For two decades, behavioral scientists, including many of us, believed we’d found a cheap, non-political way to tackle urgent social and environmental issues. The idea was simple: “nudge” people toward better choices, not by banning or taxing bad behavior, but by subtly reshaping how options are presented. Make the healthy choice the easy choice, and people will choose it. It seemed like a win-win.
The Promise of Nudges
The theory was that human failures—like obesity, pollution, or addiction—stemmed from poor individual decisions. Nudges offered a way to sidestep the usual political gridlock by simply making good behavior more appealing. Smaller plates in cafeterias, automatically enrolling people in green energy plans, and placing salad bars at the front of the line seemed like low-cost, high-impact interventions.
For a time, it appeared the nudge revolution was underway. Researchers, including us, sought minor tweaks to “choice architecture” that could drive large-scale behavioral shifts. The underlying assumption was that psychology could be harnessed for a better world.
The Disappointing Reality
Nearly twenty years later, the results are underwhelming. Nudges work… but poorly. Their effects are small, temporary, and rarely scale up. Even worse, this individual-focused approach has inadvertently strengthened arguments against effective policy solutions like taxes and regulations. Powerful business interests, threatened by systemic change, have weaponized the idea that social problems are just about individual choices.
Systemic Problems Require Systemic Solutions
The core flaw was thinking that changing human psychology would fix problems rooted in large-scale systemic shifts. The rise of processed foods, the mechanization of agriculture, and the fossil fuel industry didn’t happen because people made bad individual choices. They were the result of fundamental changes in how society operates. Individuals, no matter how well nudged, cannot fix problems like climate change or unhealthy diets alone.
Indeed, the focus on individual behavior may be a deliberate distraction, misleading policymakers and citizens into believing there’s a viable alternative to meaningful regulation.
The Corporate Playbook
Corporations actively exploit this distraction. The concept of the “carbon footprint,” for example, didn’t originate with environmental groups. It was popularized by an ad campaign from BP, one of the world’s largest oil companies, in the early 2000s. The goal is to shift blame to the individual, rather than addressing systemic problems.
Opponents of systemic change will always push the problem back to the individual. Behavioral scientists have unwittingly aided this strategy.
The lesson is clear: when facing entrenched interests resisting change, expect them to champion ineffective but plausible-sounding individual-level solutions. We fell into this trap, and now we recognize it. The focus must shift from nudging individuals to changing the rules of the game.
The reality is that systemic problems require systemic solutions. The nudge experiment failed because it tried to treat symptoms while ignoring the disease.
