Public acceptance of default nudges to promote healthy and sustainable food choices

Purpose: Default nudges constitute an increasingly relevant policy arena for promoting healthy and sustainable food choices. This study examines public acceptance, as well as its drivers, of a series of default dietary nudges with promising effectiveness potential, all of which are drawn from existing studies and/or real-world policies. The results yield applicable insights into nudge design and communication strategies that can be leveraged to find ‘sweet spots’ with regard to designing default nudges that balance concerns of both effectiveness and legitimacy of intervention. Principally highlighted is the opportunity for choice architects to more actively mitigate the costliness of opting out of default nudges in order to better align with nudging theory, as well as the transparency of the nudge. With regard to communication strategies, the protection of individual freedom of choice and, in most cases, effectiveness, emerge as key aspects for choice architects to emphasize regarding default nudges to increase acceptance. nature of data: 451 participants completed the survey. They were recruited by a market research firm to be representative of German consumers on quotas of age, gender and income. The survey was pre-tested amongst 50 participants from different educational backgrounds. To minimize selection bias, participants received no information on the survey content prior to participation. To ensure data quality, attention checks were included in the survey and participants who failed were unable to complete the survey. In addition, participants who took less than 5 min (approximately half of median time, one third of mean time) to complete the questionnaire, were excluded, as it is assumed that they did not have time to adequately process and evaluate the scenarios. The cleaned data set includes 409 participants