Nudging children: An ethically questionable method to compound returns to nudges?

On a recent trip to Singapore, I came across an interesting poster with the hashtag #standupstacy that encouraged commuters to give up their seats for those in need. Soon after, I came across displays in a hallway that encouraged people to stereotype themselves as a certain type of positive community member. While I don’t think I came back home as a better person, I did come back home with a newfound curiosity for social engineering, something that Singapore is quite well known for and in particular – nudges.

What is a nudge?

Coined by the 2017 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics Richard Thaler, a “nudge” frames choices in a particular way to encourage individuals to act a certain way without affecting their options or economic incentives. Nudges are common practice within businesses to influence your subconscious decision-making. Think of those times where you are hungry and on a time crunch, suddenly the chips placed conveniently at the front of the grocery store become much more appealing. At its core, nudges provide no economic incentives which means that they should have no effect on a rational decision maker. Of course, humans are rarely rational which means policymakers can take advantage of a nudge’s psychological effect to encourage individuals to change their behaviours.

For example, an interesting paper by Benhassine et al. (2015) found that nudges were more effective in improving school participation in Morocco than usual schooling policy. The study compared 2 programs randomly allocated to low-income Moroccan households:

1. Program A (control) which gave families a large payment if their children consistently attended school.
2. Program B (nudge) which gave families a small payment regardless of if their children attended school, but labelled as an “educational support program”.

Results were surprising as Program B was more effective and cost efficient than Program A in getting children into school. Researchers explained the outcome was a result of a nudge to parents’ attitude towards their children’s education - making them believe education to be more worthwhile even if the monetary incentive was less. On the other hand, the targeted initiative had the opposite effect by “crowding out” families’ intrinsic support for education.

Figure 1: Summary of results from A Labelled Cash Transfer for Education by Benhassine et al. (2015)

Note: This example might need to be replaced by a simpler example (e.g., cigarette packaging or comparing energy consumption)

Are nudges too good to be true?

If nudges are more impactful and cost effective than traditional policy, why don’t we see more of them in place? That’s because the magic of nudging dies down once we delve deeper into its reality.

Firstly, while nudges are effective in changing behaviour, these changes tend to be quite small in the short-run and almost non-existent in the long-run. Moreover, nudges that do have strong short-run impacts can have unintended consequences. One example is in compensating behaviour. Suppose a cafe makes it more convenient to buy salads over burgers, this would generally make consumers purchase a less calorie dense meal but may lead them to purchase an additional drink that would offset any benefits.

Secondly, nudging is highly context dependant, making nudging behaviour difficult to replicate. For example, a frequently cited US study found that hotels can make guests more likely to reuse towels by catering to their desire to follow social norms by telling them that “the majority of guests reuse their towels”. However, an attempt to replicate this study in Germany found the social nudge had no additional effect compared to a traditional environmental message as Germans already had high levels of towel reusage. This dependence on context and small effect sizes makes it difficult for policymakers to find substantial evidence to support possible implementations of nudges which often means nudges are only implemented alongside a traditional policy.

A unique, and possible unethical, application of the nudge

Now that I’ve touched on the effects and limitations of nudging, let’s go back a bit and return to the original poster that piqued my interest. There were 2 reasons why I was particularly intrigued by that poster:

1. Self-perception theory argues that our actions shape our attitudes and beliefs. If nudging can change people’s actions without them knowing, could nudging create social change by almost indoctrinating unassuming agents? If someone gives up their seat due to a nudge, would they ultimately envision themselves as more of a person who is willing to give up a seat for others?
2. My prior understanding of nudges made me unaffected by the poster, but what if someone unassuming, like a child, came across the nudge? Would they be more affected by it?

Given that nudges may struggle to create a long-term impact, nudging a child to change their actions into adulthood could be the solution to creating nudges with lasting impacts (ethical discussions aside for now).

Nudges as an application of self-perception theory

Think about a time you chose to pick up a Coke over a Pepsi. If someone asked why you made that decision, odds are you would simply say “Coke’s just better”. In reality, you most likely made the decision subconsciously and just scrambled for a reason for your choice. This is the basis of self-perception theory – our beliefs shape our actions, but our actions also shape our beliefs.

Nudges thus form an interesting application of self-perception theory. If nudges can encourage someone to take an action subconsciously, then they should be able to subconsciously change their attitudes too via their actions.

While limited, there is evidence to support this theory. In an experiment investigating the impact of nudges on healthy eating over time, Rookhuijzen et al. (2021) found that nudges were generally ineffective in sustaining behavioural change, as consistent with existing literature. However, all the individuals who sustained behavioural change also unknowingly changed their attitudes in the same period. Researchers thus reasoned that nudges can only create lasting behavioural if they make individuals change their attitudes as well – even though this attitude change is not known by the individual.

Nudging children…

The topic of nudging children is of particular interest as attitudes and beliefs formed during childhood are likely to persist throughout adulthood. For example, children and adolescents who learn financial literacy are likely to accumulate more savings and wealth in adulthood. If nudges can effectively change children’s beliefs, it could mean that nudges on children can have a compounding effect in the long term.

So…is nudging more effective on children than adults?

There is currently little research directly comparing the effectiveness of nudging children vs adults (which is a somewhat good sign given ethical considerations). Research on the impact of marketing on children do suggest that children are more susceptible to marketing as their critical-reasoning skills are not yet fully developed. However, a study on the impact of environmental nudges on children found that nudges more strongly affect children between ages of 10-12 compared to younger children. This is because those are the ages when children are forming their self-concept, meaning that they attribute the nudged behaviour into their identity.

So…should we nudge children?

Nudging children could be the solution to creating long-term changes with nudges. Children and teenagers above the age of 10 are most susceptive to nudges due to the formation of self-concept during those ages. This makes them more likely to internalise nudged actions as part of their identity and keep those behaviours into adulthood.

But to truly answer this question, we would need to consider the ethical considerations of using our newfound policy tool. A survey on the public acceptability of nudges surprisingly found that society accepts nudges on children just as much as they accept nudges on adults, if the nudge is for a good cause. Some researchers even argue that it is more ethical to nudge children than adults because they do not have a sense of autonomy to be violated. If it’s ok to punish a child by putting them in a naughty corner, what’s so bad about nudging them to sit still in class?

In the end, nudging is just a tool which can be used for both good and bad. Just as anti-smoking campaigns at schools can change social norms of smoking over time, it is possible that nudges on children can be the solution to encouraging better social behaviour in the future.