ABSTRACT
One of the main points of nudging is to preserve freedom of choice—and thus to maintain people’s capacity for agency. In free societies, people are treated with respect. Noneducative nudges, such as uses of healthy choice architecture at cafeterias or in grocery stores, also allow people to choose as they wish. If people are automatically enrolled into some kind of insurance plan and allowed to opt out, they might say, “yeah, whatever,” and simply go along with the default. Some people object that nudges are troublesome because they treat people as mere objects for official control. The good news is that survey evidence suggests that when people are asked concrete questions, they do not fall victim to the misconceptions. In a variation on the claim that nudges are covert, some people have objected that nudges are a form of manipulation. Automatic enrollment would have large consequences for the lives of millions of people.
