HOW do we really feel about policy “nudges”?

Earlier this month, President Obama signed an executive order directing federal agencies to collaborate with the White House’s new Social and Behavioral Sciences Team to use insights from behavioral science research to better serve the American people. For instance, studies show that people are more likely to save for retirement when they are automatically enrolled into a 401(k) retirement saving plan that they can opt out of than when they must actively opt in. The idea behind Mr. Obama’s initiative is that such soft-touch interventions, or “nudges,” can facilitate better decisions without resorting to heavier-handed strategies like mandates, taxes and bans.

The response to the executive order has been generally positive, but some conservatives have been critical, characterizing it as an instance of government overreach. (“President Obama Orders Behavioral Experiments on American Public” ran a headline on the website The Daily Caller.) However, it is worth noting that when a similar “behavioral insights team” was founded by the conservative government of the British prime minister, David Cameron, it met resistance from the political left. (“Brits’ Minds Will Be Controlled Without Us Knowing It” ran a headline in The Guardian.)

Is it possible that partisans from both ends of the political spectrum conflate their feelings about a general-purpose policy method (such as nudges) with their feelings about a specific policy goal (or about those who endorse that goal)? We think so. In a series of recent experiments that we conducted with Todd Rogers of the Harvard Kennedy School, we found evidence for a “partisan nudge bias.”

In one experiment, we presented participants of varying political persuasions with short descriptions of various behavioral policy nudges (e.g., designating enrollment in a program as a default). To explain how such policy tools could be applied, we illustrated them using either an example of a liberal policy priority (e.g., encouraging low-income individuals to enroll in food stamps programs for which they were legally eligible) or a conservative policy priority (e.g., encouraging the wealthy to take advantage of capital gains tax breaks they were legally eligible for). The participants were then asked to rate how ethical, manipulative and coercive they found the nudge to be, as a general policy approach.