Humanities & Social Sciences
July 2019
Nudge, nudge, think, think
Experimenting with ways to change citizen behaviour, second edition
by Peter John, Sarah Cotterill, Alice Moseley, Liz Richardson, Graham Smith, Gerry Stoker, Corinne Wales
How can governments persuade their citizens to act in socially beneficial ways? This ground-breaking book builds on the idea of 'light touch interventions' or 'nudges' proposed in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's highly influential Nudge (2008). While recognising the power of this approach, it argues that an alternative also needs to be considered: a 'think' strategy that calls on citizens to decide their own priorities as part of a process of civic and democratic renewal. As well as setting out these divergent approaches in theory, the book provides evidence from a number of experiments to show how using 'nudge' or 'think' techniques works in practice. This second edition includes a substantial new introduction that explores recent changes in policy and politics and reviews the continuing academic debate about nudge and think. It also features a foreword by David Halpern, Director of the Behavioural Insights Team (a.k.a. the 'Nudge Unit'), and an afterword by Peter John, introducing his radical new version of nudge, 'nudge plus'.
