the | experiment. | | I think this doesn't really apply to A/B testing, because | people are incentivized pay as much attention to negative | results as to positive ones. | zeroonetwothree wrote: | From what I've seen there is even more incentive to focus | on positive A/B tests. It's the way you get credit for your | work at a company. A negative test is counted as barely | anything. So your incentive is to run tons of tests, then | cherry pick only the positive ones and announce them | widely. Another strategy is to track multiple metrics for | each test and not adjust for that when computing p values. | But then at the end you only report the one metric that was | positive. | aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: | People are incentivized to pay attention to the result that | increases their mid-year bonus the most. | zeroonetwothree wrote: | A/B testing has a ton of issues as well that make it easy to | be fooled | | https://biggestfish.substack.com/p/data-as-placebo | akyu wrote: | Of course. | mcswell wrote: | "... evidence that nudging works. Perhaps not up to the | standard of science..." That's pretty close to saying it | doesn't work. The point of this meta-study was precisely to | show that the evidence claimed to support nudging was probably | attributable to random variation + unnatural selection, where | the unnatural selection was publication choice: either the | researchers who got negative (null) results chose not to bother | writing it up and submitting it, or papers that reported | negative were rejected by publishers. | | There are lots of people who do X for a living, but where X | doesn't work: palm readers, fortune tellers, horoscope writers, | and so on. I'm not even sure that funds managers _reliably_ | obtain results much above random. | akyu wrote: | >That's pretty close to saying it doesn't work. | | No it's really not. | | To say things a different way, I don't think this study will | change anything for people actually doing choice architecture | in applied settings. They have results that speak for | themselves. | mcswell wrote: | "I don't think this study will change anything for people | actually doing choice architecture in applied settings." | Probably true, but then evidence that horoscopes etc. don't | work, doesn't prevent people from drawing horoscopes, or | other people from relying on their horoscope to plan out | their day. | | "They have results that speak for themselves." Let me put | my point differently. Suppose that nudges don't have any | effect at all (null hypothesis). More concretely--and just | to take a random number--suppose that 50% of the time when | a nudge is used, the nudgees happen to behave in the | direction that the nudge was intended to move them, and 50% | of the time they don't move, or they move in the opposite | direction. And suppose there are a number of nudgers, maybe | 100. Then some nudgers will get better than random results, | while others will get no result, or negative results. The | former nudgers will have results that appear to speak for | themselves, even if the nudges actually have no effect | whatsoever. | | This is the same as asking if a fair coin is tossed ten | times, what is the probability that you'll get at least 7 | heads. The probability of such a number of heads in a | single run is ~17%. So 17% of those nudgers could be | getting apparently significant results, even if their | results are actually random. | pessimizer wrote: | > results that speak for themselves. | | This is exactly how a midwife explained to me why she uses | magic crystals. She told me that there's science, and | there's results, and that she's seen the crystals work. | rsanek wrote: | I mean, yeah, if she has solid RCT data on thousands to | millions of childbirths and has found a statistically | significant impact from using the magic crystals, I would | support their use. A/B as well as scientific research | uses the same basis. | | The issue is that in fact the midwife will not have such | data. The comparison being made is that A/B testing, if | run competently, is pretty close to scientific research, | _in particular_ for research related to nudging. | asdff wrote: | I wonder how many engineers crack open a statistics book | to find the correct test versus just plotting box plots | and saying "see looks pretty different" | pessimizer wrote: | But if run rigorously, A/B testing is identical to | scientific research, and the scientific research fails to | show an effect. | DangitBobby wrote: | They would be the people who published, in this scenario. | Beldin wrote: | I think gp and you probably see eye to eye, but gp has a | problem with your phrasing. If the effect does not live up | to scientific rigour, that (more or less) implies that the | effect is roughly indistinguishable from randomness. | | If folks have results that speak for themselves, then the | effect more than likely is scientifically rigorously | testable. It may already have been - by those very results. | mikkergp wrote: | I think what's not clear is what's in those papers and what | exactly they have to say about nudging and what definition | they're using. It defies credulity to think that changing | defaults in software doesn't change behavior if only because | most users aren't technically savvy enough to change their | settings. | | On the other hand the dream of nudge theory is something like | a study done in the UK that suggests that adding the line | "most of your fellow citizens pay their taxes" will increase | the likelihood that people pay taxes. This I'd be more likely | to believe the benefits are not clear, and more importantly | difficult to replicate across time and culture. | | It seems that