How Do You Get To Control People? It's The Application Of The Nudge

Our dog Benny has the art of the Nudge down pat. He gives me a nudge if he wants me to put my arm around him. If I'm having dinner and he wants a piece of chicken, he nudges my leg. Looking at his face, you can see why I often succumb.

Humans use nudging too, as a method to direct behaviour in a specific direction. In fact, this is the basis of Nudge theory––positive reinforcement that influences decision making. It is used by governments and private corporations. The developer of the theory, Richard Thaler, won a Nobel Prize in 2017. The initial intention was to get people to invest wisely by nudging them in a particular direction.

A nudge is anything that alters someone's decision making or behaviour predictably—without taking away their options––or incentivizing choices in a meaningful way. Changing the environment makes a nudge more likely that a person will make one choice over another when their brain's cognitive processing automatically selects the favoured choice.

Here are a few examples:

In Australia, if you are having hip replacement surgery, you are asked if you would like to donate the old femur head bone to be used by others for things like reconstructive surgery and bone grafts. So you're in a hospital setting, and this is a subtle nudge. Who wouldn't like to help others?

In investing, someone can be nudged into parting with their money in an investment that is considered safe yet may promise good returns. In the Nudge art, there is no coercion but rather a subtle manipulation so that you are directed towards one out of several choices.

In Australia, the government subsidizes solar panels for the home by 30%. So that is the grab, lower costs, but you are also told that they save on greenhouse gases, and you're helping the planet. You are not told that the production of solar panels is highly polluting. But that's another story.

While the intent of the Nudge may be to elicit positive results for the person, it obviously can be used in a nefarious way.

Has the Nudge been used in vaccination programs? This is sure, as confirmed by this article in Nature, which used invitations to attend vaccination centres with reminders.

What were the catch-phrases put out by media and politicians? "Safe and effective", "We're all in this together", and "It will stop the spread". These are all positive reinforcing messages. They are designed to get people to roll up their sleeves purportedly to get a life-saving jab. So how well did it work?

Nudging worked to a certain degree; remember nudging is not a forced policy; it is steering people to an option that the nudger feels is more beneficial to the individual. Despite no track record to warrant such faith, most people succumbed to the Nudge and took the new experimental Covid shots. However, a significant number didn't, as reports came from people having adverse reactions.

So on a global level, politicians decided that a nudge was not enough. They took a sledgehammer to the public with vaccine mandates, banning the non-vaccinated from restaurants, gyms, workplaces and social gatherings. People being confronted with the loss of a job left them with few options. Get the job or lose your livelihood.

We went from subtle manipulation with options to totalitarian edicts with few options, all in the name of getting a jab, potentially dangerous and with little to no effectiveness.