Nudges in a post-truth world
Item Type
Author
Language
English
Abstract
Nudges—policy proposals informed by work in behavioural economics and psychology that are designed to lead to better decision-making or better behaviour—are controversial. Critics allege that they bypass our deliberative capacities, thereby undermining autonomy and responsible agency. In this paper, I identify a kind of nudge I call a nudge to reason, which make us more responsive to genuine evidence. I argue that at least some nudges to reason do not bypass our deliberative capacities. Instead, use of these nudges should be seen as appeals to mechanisms partially constitutive of these capacities, and therefore as benign (so far as autonomy and responsible agency are concerned). I sketch some concrete proposals for nudges to reason which are especially important given the apparent widespread resistance to evidence seen in recent political events.
Subject
Autonomy
Behaviour Modification
Publication Title
Publication Year
2017
Publication Date
2017-08-01
Source
PMID: 28526778 -- jme.bmj.com.inshs.bib.cnrs.fr
License
Rights
Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://www.bmj.com.inshs.bib.cnrs.fr/company/products-services/rights-and-licensing/. This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
ISSN
0306-6800
1473-4257
Link Attachment
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28526778
Physical Description
vol. 43, n. 8, pp. 495-500