trying to do a meta-analysis on all of nudge | theory (or large categories of it) would indeed show know | impact. It's not like you're testing one thing, you're | comparing well designed programs, with ones that aren't. | zeroonetwothree wrote: | They note that there is no evidence for nudging as being | generally effective. So any individual nudge could be effective | (except in finance in which they found that none are | effective). | turns0ut wrote: | I can't help but see social science as humans attempting to | modernize memory of imperialism and religious belief embedded by | prior experience. | | Think of how popular it became as a field in the last 50-100 | years as the populace became less religious. The US adult | population recently crossed a threshold where <50% believe in | higher power now. | | No science gives social scientists higher powers of forecasting | human future, yet we took the ideas and applied them with the | same conviction some believe in gods, in the same way; a network | of randos spreading their gossip, wrapping it in technical jargon | biased by past ignorance. | | Consider how much of this work was being leveraged against an | ignorant public with no opt out button, via print and TV. How is | that informed consent? | | Social media comes along, upends those forms of media, creates a | new meta awareness we lived in a society policed by high minded | but normal people. That awareness means we can opt out of being | influenced by intentional nudges, same as we opt out of believing | in intentional nudges to abide higher powers. | | Social science "worked" when the masses were unaware it was | happening to them. As the public has become more aware of how it | works, it's all Soylent green; just people. | verisimi wrote: | Whether 'nudging' works or not, the concept is unacceptable to | me. | | First, the term 'nudging' is a misnomer. Let's call it what it is | - manipulation. Manipulating the options or defaults to some | other set in order to achieve a better outcome for someone... | | Well, who is that someone? The government? | | Who says that their values align with mine? I wouldn't have | responded as the government did to the pandemic, but their nudge | units went into overdrive nudging people into vaccinations, etc. | Is preventing access to bank accounts for protesting government | actions (as in Canada) a 'nudge'? | | Can I challenge the promoted values? If the state apparatus has | its own values and agenda, how do I get to state mine - where is | the values/ethics discussion being had, and how do I get my say? | I find the promoted values Orwellian, communistic, overly | progressive - one for all, but not all for one... is that opinion | fair to hold? Or must I be nudged over the cliff? | | Aren't we really just talking about soft-sell authoritarianism | here? Weren't we just meant to vote for people, not have a | perpetual nanny state guiding us? | wawjgreen wrote: | There's a little-known theory (whose name eludes me) that states: | any outcome in behaviour is highly dependent on the immediate and | unpredictable interplay of various environment variables and | their real and perceived effect on the person. this alone cancels | the efficacy of any nudges (but some variables may be in the same | direction as the nudge--hence the original but misguided nudge | research: they were fooled by randomness). I have seen married | women who were loyal to their husbands (and who had no idea they | would fall for a guy who practiced "seduction" on them) become | bewildered and surprised by their own behaviour even though the | behavior went against their firmly-held opinions about themselves | (that is: I love my husband and I am loyal to him.). The | environmental variables used by the person (who is a marketer) | were too strong for their opinions to hold out against. As an | example, he would invite them to his studio, which he had | decorated (and clean) and made it so homely and snug and comfy | that the first lines of defense were broken before they had a | chance to realize what trap they were in. The marketer also tried | to brainwash me (but failed) because I knew the power of | variables and this knowledge alone saved me--even though he | seemed irresistibly charming in the capacity of a father figure I | never had. | asdff wrote: | Wait until you start reading about genotype by environment | interactions and realizing the implications that has on just | about everything in biology and society | darkerside wrote: | So many hot takes about a paper that says, | | > A newly proposed bias correction technique, robust Bayesian | metaanalysis (RoBMA) (6), avoids an all-or-none debate over | whether or not publication bias is "severe." | | Absence of evidence doesn't mean it's not true. It doesn't even | imply it. | mikkergp wrote: | If publication bias is the exclusion of publishing results that | doesn't support your hypothesis, how are they taking that into | account? | | If I'm interpreting this correctly(and I by no means am sure that | I am), I infer that they are saying in a fair publishing | environment you'd expect to see more results that show less | decisive results, therefor the current set of results is likely | biased. | | Couldn't this bias also happen in the other direction? It sounds | like they're saying the results are too good and don't match | other scientific patterns of publishing results. | mcswell wrote: | "Couldn't this bias also happen in the other direction?" The | general notion is that positive results ("we tried nudging and | succeeded in getting people to behave more in X way") are more | publishable than negative results ("we tried nudging, and | nothing much happened"). It is a common and