Nudges for People who Think

Abstract

The naiveté of the dominant ‘cognitive-miser’ metaphor of human thinking hampers theoretical progress in understanding how and why subtle behavioral interventions – ‘nudges’ – could work. We propose a reconceptualization that places the balance in agency between, and the alignment of representations held by, people and choice architects as central to determining the prospect of observing behaviour change. We argue that two aspects of representational (mis)alignment are relevant: cognitive (how people construe the factual structure of a decision environment) and motivational (the importance of a choice to an individual). Nudging thinkers via the alignment of representations provides a framework that offers theoretical and practical advances and avoids disparaging people’s cognitive capacities.