Diverging from the discipline of homo economicus, behavioral public policy evolved from the ideas that humans are not infallibly rational and that gentle nudges could improve behavior. Progenitors of this new field included Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose decision-making insights in the 1970s led to a rich literature on heuristics. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein followed suit, their 1999 (2008) publication of Nudge escalating interest in behavioral public policy. Such interest was evidenced by Britain installing the Behavioural Insights Team (a.k.a. the Nudge Unit) in 2010, and the White House operating its own Social and Behavioral Science Team from 2015 to 2017. Within health, behavioral economics insights have influenced intervention and policy design, evaluation, and implementation across a range of consumer health behaviors, from health-insurance-plan selection to smoking cessation.
In The Origins of Behavioural Public Policy, author Adam Oliver provides a succinct summary of the theoretical and...