well-attested | problem in many areas of science, but probably particularly in | behavioral sciences; I have not heard of cases where | publication of negative results is more likely than publication | of positive results, although there are obviously heated | debates over some results. | | Whether publication bias is the explanation in this example, I | don't pretend to know. | ghaff wrote: | There's also an implicit assumption with nudges/defaults that | you're nudging people towards a reasonable place for some | combination of policy and preference reasons. | | But imagine that a company would just as soon not pay out | more 401k matching than it has to, so it makes the default | zero. (Which of course is often the norm for different | reasons.) That's as valid a nudge as anything but we | shouldn't be surprised if a lot of people don't go with the | default. | | We probably also shouldn't be surprised if a lot of people | maybe wouldn't go with a maxed out default. | | Defaults wouldn't be nearly so powerful if they weren't | typically chosen to be fairly reasonable for the average | person in the target audience. | mikkergp wrote: | But I don't think the goal is "most people can be nudged" | so much as "a nudge is a cheap way to increase a behavior | by 5-10% which is probably quite significant in policy | circles. Low single digit percentage increase in people who | pay their taxes would be huge. | mikkergp wrote: | I guess the question would be are positive results missing | for another reason, like they are harder to test for, | therefor the data looks better than it should because in the | aggregate they are better, but yeah this is probably | unlikely. | notafraudster wrote: | The easiest to understand diagnostic used to measure | publication bias is the funnel plot. Suppose the true effect of | interest is theta = 0.2. Then the observed effects in studies | should be centered at 0.2; some will be higher, some will be | lower. Assuming no systematic error, the degree to which study | results vary around 0.2 should be proportional to the precision | of the study (think sampling error given a sampling design). A | hypothetical study of an infinitely large meta-population would | produce the effect estimate of exactly 0.2, infinitely | precisely. A series of very small studies will likely show | quite divergent results, just on the basis of precision. | | A funnel plot plots effect sizes on the x axis and precision on | the y axis. The most precise studies should be tightly grouped | around the meta-analytic average effect; the least precise | studies should be spread more widely. This forms a triangular, | funnel shape. If no publication bias exists, the spread of | studies below the magnitude of the average effect should be | comparable to the spread of studies above the magnitude of the | average effect. | | If there is publication bias, then the points that would form | the left (without loss of generality; right if negative effect | size) portion of the funnel will not be observable. | | There are issues with funnel plots and there are other | diagnostics but I hope this provides insight into one of the | tools used. Notably, as a diagnostic, funnel plots work whether | the true effect is positive, negative, or null; they assume | only that the underlying assumptions of meta-analysis are true | (that studies represent a sample of the same, true underlying | effect -- other diagnostics and corrections exist when this is | violated) | lmeyerov wrote: | Interesting -- the problem may be a misapplication of funnel | plots for metaanalysis. | | I'm not sure what theta is representing and only skimmed the | paper, but especially in social scenarios and across social | papers, seems unlikely to assume the same distributions and | parameters across tasks & populations. Sometimes comes down | to 'is there any effect??' and sometimes a precise notion of | effect size in a lucky/clever specific scenario. Likewise, | social science is one of the hardest fields to setup a good | experiment, and few publications accepts negative results, so | mostly only 'good' p-value ranges getting published seems | normal. The Wikipedia page on funnel plots shows, afaict, the | same criticism of the technique. | | Whether about the effect size or how it is reported, funnel | plots seem an inappropriate choice for debunking something as | general as 'nudges' across heterogeneous studies. Skimming | made the metaanalysis feel rather lazy (lack of cross | validation, interpretation, ...). Not my field, but I would | have had to do some digging before accepting this | metaanalysis in review, and by default, would be 'not ready'. | hkon wrote: | Sometimes the implementation of "nudges" is so obvious it has the | opposite of the desired effect. | arpinum wrote: | Not a great journal if you are trying to publish something with | potentially large import. Its reasonable to guess that something | is seriously wrong with the study to not get it in a good | journal. This publication does not move my opinion on the matter. | light_hue_1 wrote: | There's a lot of confusion here about what this article is | talking about. | | Nudges aren't just defaults. We've known for over a century that | people are influenced by defaults. Nudges also aren't anchoring, | where choices influence one another. Kahneman & Tversky won a | Nobel prize for that and other behavioral economics ideas a | decade before the idea of nudges. | | Nudges are a bigger idea that many small changes lead to huge | behavioral changes. Like providing a social reference point (see | the average electricity use of your neighbors), surfacing hidden | information (a red light to remind you to change your A/C | filter), change the