Are People Being Nudged During the COVID-19 Crisis? IPBC Thought Piece

Nudging has been proposed as in instrument to achieve behavioural change that requires neither force nor extensive cognitive effort. We discuss the extent to which nudging techniques have been used to make people adapt their behaviour to the COVID-19 pandemic and what we may learn for the application of nudging to other areas of behavioural change, especially mitigation of climate change. We argue that the current situation may allow us to learn how nudging techniques interact with other attempts at behaviour change, and suggest that mitigating lasting behavioural change will require a combination of techniques appealing to the ‘cognitive miser’ and of techniques appealing to the human desire to build coherent self-identities