this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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ok, guess its these three papers
So the meta-analysis says nudging works, but not to some massive degree.
Given that you quoted from the last paper, there was a response from Maier et al. to that paper explicitly, correcting for publication bias and finding no effect when "nudging":
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9351501/
Maier's letter to the editor is not peer reviewed; it counts as opinion, the original authors have not retracted their paper - so the matter is at best "divided"
The original paper might have other issues, e. g. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/01/07/pnas-gigo-qrp-wtf-approaching-the-platonic-ideal-of-junk-science/
But I'm not here to discuss effect size or quality of sources, I think it is much more important to understand that there is no good proof that nudging enables people to make good, lasting changes, while at the same time offering policymakers an easy and cheap way out of applying uncontested, proven methods that would be a lot more beneficial.