A meta-analytic cognitive framework of nudge and sludge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Public and private institutions worldwide have gained considerable traction in developing interventions to alter people’s behaviors in predictable ways without limiting the freedom of choice or significantly changing the incentive structure. A nudge is designed to facilitate actions by minimizing friction, while a sludge is an intervention that inhibits actions by increasing friction. While the terms nudge and sludge have garnered significant attention, the underlying cognitive mechanisms behind these interventions remain largely unknown. Here, we develop a novel cognitive framework by organizing these interventions along six cognitive processes: attention, perception, memory, effort, intrinsic motivation, and extrinsic motivation. In addition, we conduct a meta-analysis of field experiments (i.e., randomized controlled trials) that contained real behavioral measures ( n = 188 papers, k = 188 observations, N = 2,209,334 participants) from 2008 to 2021 to examine the effect size of these interventions targeting each cognitive process. Our findings demonstrate that interventions that change effort are more effective than interventions that change intrinsic motivation to alter behaviors. Nudge and sludge interventions had similar effect sizes. This new meta-analytic framework provides cognitive principles for organizing nudge and sludge with corresponding behavioral impacts. The insights gained from this framework help inform the design and development of future interventions based on cognitive insights.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".