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Are nudges sinister psychological tricks? Or are they useless? Actually they are neither

Written by Meg Elkins, Senior Lecturer with School of Economics, Finance and Marketing and Behavioural Business Lab Member, RMIT University

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Nudging – the idea that simple changes to how a choice is presented can lead people to make better decisions – has been one of the most popular ideas to emerge from economics in the past two decades.

But nudging is now under attack, entangled in the bitter partisan dispute over pandemic policy responses.

Since the idea was...

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