I was thinking recently about the popularity of Nudge, despite all its serious flaws, not just in presentation but in substance, not just extolling fraudulent science and the later not coming to terms with it, but also being part of a whole academic movement that relies on junk science even when you eliminate the clearly-identified fraud.
I can kinda see why this stuff would be popular with the Ted/NPR crowd, the kind of people who want to take your organization’s spare cash and spend it on management consultants, motivational speakers, and people who will organize lifeboat activities, which I guess is the modern equivalent of making people go to church every Sunday and mouth the words even if they don’t believe.
But how did it become so influential within academia? How is it that psychologists and economists (not to mention business and law professors) at top universities fell for it all?
Part of it is the whole academic-gold-rush thing: Tversky, Kahenman, and their predecessors and successors in the field of judgment and decision making really did indeed have lots of good ideas (see here, for example), and it made sense for other researchers to follow up and for others to popularize and promote the ideas.
So far, so good. But, then, when it moved from lab experiments and studies of defaults to goofy stuff like power pose and bottomless soup bowls and signing at the bottom and himmicanes and all the rest, why has it taken so long for academic researchers to jump off the train (and, indeed, some are still on it, serenely taking drinks in the club car as it goes off the cliff)?
Again, I’ll start with the charitable explanation, which I do think has a lot of truth to it: judgment and decision making is a real area of research, don’t want to throw out the baby, let’s accentuate the positive, etc etc. This is a strategic argument to keep quiet, keep getting some use of the bathwater as it slowly drains out [ok, sorry for switching metaphors but this just a blog post, ok? — ed.], basically the idea is to extract what value there is here and kinda keep quiet about the problems.
But . . . I think something else has been going on, not so much now as ten or fifteen years ago when these ideas were at their height, and that’s that the story became the story, which is indeed the subject of this post.
What do I mean by “the story became the story”? I mean that a big part of the appeal of the Nudge phenomenon is not just the lab studies of cognitive biases, not just the real-world studies of big effects (ok, some of these were p-hacked and others were flat-out faked, but people didn’t know that at the time), not just “nudge” as a cool unifying slogan that connected academic research to policy, not just potential dollars that flow toward a business- and government-friendly idea, but also the idea of Nudge as an academic success. The idea is that we should be rooting for Thaler and Sunstein because they’re local boys made good. The success is part of the story, in the same way that in the 1990s, Michael Jordan’s success was part of his story: people were rooting for Michael to break more records because it was all so exciting, the same way people liked to talk about how world-historically rich Bill Gates was, or about the incredible Tiger Woods phenomenon.
Sometimes when something gets big enough, its success becomes part of the story, and I think that’s what happened with Nudge and related intellectual products among much of social-science academia. One of their own had made it big.
Another example comes up in political campaigns and social movements. Brexit, Black Lives Matter, Barack Obama, Donald Trump: sometimes the story becomes the story. Part of the appeal of these movements is the story, that something big is happening.
It doesn’t have to happen that way. Sometimes we see the opposite, which is that someone or something becomes overexposed and then there’s a backlash. I guess that happened to some extent with Gladwell (follow-up here but also see here). So it’s not like I’m postulating any general laws here or anything. I just think it’s interesting how, in some cases, the story becomes the story.
Is “story becomes the story” pretty much the same as the bandwagon effect? I can see some nuanced differences, but in practice they more or less converge, yes?
As for nudge specifically, in historical perspective it was a logical outgrowth of the rational choice wave that swept over much of the social sciences in the late 20th c. Behavioral econ became a rock against that wave, so the rat choice people found a clever adaptation, that deviations from rationality were predictable and could be countered by alterations in the “choice architecture” engineered by uber-rational policy geeks. Rationality evolved from description to prescription. The internal logic of this move was compelling enough that the empirical holes could be overlooked.
I hope the obsession with narrowly defined rationality (Sen’s “rational fools”) is fading.
Nudge-style interventions originally sounded fascinating (almost magical) because they claimed to achieve large effects without constraining or affecting the choice set. Science-based manipulation, for your own good, formally compatible with a libertarian approach, a policymaker’s utopia.
Even simpler, I think.
For 20 years or longer behavioral science academics are told by funding agencies “research should be translational, no more blue skies/ivory tower.”
Along comes a line of research that gets seemingly big real-world effects from little non-obvious interventions. In this climate, it’s intensely validating, because it feeds in to the whole technocratic behavioral-management rationale for our receipt of public funds.
Maybe the watershed moment is 2016, both for the replication crisis rolling along, as the technocrats face stiff challenges from left and especially right, and in hindsight we’ve generally found that those micro-targeted Facebook ads didn’t do as much as more prosaic political motivations did.
Today’s blog begins with “I was thinking recently about the popularity of Nudge, despite all its serious flaws, not just in presentation but in substance (not just extolling fraudulent science …”
but where is the closing parenthesis, “)” for this aside?
Punctuation fixed; thanks.
Post 2016 etc. and getting past the frame of reference I had in my teens-to-young adulthood, I arrived at a sort-of understanding which may explain what you’ve described here.
Basically, the post-Cold War era, up until the Great Recession, was one where people thought humanity (or at least those in the developed world) had found the final form of civilization: whether they were aware of it or not, people accepted the premise of Fukuyama’s “End of History”. The arrival of the internet, the liberal interventionism in the former Yugoslavia, the balanced budgets of the Clinton era, the European Union, the successful reduction of the hole in the ozone layer — all great achievements that seemed to be linked to this ultimate way of governing.
As a result, it seemed as if there was one correct framework in which to address all the remaining societal problems ahead of us, and to ensure that the whole world could prosper together: that of “neoliberalism”, by which I mean a system in which ordinary people are given the freedom to make a large number of choices about their consumption habits (I use consumption in the broadest possible sense), but political choice was effectively limited — not coercively, but by a media who bought into and benefited from the system — and politicians became window-dressing for technocrats and policy wonks (I exaggerate mildly for effect). This group of people all come from the same big-name institutions of learning, and for the most part are practicing academics themselves, cycling in and out of government between book-leaves and advisory positions on the IMF, World Bank etc.
In that setting, the ideas in “Nudge” become extremely attractive to administrators. Should we have major reform of our tax system in order to prevent the rise of an extremely wealthy class who can soon completely circumvent any future regulation on their actions? No, let’s see if getting people to sign an honesty pledge at the start or end of their tax returns makes a difference in how much revenue we collect. Should we stop food manufacturers from adding HFCS and other sugars to their products to stop an obesity epidemic? No, the market is well-established; let’s change how we display the nutritional information on the cereal boxes. And so on. And the people who came up with them are also members of the same Brahmin class who populate the CEA, MPC etc.
This is not meant as a full-blown tear down of “neoliberalism”, the bureaucratic state, or the use of independent scientific advisers to formulate policy. I think a lot of good things happened as a result of these things that could not have happened otherwise, but the hype around them was self-reinforcing to the point of excluding any other approaches, until it all came crashing down circa 2010.
If you ask Scott Sumner, Noah Smith or Richard Hanania, Fukuyama’s End of History just keeps getting vindicated even now.
I’m surprised you didn’t link to your earlier post on Michael Jordan, Bill Gates & Tiger Woods.
Link added; thanks.