2025/12/01 by Bo Hu, Ziqian Xia, Qingcheng Guo +3 · 1 voice
Decision Sciences · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Behavioral Health and Interventions #Meta-analysis and systematic reviews #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
paper · doi:10.1002/bdm.70053
openalex publication_date 2025/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/12/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
ABSTRACT Nudging as a strategy to alter behaviors has garnered increasing attention from both researchers and policymakers. Here, we conduct a second‐order meta‐analysis, synthesizing 13 articles (14 meta‐analyses) that include 1638 primary studies and approximately 30 million participants. We find a small aggregated effect size across these meta‐analyses ( d = 0.27, 95% CI [0.16, 0.38]), which drops to d = 0.004 after adjusting for publication bias. Examining the methodological quality of the meta‐analyses, we find that most were rated as low or critically low, suggesting that our findings, which inherit these limitations, should be interpreted with caution. This study provides the most comprehensive synthesis of the effectiveness of nudging to date, while underscoring the urgent need for higher quality, preregistered meta‐analyses to clarify the true impact.