financial effort involved in something | (deposit your drinking money into an account that you lose when | you drink again; health plans that pay to stay healthy), change | the physical effort of making bad choices (a motorcycle license | for people who don't want to wear helmets that is much harder to | get), change the consequences of options (pay a teenager $1/day | to not get pregnant), provide reminders (check if an email is | rude and have someone confirm they want to send it), public | commitments (say you are doing X makes you more likely to do X), | etc. | | There are various examples of each of these working to some | extent in specific circumstances. | | But we have a lot of other tools for changing people's behavior. | We have education campaigns. We have fines. We have taxes. We | have tax breaks. The idea behind nudges is that they're an easy | replacement for many of these other tools. | | But the meta-analysis shows that nudges aren't a general-purpose | tool that leads to significant changes in people's behavior. The | behavioral changes are small, the same as we get from a fine, a | tax, or an education campaign. | | Aside from specific circumstances, nudges don't work better (and | may be much worse) compared to our usual tools for getting people | to behave. | vishnugupta wrote: | I'm not a social scientist, so please help me understand this. | The way you have defined nudge it seems like a very broad | category. Some passive nudge (defaults) and some active (red | lights) and a whole lot others. | | If a category has such a broad number of phenomenon then | shouldn't we be analysing individual phenomenon instead of the | category as a whole? For example; defaults may work and red- | light thing may not work. Why place them both under the same | bucket at all? Why not study them in isolation? | light_hue_1 wrote: | > For example; defaults may work and red-light thing may not | work. Why place them both under the same bucket at all? Why | not study them in isolation? | | And that's exactly how these meta analyses work! If you look | in figure 1, they break down nudges both by the kind of | intervention and by the domain. Maybe some types of nudges | are much better than others. And maybe nudges work much | better for say food vs finance. | | Yes. Defaults have an effect, most other nudge types don't. | But the domain doesn't matter much it seems. | rjmunro wrote: | Reading this, I don't get how you can take all "nudging" and | declare "No evidence". Surely "nudging" encompasses a whole range | of different actual actions. Some nudges work, some don't. You | can't just average across all of them. | | I'm probably totally misunderstanding, but it sounds similar to | saying "there is no evidence for medicine" because you've | averaged all the papers describing medical interventions that | work and those that don't. | | I thought the point of "nudges" is that they are so cheap to | implement you can easily afford to try many. Most won't work, | some will. | mcswell wrote: | There are a number of posts that address this issue, as well as | issues raised by responses to this post. I posted somewhere "no | true Scotsman"--I'm not claiming my post was enlightening in | itself, but the post I was responded to (and the entire thread) | was, IMO, enlightening. | | As for averaging, yes, you can: if a nudge is ineffective, then | its result will be random, and a bunch of ineffective nudges | will average zero effectiveness. The effective nudges will then | push the overall average above zero. We don't see that. (The | same would be true for medical interventions, unless some cause | harm.) | | As for being able to try lots of them: in some circumstances, | maybe. But when a government is trying to nudge people towards | some desired behavior (vaccination, say, to take a random | example), they don't try sending out a bunch to different | groups of people, then polling each of those groups to see | which groups--and therefore which nudges--moved. And it's not | always practical, anyway (and the vaccination example is a case | where it's almost certainly not practical). | | See also threads that mention A/B testing. | 13415 wrote: | I have the same concern. Nudging is an umbrella term for a vast | number of very different activities. For example, nudging is a | term used for motivating more carefully designed road markings. | I find it hard to believe that some of these newer designs | don't "work" better than the old ones, some of them are quite | ingenious. At the same time "nudging" is also used for all | sorts of public policy framing issues that are more | questionable and have probably harder to measure effects. As | you say, each "nudge" needs to be evaluated individually. | picardo wrote: | Agree with you. Nudging is a type of user experience design. | UX designers nudge with every design decision they make, and | the effectiveness of those decisions is quantifiable. So it's | hard to argue that all nudges are ineffective, just like one | can't argue that all UX design is ineffective. | topaz0 wrote: | This is my interpretation as well. Also weird to think about | publication bias in this way: "these studies about the | effectiveness of snake oil as a drug weren't published, so we | must be overestimating how effective drugs are". | | The authors do mention that there is likely to be heterogeneity | in (real) effect sizes, but somehow still go with this | title/abstract. | | Maybe there is a valid conclusion that _some_ of the many nudge | studies are probably claiming effects that don 't exist. That | could be interesting in itself. But rejecting the whole field | based on this kind of argument seems wrong. | civilized wrote: | I agree with other