Daniel Goldstein
Behavioural scientist. Co-author of the 2003 organ donation policy forum, and later a co-author of one of the 2022 letters arguing the nudge literature has been oversold.
Who they are
Goldstein works on decision making and on how people judge under uncertainty. He co-wrote the paper that carried defaults into public life, and nineteen years later co-wrote a letter in the same journal arguing there is no reason to expect large and consistent effects from nudge interventions.
That pairing is worth noticing. It is what a field correcting itself looks like from the inside.
Key papers
Johnson, E. J., & Goldstein, D. (2003). Do defaults save lives? Science.
Szaszi, B., Higney, A., Charlton, A., Gelman, A., Ziano, I., Aczel, B., Goldstein, D. G., Yeager, D. S., & Tipton, E. (2022). No reason to expect large and consistent effects of nudge interventions. PNAS.
Key ideas
Consent defaults are associated with large differences in registered donor numbers between countries.
The wider family of small interventions does not support the confident general claim made for it, once the corrections are applied and the heterogeneity between studies is taken seriously.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.1126/science.1091721
- doi:10.1073/pnas.2200732119