The effectiveness of nudging: A meta-analysis of choice architecture interventions across behavioral domains
Mertens, Herberz, Hahnel and Brosch meta-analysed the choice architecture literature across many behavioural domains and reported that these interventions are effective and widely applicable. Their more useful finding is comparative. Interventions that target the organisation and structure of the choice itself consistently outperform interventions that describe the alternatives differently or reinforce a person's existing intentions, and that ordering holds across domains. Food choices were the most responsive category by a wide margin. The effects were largely independent of where the study was run and which population it targeted. The paper also reports, in its own results, a moderate publication bias towards positive findings in the literature it analyses. That disclosure is the sentence two teams took seriously in July 2022, and the database assembled here is what made their reanalyses possible, so the correction that followed rests on this work rather than replacing it.
Mertens, Herberz, Hahnel and Brosch meta-analysed the choice architecture literature across many behavioural domains and reported that these interventions are effective and widely applicable. Their more useful finding is comparative. Interventions that target the organisation and structure of the choice itself consistently outperform interventions that describe the alternatives differently or reinforce a person's existing intentions, and that ordering holds across domains. Food choices were the most responsive category by a wide margin. The effects were largely independent of where the study was run and which population it targeted. The paper also reports, in its own results, a moderate publication bias towards positive findings in the literature it analyses. That disclosure is the sentence two teams took seriously in July 2022, and the database assembled here is what made their reanalyses possible, so the correction that followed rests on this work rather than replacing it.
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with decision-structure interventions outperforming decision-information and decision-assistance, and reports moderate publication bias in the same paper. doi:10.1073/pnas.2107346118
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- Why You Never Change the Setting, Why We Act
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The source
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107346118
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2107346118