[a_simm]

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]

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"?

Further, isn't this using the same data from the original meta analysis that did find "of small to medium size" effect[0]?

Why would this, alone, undo decades of research and clear, bright-line conclusions such as the ones cited in my sibling comments? In other words, why is this letter the final word on the topic of "nudge", to you, and not the original meta-analysis? Sounds like you think everyone should pack it up and go home, all because of one letter using an alternative set of definitions and analysis.

Just seems like an overreaction on your part, especially given how vocal and... you-sounding (for lack of a better term) the "anti-nudge" crowd often is.

To take a wider view, a comment like yours is a more malicious form of nerd-sniping[1], 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://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2107346118#sec-3

[1] https://xkcd.com/356/

[sacrosancty]

I think social scientists have lost the right to the benefit of the doubt. They don't preregister their trials. They don't publish their negative results. They're notoriously bad at statistics, notoriously let their political beliefs distort their conclusions, notoriously scatter their work over thousands of arbitrary, hard-to-compare small-sample-size studies instead of concentrating their resources. I don't think it matters if this criticism is right or not. The fact that it's even possible to make such a criticism is already a condemnation of the scientific incompetence of social scientists.

[unityByFreedom]

> They don't preregister their trials.

First of all, preregistration is not a requirement for the scientific method, which has functioned well for centuries. That is a recent trend in response to the overflowing amount of haphazardly published science.

Second, it is up to the individual scientist to decide to preregister or not. Some social scientists may preregister.

Third, small sample size may be a fair critique, however that overlooks how difficult it is to collect such data.

You've made a lot of generalizations here that amount to, "social scientists aren't as rigorous as other areas of science, therefore we should only believe studies that disagree with their results". I don't think throwing the baby out with the bath water is helpful. You can take results of studies with small sample sizes with a grain of salt, watch for replication, etc. Lambasting the field as a whole doesn't make sense to me.

Finally, readers should note that this isn't a new argument. People have been making this claim about social science for 120 years, if not longer, but at least since Freud and contemporaries began publishing.

[rayiner]

> You've made a lot of generalizations here that amount to, "social scientists aren't as rigorous as other areas of science, therefore we should only believe studies that disagree with their results".

I think it’s more “ignore them completely.” It brings “science” into disrepute to let social science associate with the other sciences.

> I don't think throwing the baby out with the bath water is helpful.

There is no baby!

> People have been making this claim about social science for 120 years, if not longer, but at least since Freud and contemporaries began publishing.

Doesn’t that prove the point? It wasn’t science then and isn’t science today.

[unityByFreedom]

> It brings “science” into disrepute to let social science associate with the other sciences.

So you just want it renamed to "social studies" or what? What is your proposal, that nobody research this topic, or that they be separated in journals etc? I doubt that will have much impact on whether it makes the news. If you want that to change, you may need to get yourself onto the board of a journal you care about.

> There is no baby!

That's reductive. Just because you don't see the baby doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

> Doesn’t that prove the point? It wasn’t science then and isn’t science today.

No, it just proves it's an old disagreement, like nature vs nurture.

There is plenty of work in social science that contributes to humanity. It will always have smaller sample sizes due to the nature of collecting the data. The work can be considered useful nonetheless.

[Schroedingersat]

> So you just want it renamed to "social studies" or what? What is your proposal, that nobody research this topic, or that they be separated in journals etc? I doubt that will have much impact on whether it makes the news.

Or maybe people just want to shine light on the fact that social science is harder than other science for a bunch of different reasons, bring social scientists' attention towards the tools that help mitigate this, and bring the journals that seek profit over reliable results into disrepute?

Most of the papers published in current social science journals are not science, and this has been a problem for those 120 years precisely because the techniques used in chemistry or physics are inadequate for the problem domain, so applying them blindly does not produce scientific outcomes.

[rayiner]

> So you just want it renamed to "social studies" or what? What is your proposal, that nobody research this topic, or that they be separated in journals etc

Yes. And that the rest of us stop treating it as science, citing it as science, and relying on it as science.

For example, there is a major trend in the law of treating social sciences as having truth value the way real sciences do. That’s the kind of thing we need to stop doing.

[istjohn]

It's not useful. In fact, it's actively harmful. The constant churn of findings and retractions undermines the public's belief in science. When people stop believing in science, you get things like flat earthers, global warming deniers, and vaccine skeptics.

[sbierwagen]

>First of all, preregistration is not a requirement for the scientific method, which has functioned well for centuries.

As has been said before, the problem is that the scientific method is right eventually. It can and often does get stuck for decades at a time, if someone with, shall we say, durable beliefs gets tenure, amasses political power and shoves their rivals out of a field. The amyloid hypothesis is just the most recent example.

Modern metascience practices (preregistration, blinding, banning "garden of forking paths" subgroup analysis, demanding high p factors and larger n) don't replace the scientific method, they're supposed to speed it up! But, by definition, these are all political issues, so they attract political arguments.

[unityByFreedom]

> It can and often does get stuck for decades at a time,

I think this is just more data. If we're all wrong for a longer time, then the impact will be more clear.

