Nudge plus: incorporating reflection into behavioural public policy

We outline a modified account of behaviour change called nudge plus, which incorporates an element of reflection as part of the delivery of a nudge. Nudge plus builds on recent work advocating educative nudges and boosts. Its argument turns on seminal work on dual systems that presents a more subtle relationship between fast and slow thinking than commonly assumed in the classic literature in behavioural public policy. Our claim is that a hybrid nudge-think strategy can be a useful additional way to design pro-social interventions. We review classic and recent work on dual systems to show that a hybrid dual process account is more plausible than the default interventionist or parallel competitive framework. We put forward a way to operationalise nudge plus and set out what reflections could embody. We compare nudge, nudge plus, and boost, and we draw testable implications.

Banerjee, S., & John, P. (2021). Nudge plus: Incorporating reflection into behavioral public policy. Behavioural Public Policy, 1-16. doi:10.1017/bpp.2021.6