original definition of a nudge by Thaler and Sunstein:…any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior 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.
nudge approach builds on this by instrumentalising cognitive limitations to influence behaviour whereas boosts aim to help people overcome these limitations by expanding (boosting) their abilities to make decisions that are aligned with their goals
Nudges steer people towards a particular behaviour by creating environmental conditions that trigger a given heuristic strategy. In contrast, boosts change behaviour by fostering people’s decision-making competences
IOT, nudge rely on some supposedly existing state of system 1 while boost educates the system 1
Non-educative nudges target behaviour by harnessing cognitive or motivational deficiencies such as inertia, procrastination and loss aversion to steer it in the desired direction
boosts are designed to enable specific behaviours through improving decision making and its outcomes by enlisting human cognition, the environment or both.
roots of the nudge approach lie in the dual-system processing view of the human cognitive architecture which suggests that those wanting to change behaviour can choose from one of two routes: engage System 2 and foster it or harness System 1 deficiencies.
those advocating for boosting don’t all share the same view of human decision making (see this post) but what they do agree on is that cognitive and motivational processes are malleable, and that existing mental tools can be enhanced by redesigning aspects of the external environment or by teaching people how to redesign them
By changing the choice context and harnessing cognitive and motivational deficiencies to affect behaviour, the nudge inadvertently affects the cognitive and motivational processes themselves. The nudge has thus turned into a boost and had lasting effects.