commenters that it's unlikely nudges never | have an impact. | | We should also be wary of high-profile debunkings, now that | they're increasingly in fashion due to the replication crisis and | the general dour mood. It's easy to p-hack a result into | significance, but you can just as easily hack results into | insignificance. | | These days, both findings and debunkings need a skeptical eye. | themitigating wrote: | Isn't that always the case? | pessimizer wrote: | I think some people careen from fully trusting one thing to | fully trusting the opposite thing. If you're not one of those | people, you'll never understand dismissing things on the | basis of "you should be critical of this, because not | everything that people say is true." | | I do feel like that, even though being critical is something | we should always do, that in cases where | | 1) the only reason you started paying attention to something | was an intuitive hunch that it could matter, and | | 2) the only reason you started treating that hunch as | established science is because you did experiments that had | significant results, then | | 3) later you found that significance could be entirely | accounted for by the file-drawer effect, | | you need to adjust your expectation that there actually is an | effect to lower than your expectation was at step 1). It | isn't that the theory hasn't been tested (although you can | argue it hasn't been tested for ingeniously enough yet), it's | that it _has been tested and no effect has been shown._ | | If you allow the existence of interest in a theory | (represented in amount of ink spilled and number of | experiments done) to raise your expectation that the theory | is true, despite experimental indications to the contrary, | you're not really doing science, you're just throwing good | money after bad, probably motivated by a desire to protect | the researchers and institutions that are heavily committed | to the truth of the theory and/or the desire to protect other | theories that depend on the one that hasn't shown results. | civilized wrote: | There's a lot of junk behavioral science out there, but | things like "people often go with a default or recommended | option so they can move on with their day" seem so obvious | to me that I become suspicious of this debunking for | debunking too much. | pessimizer wrote: | That's just refusing to be convinced by evidence, though. | It's good to have hunches, but it's good to let them go | after you've done the experiments. Come up with a new | hunch and a new experiment that shows why the expected | effects weren't seen, and you're right back in there. | civilized wrote: | "Refusing to be convinced by evidence" is a simplistic | false dichotomy. The evidence is interesting but I have | several reasons not to immediately take it as definitive. | | Are you really certain that a big debunking in PNAS, | surfing a wave of other celebrated debunkings, should be | taken as definitive, when a good deal of the research | being debunked was published to similar fanfare in PNAS | back when a different kind of research was fashionable? | | I take neither the original research nor the debunking as | particularly credible. Without technical expertise, I'm | left to educated guess. It's just my guess. | pessimizer wrote: | > I have several reasons not to immediately take it as | definitive. | | The one that you expressed is that it "seems so obvious | to you that you become suspicious." I'm just taking you | at your word. | civilized wrote: | The idea that we should _always_ be convinced by evidence | regardless of context is a vast overgeneralization, | impossible ( "the evidence" overall rarely points only | one way, even if the latest chunk of new evidence does), | and in contradiction with Bayesian epistemology. | pessimizer wrote: | My problem isn't that I think people should be credulous | of everything, it's that I don't think "it's just | obvious" is a proper counter to experiments that show | nothing. If the effect is so obvious, it should be | obvious how to design an experiment that would show it. | | I don't even know what you're defending here other than | believing your first impulse above any subsequent | evidence. Nobody is preventing anyone from proving an | effect, in fact they poured money into the attempt. | JusticeJuice wrote: | I'm a UI designer, and my experience of implementing 'nudges' | is that sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. | | The reality is that the way people make decisions is stupidly | complex, because people have stupidly complex lives. Some tweak | will work great for one project, and do nothing on the next | one. It's hard to even say if it was the nudge that worked the | first time. | | I really view nudge theory as one of many ideas of things you | can try, a tool in a toolkit. But the only tool I really feel | confident works is the design-test-iterate loop. | solarkraft wrote: | I'd love to read more about this. Do you have examples? | JusticeJuice wrote: | I was working on a fintech project (gonna be vague as it's | not yet released). | | The legal team told us we couldn't use default choices | anywhere, as it could count as giving financial advice. | Fair enough. So we designed the onboarding, and there was | this choice the user had to make before we could create | their account. | | During testing, we found people were getting really stuck | on this choice, to the point of giving up. The choice | actually had quite low impact, but it was really technical | - a lot of people just didn't understand it. Which makes | sense our users weren't financial experts, which was our | target user. This choice was a new concept for the market, | so we couldn't relate