How common language on nudging can better steer behaviour

Academics have long focused on behavioural interventions commonly known as nudges, perhaps best visualised as a gentle push in the back to steer a person or organisation in a particular direction beneficial to society. This might include more sustainable dining habits, preventative health measures such as regular medical checkups, or taking public transport to reduce carbon emissions from private cars.

But consider the language of such nudging. Are the words, phrases and expressions used in nudging commonly understood across fields ranging from psychology to economics to political science? Not sufficiently, is the short answer.

“A lack of common terminology and shared understanding of behavioural interventions across academic disciplines and professional groups limits the multidisciplinary application of such interventions and our collective ability to share and compare their effects,” says research from the El-Erian Institute of Behavioural Economics and Policy at Cambridge Judge Business School.

So the El-Erian researchers developed a comprehensive classification system for nudges and related behavioural interventions that will help practitioners and academics across disciplines to better share and compare the results of such nudges in ways that best steer the desired behavioural changes. The classification system is known as META BI (Mapping of Environment, Target group and Agent for Behavioural Interventions).

Defining a nudge: altering behaviour in an easy and predictable way

While there is no consensus on what exactly comprises a nudge, the Cambridge Judge researchers follow a definition laid down by previous research in 2008 that defines a nudge as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid.” In other words, a nudge is relatively quick and simple to implement, in contrast to other interventions such as education and social marketing that are often far more extensive and time consuming.

Yet simple as a nudge may be, previous efforts to classify nudges have lacked an evident scope and clear classification criteria – and that’s what the El-Erian Institute researchers sought to address in the META BI system.

“The diverse nature and various disciplines (such as psychology, economics, political science) and sectors (such as industry, politics) involved in nudge research and application can make communicating about nudges complex and hinder shared understandings,” says the research. “Previous nudge classifications tended to focus on one or a small number of characteristics typically associated with specific disciplines, for instance, underlying cognitive mechanisms (psychology) or welfare effects (economics). However, such aspects are related and involve complex trade-offs necessitating a detailed and rich understanding of nudges and application contexts.

“To complicate things further, different communities use different terminologies to describe the same interventions, demonstrating a lack of common understanding. For example, an influential psychological distinction relies on individuals’ perceptions of nudges as pro-self or pro-social, whereas the economics literature employs a similar but more objective distinction between interventions that target consequences for oneself.”