The ethics of boost

Abstract

Boosting and nudgingHumans have the capacity to apply complex grammatical rules from a very young age without having any awareness of such rules or competence to consciously apply them.They act as if they are following these rules.In the late 1960s, Tversky and Kahneman became interested in whether the same can be said for rules of rational belief formation and choice (Kahneman, 2011: 5).Are humans able to reason or choose in accordance with, say, Bayes' Theorem or expected utility maximization, though they have no awareness of these rules or competence to consciously apply them?What they noticed was that the situation was dissimilar: Unlike in linguistics, humans do not act as if they are applying these rules of inference or rational choice, but rather, they are making systematic mistakes.The Heuristics and Biases (H&B) framework is the study of these systematic mistakes.Thaler and Sunstein (2008) import these insights of the H&B framework into public policy.When error-prone citizens make choices that are not conducive to what they consider to be in their interest, policymakers can reshape the environment so that these systematic human foibles will elicit choices that do serve the citizens' interests.This is nudge in a nutshell.Hertwig et al. (2025) trace nudging back to a misreading of Herbert Simon's (1957) notion of bounded rationality.In the H&B framework, bounded rationality is about what lies beyond the bounds of rationality; it is the study of systematic deviations from rationality.But this, Hertwig et al. argue, is not how Simon conceived it.Rather, Hertwig et al. understand bounded rationality in terms of Gigerenzer and Peter (1999) Simple Heuristics framework: Humans act rationally within the bounds of their limited cognitive and motivational capacities and within specific environments.These cognitive and motivational capacities can be honed, and the environment can be adapted so that these capacities can operate successfully.And this is what boosting is meant to do (see also Grüne-Yanoff and Hertwig, 2016; Hertwig and Gr ü ne-Yanoff, 2017; Herzog and Hertwig, 2025).Nudging has a cynical ring to it.Humans are incorrigibly flawed decision-makers.The only thing policymakers can do is to work with these weaknesses and present

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.