it to other products they might know. | The options inside also had quite a lot of detail when you | started digging into them, detail we had to provide if | somebody went looking for it. Our testers would hit this | choice, get stuck, feel the urge to research this decision, | get overwhelmed, give up. | | We spent so long trying to reframe this choice, explaining | it better in a nice succinct way, we even tried to get this | feature removed entirely - but nothing stuck. | | Eventually after lots of discussion with legal we were | allowed to have a 'base' choice, which the user could | optionally change. We tested the new design, and it made a | significant difference in conversion rates. | | Huzzar for nudge theory! Right? Well, maybe. I think it's a | bit more complicated. | | - The new design was faster. There was less screens with | simpler choices. It went from a 'pick one of 5' to a 'heres | the default, would you like to change it?'. Was it just the | speed that made a difference? | | - The user was not a financial expert, and the company | behind the product was. In some sense was the user just | thinking 'these guys probably know more than me I'll leave | it at that'. Imagine trying to implement this exact change | on something the user is an expert in - say like your meal | choice in an airplane. I imagine most people would think | "How rude choosing for me! I'm an expert in what I feel | like eating I want to see all the options". | | - It had less of a cognitive load. Like the whole | onboarding flow was already really complicated, just | reducing the overall mental strain to make an account may | have just improved the whole experience. E.g. if we had | removed decisions earlier in the flow, would this one still | have been as big of an issue? We never had time to test it, | so I can't say for sure. | | - Lack of confusion == confidence. For the users who didn't | look at the options and took the default, did they just | feel more in control and confident because they weren't | exposed with unfamiliar terms and choices? They never | experienced the urge to research. | | Like at the surface level this new design worked great, so | job done. But it's hard to say _definitively_ it was | because of nudge theory. I don 't think you can really | blindly say "oh yeah defaults == always good" and slap them | on every problem - which is why the design-test-iterate | loop is so important. | civilized wrote: | Very interesting. One question: | | > The new design was faster. There was less screens with | simpler choices. It went from a 'pick one of 5' to a | 'heres the default, would you like to change it?'. Was it | just the speed that made a difference? | | If you're just going from "pick one of 5" to "pick one of | 5 but there's a default", I wouldn't expect one or the | other to be "faster". Was the new design more different | than that? | | As for the rest, I think the beneficial features of the | design are predicted by nudge theory. "Providing a | credible default reduces cognitive load and confusion on | the path to a decision, as the user can just trust the | defaults have been set up reasonably" has always been the | theory for why nudges work. | nabla9 wrote: | There is no evidence of impact. | | That's different from the existence of the phenomenon. | | Same thing happened to Kahneman, Daniel (2011) and his book of | Thinking, Fast and Slow. He acknowledges that several pieces of | evidence he presents in the book has disappeared and can't be | replicated. | | He still thinks he is right, he just admits that he does not | have strong evidence anymore. | | What is left is a theory with less and less evidence supporting | it. | civilized wrote: | I just think it's implausible that there's been no good | research showing solid evidence of choice architecture | mattering. Could be, I'm not an expert, but I'd like to see | where things stand after a couple more years of research and | debate. | nabla9 wrote: | >I just think it's implausible that there's b | | The job of scientist is to find and present that evidence. | | If your assumption is correct, and Kahneman failed to find | good evidence that was there, that makes him a incompetent | scientist. I don't think he is. | civilized wrote: | I respect Kahneman too but rigorous behavioral science | can be _extremely_ demanding. Read the rat story here: | http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html | | Feynman taught us to be scornful of cargo cult science, | but fewer have internalized how difficult real science | can be in comparison. | | If this is the case, though, maybe I shouldn't be | surprised that maybe no quality research has been done. | BeetleB wrote: | > He acknowledges that several pieces of evidence he presents | in the book has disappeared and can't be replicated. | | He mostly says that about just one chapter. A significant | portion of the book is fallacies of basic statistics and | logic. | t_mann wrote: | The paper actually explicitly addresses this: | | > However, all intervention categories and domains apart from | "finance" show evidence for heterogeneity, which implies that | some nudges might be effective, even when there is evidence | against the mean effect. | karpierz wrote: | The issue with this kind of meta analysis is that, as the author, | you get to decide what the groupings are. No two studies will be | identical, so you can invent bucketing strategies until you find | that some buckets have the results you want and focus on those. | | In addition, they don't seem to have shown that the technique | they're applying actually works for modelling the distributions | that they're analyzing. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-24 23:00 UTC)