ABSTRACT
There are two main secondary ideas in Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein's Nudge: that people use Automatic and Reflective Systems of thinking, and that people experience nudges constantly in their day-to-day lives, whether the government intervenes or not. The first idea is discussed early in Nudge as a way to frame the reader's understanding of how nudges work. Thaler and Sunstein discuss research from psychology and neuroscience that describes the functioning of the human brain. That approach conceives of two kinds of thinking: a fast and instinctive Automatic System, and a slower, more rational Reflective System. The second idea is that nudging is already pervasive in the real world in the form of advertising and sales techniques. Thaler and Sunstein use the concepts "Econs and Humans" in Nudge to contrast how neoclassical and behavioral economics describe human behavior. "Econs" are the perfectly rational beings described in rational choice theory. "Humans" are real people, who occasionally make irrational decisions.
