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ESSAYS on NUDGING Way to Influence Someone Without Violating His Or Her Freedom of Choice

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THE GOOD PLACE Gustav Almqvist Google “how to make better decisions” and you get 5 million hits. Blog posts, TED talks and self-help books that promise to improve our lives dramatically as long as we follow their easy steps towards becoming better decision makers. A popular concept within the same discourse is known as choice architecture or THE GOOD PLACE nudging. Nudge, a book published by two scholars in 2008, stands out as it offers us a way to make better decisions for someone else. A nudge is a gentle ESSAYS ON NUDGING way to influence someone without violating his or her freedom of choice. It must be for a good cause, but must not involve money. Graphic warnings on cigarette packages, the power saving mode on your TV, and the “open here” symbol at the back of your bag of chips are all nudges. The pedometer on your smartphone is a nudge. Judgment and decision making (JDM) research has normative, descriptive and prescriptive sides. Nudging has become a cornerstone of prescriptive JDM. Over the past decade, it has spread to business and public administration. Many governments now use it. This dissertation critically discusses the ideo- logical assumptions behind nudging and empirically investigates when it may be unpopular, unnecessary or Big Brother-esque. That is, when not to nudge. Building on secondary data analyses and surveys, the dissertation contains four articles. Articles 1 and 2 investigate the Swedish public support for nudg- ing. Article 3 studies an alleged bias among horseracing bettors. Article 4 looks into predictions from Big Data. The dissertation concludes that Swedes are cautiously positive towards nudging; that horseracing bettors generally Almqvist Gustav are not biased; and that it remains to be seen whether Big Data leads to Big (Brother) nudging. The dissertation generally warns against unrealistic expec- tations of nudging. GUSTAV ALMQVIST is a researcher at the Center for THE GOOD THE PLACE Media and Economic Psychology and the Center for Sports and Business at the Stockholm School of Eco- nomics Institute for Research (SIR) and a teacher at the Department of Marketing and Strategy at the Stock- holm School of Economics. He lives in Stockholm. ISBN 978-91-7731-182-9 DOCTORAL DISSERTATION IN BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION STOCKHOLM SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS, SWEDEN 2020 THE GOOD PLACE Gustav Almqvist Google “how to make better decisions” and you get 5 million hits. Blog posts, TED talks and self-help books that promise to improve our lives dramatically as long as we follow their easy steps towards becoming better decision makers. A popular concept within the same discourse is known as choice architecture or THE GOOD PLACE nudging. Nudge, a book published by two scholars in 2008, stands out as it offers us a way to make better decisions for someone else. A nudge is a gentle ESSAYS ON NUDGING way to influence someone without violating his or her freedom of choice. It must be for a good cause, but must not involve money. Graphic warnings on cigarette packages, the power saving mode on your TV, and the “open here” symbol at the back of your bag of chips are all nudges. The pedometer on your smartphone is a nudge. Judgment and decision making (JDM) research has normative, descriptive and prescriptive sides. Nudging has become a cornerstone of prescriptive JDM. Over the past decade, it has spread to business and public administration. Many governments now use it. This dissertation critically discusses the ideo- logical assumptions behind nudging and empirically investigates when it may be unpopular, unnecessary or Big Brother-esque. That is, when not to nudge. Building on secondary data analyses and surveys, the dissertation contains four articles. Articles 1 and 2 investigate the Swedish public support for nudg- ing. Article 3 studies an alleged bias among horseracing bettors. Article 4 looks into predictions from Big Data. The dissertation concludes that Swedes are cautiously positive towards nudging; that horseracing bettors generally Almqvist Gustav are not biased; and that it remains to be seen whether Big Data leads to Big (Brother) nudging. The dissertation generally warns against unrealistic expec- tations of nudging. GUSTAV ALMQVIST is a researcher at the Center for THE GOOD THE PLACE Media and Economic Psychology and the Center for Sports and Business at the Stockholm School of Eco- nomics Institute for Research (SIR) and a teacher at the Department of Marketing and Strategy at the Stock- holm School of Economics. He lives in Stockholm. ISBN 978-91-7731-182-9 DOCTORAL DISSERTATION IN BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION STOCKHOLM SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS, SWEDEN 2020 The Good Place Essays on Nudging Gustav Almqvist Akademisk avhandling som för avläggande av ekonomie doktorsexamen vid Handelshögskolan i