Nudging Students' Creative Problem-Solving Skills

Abstract

People often make choices that go against their own best interests. In the controversial bestseller Nudge , Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue that people can benefit from simple “nudges” to improve their decision-making. In an upper-level undergraduate course on political decision-making, I created a series of assignments around Nudge . In the project, students designed their own “nudges” to solve a variety of political and social problems. Students gave this assignment rave reviews, not only for the course content they learned, but also for what they discovered about their connections to society and its problems. In this article, I describe the assignment and report students' evaluations of it. This assignment could be tailored to any course on political behavior, public policy, or public administration.