Maximilian Maier
Psychologist and methodologist. First author of the 2022 reanalysis that found no evidence for an overall nudge effect once publication bias is modelled directly.
Who they are
Maier works on meta-analytic methods and on what survives when the probability of a study being published is treated as part of the model rather than as an afterthought. With Frantisek Bartos, T. D. Stanley, David Shanks, Adam Harris and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, he applied that approach to the choice architecture database.
The result is more specific than the headline suggests, and the specificity is the useful part.
Key papers
Maier, M., Bartos, F., Stanley, T. D., Shanks, D. R., Harris, A. J. L., & Wagenmakers, E.-J. (2022). No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias. PNAS, 119(31), e2200300119.
Key ideas
There is no evidence for an overall effect of nudging across the corrected database.
There is evidence against an effect for interventions that supply information and for those that assist people in following through. For interventions that restructure the choice, the family that contains defaults, the evidence came out undecided rather than negative.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.1073/pnas.2200300119