MCAT Practice Test 15

Passage 6

¹Among the tools that public health agencies have embraced in recent decades, few have been greeted as warmly as the "nudge": an alteration in the way choices are presented that steers people toward healthier options without forbidding any alternative. Place fruit at eye level in the cafeteria and the pastries at the back; make organ donation or retirement saving the default and require those who object to opt out. Defenders describe such measures as uniquely respectful of liberty. Nothing is banned, no one is fined, and anyone who wishes to choose otherwise remains free to do so. The appeal to officials is easy to see as well: such measures are cheap, require no new legislation, and spare them the unpopular work of prohibition.

²The argument has force, and it is worth stating why. Every choice is presented in some way; there is no neutral cafeteria in which food is arranged by no one for no purpose. If arrangement is unavoidable, the defenders reason, it may as well be arranged to promote health. Refusing to nudge is not abstaining from influence but merely choosing influence of a different, unexamined kind—whatever pleases the vendor, or whatever happened to be convenient for the staff who stocked the shelves.

³Yet the claim that nudges preserve liberty depends on a picture of freedom that is too thin. On that picture, I am free so long as the alternatives remain formally available—so long as I could, if I wished, reach past the fruit for the pastry. My freedom, so understood, is measured by the menu rather than by my attention to it. But nudges work precisely because people do not, in the ordinary course of things, scrutinize the arrangement of their options. A default succeeds to the degree that it is not noticed. The measure that most reliably changes behavior is therefore the one least likely to engage the deliberation through which people exercise the liberty the defenders invoke.

⁴This does not make nudges illegitimate, but it relocates the question of their legitimacy. The relevant test is not whether an alternative exists but whether the nudge could survive being made public. A cafeteria that posts a sign explaining that fruit is placed at eye level to encourage healthier eating, and a pension plan that tells employees plainly why enrollment is automatic, invite the very scrutiny that the nudge would otherwise bypass. If the measure keeps most of its effect once disclosed, that is some evidence that it works with the considered preferences of those it steers; if it loses most of its effect, that is evidence that it was working against them.

⁵Some defenders will object that disclosure would defeat the purpose—that a nudge announced is a nudge disarmed. The evidence on this point is less settled than either side tends to admit, but the objection, if true, would prove too much. A policy that can achieve its ends only so long as its targets remain unaware of it has more in common with manipulation than with the respectful guidance its champions describe. Public health has every reason to arrange choices thoughtfully. It has no reason to prefer arrangements that cannot bear the light.