I agree that modern additions like preregistration are helpful. I only wanted to remark that it is not a prerequisite for science.

> by definition, these are all political issues, so they attract political arguments.

People are good at gaming systems. We are naturals at recognizing patterns and will adjust our behavior to meet our goals. In that sense, social science may be targeting a moving object, almost like the difference between observing and not observing the atoms in a double slit test.

As hard as it may be in social science, the process of hypothesizing, observing and forming conclusions is still science. For some, it appears that is not science because a definite conclusion never arrives.

Which viewpoint is correct? I think it's up to you to decide. And, when you don't grant people that choice, you get an anti-science response, because people naturally reject being told what to think. Science, for me, is about asking questions, not necessarily arriving at a definitive result.

[planck01]

> however that overlooks how difficult it is to collect such data.

It is very difficult in physics as well. Do you know how hard it is and how much effort is involved in building the LHC? Or Ligo? Or the JWST? Or ITER? They cost billions of dollars, thousands of scientists and decades to plan and make before you even get science data. Science is hard! You need to put the work and effort in, because otherwise you can't say anything about the nature of things.

[TameAntelope]

> I don't think it matters if this criticism is right or not.

Okay, you and I care about very different things.

[harry8]

>> I don't think it matters if this criticism is right or not.

> Okay, you and I care about very different things.

Clearly it is being suggested that it doesn't matter with respect to the social studies departments being in dire need of drastic reform. If you don't care about that either direction why are you commenting on this thread? You do actually care one way and you're "point scoring" to further the argument? Something else? I'm misreading something that I think I'm reading clearly?

[TameAntelope]

Hm? I just think it matters if the letter (the original submission) is correct or not.

[harry8]

So are social studies departments and funding in dire need of reform in your opinion? How does the "correctness" in your view of the original submission affect that need or non-need?

[pizzathyme]

I agree, I have worked at 5 separate tech companies and have conducted hundreds of statistically significant experiments, changing what people select by default. These methods have been effective at helping hundreds of millions of people improve choices. It’s common practice, think: pricing on Amazon, default tips on Uber, default purchase price in a video game, etc.

I don’t see how this would make me reinterpret all those successful results. Maybe I don’t understand what this is saying.

[efitz]

How much of this is “nudging” vs. “clearly explaining trade-offs”?

I’ve not done any rigorous research, but I’ve participated in projects that resulted in dramatic shifts towards customers choosing what the dev team thought was the “best” outcome, just by altering wording, or making “dangerous” choices harder (such as by requiring more clicks to enable).

[ad8e]

One interpretation is that it is very hard to extract value from the nudge literature. When reading research articles, one must estimate and adjust for biases. This adjustment shifts the p-values by unclear amounts. So a positive result may just be a fluke.

As for your own AB tests, you have seen the processes that go into them and do not need to adjust for unknown biases. So when they demonstrate a nudge effect, you can believe it.

[salawat]

All you've proven is that controlling the default is a viable means of making a decision for someone.

I assure you, Opt-outs are much less likely to happen when combined with not explaining there is a choice to be made in the first place.

[xyzzy123]

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.

[mikkergp]

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.

[xyzzy123]

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.

[inglor_cz]

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...

[iudqnolq]

I've heard people argue that that effect isn't a nudge, it's deceit.

That is, all you're doing is tricking people who didn't read carefully. People don't know they've opted in and would opt out if you called and told them that they checked the box.

I find it generally plausible that defaults don't matter much for what people consider very important decisions. I have minimal experience in this area, though.

[manwe150]

There is also some research suggesting that defaults in organ donation (so called presumed consent) may decrease rates of actual donations in those countries. I can't find the original podcast where I heard about it (I assume related to either Planet Money or Freakonomics), but found this source:

https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-ethics/2017/09/25/organ-donati...

[jjgreen]

Without consent, it's not a donation. "Harvesting" would be an appropriate name.

[salawat]

Consider that 401k's are an onramp through which one delegates one's capital to be allocated by someone else, and it should be obvious the objective.

Capital wants to have the spigot left on. If people don't feed the beast voluntarily, Capital will make that the default.

[Gustomaximus]

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]

Or Google is using the search bar as a pretense for paying Apple for something else.

[greggsy]

Suggesting that there is a corporate or government conspiracy without actually saying what it might actually be is the worst type of conspiracy.

[pessimizer]

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.

[analog31]

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.

[SilasX]

> 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.

[IMSAI8080]

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?

[elevaet]

Another similar example is jurisdictions that switched to assuming an individual consents to organs donation when they die, rather than having an opt-in system, see much higher rates of organ donation.

https://sparq.stanford.edu/solutions/opt-out-policies-increa...

[rad88]

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.

[concordDance]

The default influenced me and pretty much everyone in my company Ive talked to (namely, almost everyone stuck to it). So yes, it defies credulity.

[rad88]

I believe you. If you know it influenced you though, that means you didn't ignore it or not even realize you could change it, which is the idea I was replying to.