Stockholm framläggs för offentlig granskning tisdagen den 15 december 2020, kl 13.15, sal Torsten, Handelshögskolan, Sveavägen 65, Stockholm The Good Place Essays on Nudging The Good Place Essays on Nudging Gustav Almqvist Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Ph.D., in Business Administration Stockholm School of Economics, 2020 The Good Place: Essays on Nudging © SSE and the author, 2020 ISBN 978-91-7731-182-9 (printed) ISBN 978-91-7731-183-6 (pdf) Front cover illustration: © iStockphoto, 2020 Back cover photo: SSE, 2020 Printed by: BrandFactory, Gothenburg, 2020 Keywords: Nudge, choice architecture, judgment and decision making, bounded rationality, heuristics, favourite-longshot bias, big data The Good Place is divided into distinct neighbourhoods. Each one contains exactly 322 people, who have been perfectly selected to blend into a blissful harmonic balance […] in each one, every blade of grass, every ladybug, every detail has been precisely designed (Schur & Goddard, 2016) Fitter, happier. More productive. Comfortable. Not drinking too much. Regular exercise at the gym, three days a week. [---] Eating well. No more microwave dinners and saturated fats. A patient, better driver. A safer car […] Sleeping well […] Careful to all animals […] Keep in contact with old friends, enjoy a drink now and then [---] Car wash, also on Sundays [--- ] An empowered and informed member of society […] Tires that grip in the dark […] Calm, fitter, healthier and more productive (Radiohead, 1997) Foreword This volume is the result of a research project carried out at the Department of Marketing and Strategy at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE). The volume is submitted as a doctoral thesis at SSE. In keeping with the policies of SSE, the author has been entirely free to conduct and pre- sent his research in the manner of his choosing as an expression of his own ideas. SSE is grateful for the financial support provided by the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation and the Tore Browaldh Foundation, which has made it possible to carry out the project. Göran Lindqvist Hans Kjellberg Director of Research Professor and Head of the Stockholm School of Economics Department of Marketing and Strategy Preface I took my first psychology course at Stockholm University 15 years ago. First up was a class in social psychology, where my friends and I were as- signed to perform a field experiment. We had no idea what a field experi- ment was, but would soon learn that it required us to manipulate something in the outside world to see if that had any effect on people. My friends were into fitness and so wanted that as part of the experi- ment design (I was not, but caved in). We ended up spending two days in a subway station at rush hour. Day one, we registered what proportion of subway passengers voluntarily took the stairway instead of the escalator. It was a very small one. Day two, we placed ourselves just in front of the es- calator, holding a hand-made sign saying: “Take the stairs, live longer!” Again, we counted the proportion. It had suddenly become larger. A com- puter program named SPSS later told us that we had discovered a statisti- cally significant increase in the proportion of subway travellers taking the stairs after having been exposed to our message. In those days, there was no catchy word for tricking people into doing something they normally would not do, supposedly for their own good. Nowadays there is one. Nudging. Had someone told me back then that you could build an entire ideology around manipulations like ours, I probably would not have believed it. For deep down, we never thought that people really needed our help. Neither did we expect it to actually benefit their health to take the stairs that one time. Nor that they would have appreciated it, had we been standing there every morning. Those very same doubts are this dissertation’s raison d'être. x Acknowledgments I am incredibly thankful for having been given the opportunity to write a doctoral dissertation, especially at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), where I first studied as an undergraduate. Epstein (2019) likens writing a book to running the 800 metres–at its worst halfway through. Writing a dissertation is more like the marathon. Exhausting throughout. So there are many people I want to thank for help- ing me reach if not the finish line then at least, at the time of writing, the home-straight. First and foremost, I want to express an enormous debt of gratitude to my supervisors. At SSE, Associate Professor Patric Andersson, Professor Richard Wahlund and Assistant Professor Emelie Fröberg. At Uppsala University, Associate Professor Håkan Nilsson. Patric. Your knowledge and patience have been invaluable to me these past several years. You have taught me everything I know about golf and most of what I know about research. I will never forget the time you have invested, and faith you have shown, in me. That includes research, teaching and lunches at Man on the Moon.
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