Educated Decision-Makers are Harder to Bias: Comparing Education and Nudges on Reliable Deliberation about Recycled Water

Abstract

Recently, it has become important to define ethical rules governing the most appropriate ways to interact with those that decision interventions seek to influence. However, philosophical theories and current methods of comparing interventions in the decision sciences are likely inadequate to fully demonstrate ethical differences among various types of interventions. Here, I seek to address this problem by first proposing a framework (based on the American Psychological Association’s ethical code of conduct) for criteria that should likely be considered when making ethical comparisons among interventions. Then, I propose a method through which one could identify the extent to which nudges and educational interventions promote reliable deliberation—a condition that has been argued to be central to ensuring autonomous decision making—when making decisions regarding recycled water. In four experiments, I show that nudges and educational interventions can both be used to shift individual preferences regarding recycled water, but that only educational interventions result in greater choice consistency, a factor that I propose is integral to demonstrating one has deliberated reliably. These results are likely of important practical benefit, as they might guide policymakers and water practitioners towards interventions that are likely to result in consistent and stable public support of recycled water, which could help avoid costly consequences such as protests and legal challenges. They likely also have important ethical implications, as they demonstrate a condition on which some nudges might fail to respect autonomy to the same extent as educational interventions. These results help us move one step closer to being able to empirically quantify ethical risks and benefits of using different intervention strategies and represent an important stepping-stone in defining an integrated ethical interaction theory.