Abstract
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge advances a theory of how designers can improve decision-making in various situations where people have to make choices. We claim that the moral acceptability of nudges hinges in part on whether they can provide an account of the competence required to offer nudges, an account that would serve to warrant our general trust in choice architects. What needs to be considered, on a methodological level, is whether they have clarified the competence required for choice architects to prompt subtly our behaviour toward making choices that are in our best interest from our own perspectives. We argue that, among other features, an account of the competence required to offer nudges would have to clarify why it is reasonable to expect that choice architects can understand the constraints imposed by semantic variance. Semantic variance refers to the diverse perceptions of meaning, tied to differences in identity and context, that influence how users interpret nudges. We conclude by suggesting that choice architects can grasp semantic variance if Thaler and Sunstein’s approach to design is compatible with insights about meaning expressed in science and technology studies and the philosophy of technology.
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Notes
The authors are listed alphabetically and equally contributed to this article.
Our treatment of trust is limited to how trust relates to competence. Based on this treatment, we do not consider whether trust exists in certain technological interfaces (Taddeo 2009), nor do we address the philosophical debates on what trust is in social relations (Wright 2009; Baier 1986; Holton 1994; Jones 1996; Hinchman 2005a, b; Hieronymi 2008).
Readers familiar with Don Ihde's phenomenological philosophy will note that semantic variance bears conceptual affinity with multi-stability (Ihde 1977; Selinger 2006; Ihde 2007). We do not use the latter term because it is broader in scope than the former. We selected a more delimited concept for the simple reason that the broad scope of multi-stability has prompted skeptical debate that should not be applicable here (Cerbone 2009).
The following is an excerpt from the transcript of Thaler’s interview on the Tavis Smiley’s PBS show: “Tavis: The research indicates that this varies from men to women, from racial group to racial group, or is this across the board? Thaler: Well, there are small differences. I think women pay a little more attention to detail than men. There are other cultural differences, but by and large, humans are all hardwired the same way. We’re all busy. We all have trouble controlling our impulses and the kinds of things that we talk about in the book are the universals. Tavis: Even for those of us who are more educated? Thaler: Absolutely. We're all human. You know, one of the most powerful biases we have is over-confidence.”
In such situations, automatic thinking can provide us with a sensible orientation to what some phenomenologists call practical intelligence and practical coping.
See, for example, Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner 2005), for examples of microeconomic fixes. Of course, stipulating that nudges cannot change financial incentives does not entail that nudged behavior is immune to economic consequences. Rather, the whole point of a properly calibrated nudge is to promote savings and avoid the undue costs that come from poorly designed behavior-modifying interfaces. The most accurate way to make this point, therefore, is to say that nudges are not pecuniary. With this point in mind, we can revisit an example discussed in Section 2, cafeterias that nudge consumers to eat less by shrinking the portions they serve. A more robust way of putting this point is to say that the cafeteria owners at issue must be motivated to make their consumers select healthy choices. If these owners shrink the portion size so that they can charge consumers more for the food they are serving, then the act of changing the plate size does not count as a nudge.
Thaler and Sunstein also emphasize their vulnerability to cognitive bias to offset claims regarding the epistemic privilege of experts. See (Shrader-Frechette 2005).
Some philosophers have taken on a project similar to Thaler and Sunsteins’, but draw on a more complicated understanding of the sociality and materiality of design situations (Verbeek 2005).
Personal correspondence.
Personal correspondence.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank several people for helping us with this essay. We appreciate Mariarosaria Taddeo taking the initiative to edit this special issue on trust and technology. Michael Lynch and Kathleen Vogel were extremely gracious, allowing one of us to present an early version of the paper at Cornell University science and technologies studies seminar. Soren Riis generously allowed one of us to give two public presentations of the material at Roskilde University, and Peter-Paul Verbeek went out of his way to arrange for that same person to give a talk at the University of Twente.
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Selinger, E., Whyte, K.P. Competence and Trust in Choice Architecture. Know Techn Pol 23, 461–482 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12130-010-9127-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12130-010-9127-3