A study of how Facebook,Google and Microsoft own applied the EU’s unique GDPR rules shows users are being manipulatedOne of the most influential books published in the final decade was Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. In it, and the authors set about showing how groundbreaking research into decision-making by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky decades earlier (for which Kahneman later won a Nobel prize) could be applied to public policy. The point of the book,as one psychologist puts it, is that “people are often not the best judges of what will serve their interests, or that institutions,including government, can help people do better for themselves (and the rest of us) with small changes – nudges – in the structure of the choices people face”.
Nudge proved very popular with policymakers because it suggested a strategy for encouraging citizens to beget clever choices without overtly telling them what to do. Thaler and Sunstein argued that if people are left to their own devices they often beget unwise choices and that these mistakes can be mitigated if governments or organisations take an active role in framing those choices. A classic example is trying to ensure that employees own a pension blueprint. Their employer can encourage them to choose a blueprint by emphasising the importance of having one. Or they can frame the decision by having every employee enrolled in the company blueprint by default, and with the option of opting out and choosing their own scheme.
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Source: theguardian.com