Nudge Paper 3 Topic

For my topic, I want to talk about the cultural psychology of “Biases and Blunders”. While many people are able to be nudged by their preconceived biases, it is not universal. In the very first section of the book after the introduction, Thaler and Sunstein show a picture of two tables:

While they may not look it to us, these tables are exactly the same size. One just looks longer and thinner because of its orientation. They state that “If you see the left table as longer and thinner than the right one, you are certifiably human”. However, this is wrong. Since the 1960s, psychologists have known that not everyone experiences these illusions in the same ways. It is a uniquely WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) perspective. One proposal for this difference is that those who live in houses and communities that do not contain straight lines and angles, such as Suku tribespeople from Northern Angola, are unable to see what Thaler and Sunstein refer to as a major facet of being human.

So are “nudges” universal? Can we expect everyone to have the same underlying human biases and make the same mistakes that we make? Of course not. I would like to further examine this in my essay. So my topic, once again, is how culture influences our biases and whether the same nudge works on everyone, or it is just based on the findings that these authors compiled from studies on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries and communities.

There are countless cultural biases in psychology, and many psychological studies that used to be taken as fact have been going through a replication crisis, in that researchers today are unable to recreate the results from famous studies such as the marshmallow test, the Stanford prison experiment, and many others that may be less well known to a general audience but are still bases of psychological practice and assumptions. It is important to attempt to replicate psychological studies not just in modern times, but also with more diverse audiences, so that misunderstandings like those above do not make their way into famous and influential publications.