Headline, December 05 2023/ STUDENTS : ''' NUDGE DOCTRINE NUMER '''

STUDENTS : ''' NUDGE

 DOCTRINE NUMER '''

A FEW OF THE IDEAS ABOUT HOW TO FIX  HUMAN  BEHAVIOR rest on some pretty shaky science. The field of ' behavioral economics ' has shaped policies we encounter every day. But the science behind it is crumbling.

It's hard to walk a block or finish morning coffee without encountering some system that attempts to tell you what to read, what to buy, how to lose weight or prevent dementia or tweak your decisions in other specific ways.

My watch constantly buzzes with ''relax reminders.'' The number of calories appear next to every menu item at fast-food restaurants.

These experiences are the result of a concerted scientific effort to understand and adjust human behavior  - '' nudges '' as the legal scholar Cass Sunstein and the economist Richard Thaler call them, that push us gently to make preferred choices.

The ''nudge doctrine'' the pair developed has led to the creation of hundreds of '' nudge units '' in governments all over the world that seek to put nudges in policies and procedures.

Examples of actions that are called nudges include making organ donation opt-out instead of opt-in, and sending information about how much drivers would save by switching to car-pooling and public transit.

There's just one problem : It's not clear how effective nudges really are. One recent analysis of a large study of nudging interventions found that, after accounting for the fact that positive ''results are more likely to get published, the evidence that nudges change the decisions people make in their everyday lives is not particularly strong.

The science behind nudging is little more than a thin set of claims about humans are ''predictably irrational,'' and our policies and systems should heavily divest from its influence.

The nudge doctrine originated in behavioral economics, a field of applied social science that has deeply influenced public policy and algorithm design.

Behavioral economics is based in large part on the Nobel-winning insights of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose groundbreaking experiments in the 1970s showed that humans made systematic errors when reasoning about statistics.

We make everyday predictions, like guesses about the stock market, based not on weighing of evidence, but instead on heuristics like what information happens to be available, or what we have recently been thinking about.

This discovery led to the rise of a form of psychology that tested people's susceptibility to mistakes based on how information was presented, what stories they were told and what stories they invented to make sense of their lives and perceptions.

The fundamental premise is that our common-sense intuitions are often irrational, but can be corrected with the help of data.

On paper, that sounds like a worthy goal. Some behavioral interventions do seem to lead to positive changes, such as automatically enrolling children in school free lunch programs or simplifying mortgage information for aspiring homeowners. [ Whether one might call such interventions ''nudges,'' however, is debatable. ]

But it's not clear we need to appeal to psychology studies to make some common-sense changes, especially since the scientific rigor of these studies is shaky at best.

The Honour and Serving of the latest Global Operational Research and Writings on Human Behaviour, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Leif Weatherby.

With most Loving and Respectful dedication to The Students of the entire world, and then Mankind, Professors and Teachers.

See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on !WOW! The World Students Society - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world :  wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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