Again, it would be surprising if it didn't matter at all, but not unimaginable. What you're saying is that almost everybody in your company would have contributed a lesser amount if not for the default. It means you can all afford to give up $20k or whatever in income this year. There are other factors.

There is no truth to the matter of "whether defaults change behavior". This thread started about 401ks and then was taken into color preferences on the web. If someone has a gun to their head is asked if they want to die, I'm sure we'll agree that whatever the default is doesn't matter. Whether defaults do anything depends on what we're talking about. Nudges might work in web ux but not economics, why is that so incredulous?

[concordDance]

But they DO work in economics. Otherwise why would almost everyone contribute the default rather than a lower or higher amount?

Defaults are very strong when there is a lot of uncertainty about the payoffs of different answers.

[HardlyCurious]

I'm not sure it is useful to lump nudging on decisions users don't want to or don't know how to make in with nudging on decisions users either want to or have to make.

It's a no brainer that defaults will alter outcomes for users who aren't willing or capable of making a selection for the choice in question.

[jolux]

You have to have a certain amount of karma to change the banner color.

[adamisom]

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.

[JusticeJuice]

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]

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.

[kristianc]

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]

No true Scotsman.

[harry8]

Also the other way will come up in these kinds of "arguments" without doubt.

"How can these horrible critics say nudges don't work? Have they never been nudged with a loaded revolver? Can they not imagine that working?"

Leaving those of us who don't follow the controversy closely in the field and are interested in what has actually been found out and understood about the world with some degree of confidence across many fields of study, leaves us scratching our heads unable to see through the viewing window for all the mud getting flung.

[_8j50]

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]

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

[jimmydorry]

To add to the above, here's a graph of inflation adjusted S&P 500 [1].

[1] https://www.multpl.com/inflation-adjusted-s-p-500

[LegitShady]

I max out contribution because my employer matches - instant 100% return. If I didn't have that I'm not sure I'd do it.

[curiousllama]

> 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.

[a_simm]

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.

[curiousllama]

> statistically and therefore substantively insignificant

This is not what statistical significance implies. This misunderstanding, and its inverse, leads to the very errors for which you criticize the "nudge" papers.

More to the broader point, "set defaults intelligently" in fact implies the ability to "shape peoples' behavior at the margins." Otherwise, why bother thinking about them?

That's why what is actually at issue with "nudges" is effect size & context: how much of a difference can we have, and where?

And to that question, this paper provides little insight. It aggregates too much & ignores real-world policy evidence.

Now, it's still a good paper - people have gone WAY overboard with nudges in silly places - it just needs to be understood as "let's reign in expectations" and not "this field is bunk"

[Retric]

> Taking that a step further …

That step is in no way supported by the evidence provided.

[HardlyCurious]

I think the issue here is using science / evidence to push for policy changes when there isn't actually sound science or evidence. That can be done with sound policies that work just as well as it can be done with bad policies. But we should always be concerned when unsound science gets used. It can be used to shut down valid policy debates. And eventually, on a long enough time line, it will get abused by bad actors.

[runarberg]

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.

[dx034]

Not very scientific, but isn't it just laziness? Most people (including me) are too lazy to think about all the choices they could make, so they just stay with the default choice most of the time. Not because they actually prefer it, mainly because they never even read it.

[runarberg]

Indeed. Your alternative theory doesn’t require an extra construct, and instead uses a pretty established cognitive behavior (the tendency of inaction) to explain the same phenomenon. I would say your explanation has the advantage of Occam’s razor, whereas Nudge Theory doesn’t.

[turns0ut]

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.

[glitchc]

Changing the defaults is not the same as nudging. There is a logical error in your thinking here.

[pm_me_your_quan]

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)"

[runarberg]

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”.

[mikkergp]

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]

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]

Where are they getting an effect size of .08 if not by mathing a bunch of other effect sizes.

[JusticeJuice]

> 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]

"Behavioural science is a young field." As was chemistry up until, say, Robert Boyle.

[xhkkffbf]

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.

[mikkergp]

> 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?

[raxxorraxor]

I think the worst offense of the social sciences recently is their quest to correct bias and with that the creation of idiots that believes themselves to be able to do that.

Because now you have said idiots running around screaming how terrible that bias is completely neglecting the fact that everyone is subjected to it.

[t_mann]

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.

[salawat]

Manipulation and deceit works? And the Government is all in on it? Imagine that.

[jrochkind1]

> 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.

I would be shocked if that wasn't true though. Is there any evidence it's not true in that specific case, that pre-selecting the max options causes more individuals to opt for that? Have individuals opting for that indeed gone up since this was done?

[kingkawn]

Does academic social science research have credibility to damage?

[pid_0]

No offense, but the research in social sciences has very little credibility. From the reproduction crisis to the blatant inability to research things that go against what the professors want, it’s just untrustworthy. Academia needs to fix itself.

[b112]

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?

[fatherzine]

"credibility of social science"

[anigbrowl]

'Social sciences as Sorcery' indeed.

[rmatt2000]

> ... the credibility of social science in general is damaged.

Umm, I have some news for you.