What is a nudge? Do dark patterns, tactics employed by casinos or loot box games that depend on whales and children of wealthy parents count?
Or how exactly does nudging look like in practice?
Which is fine of course, pretty much every specialist discipline has special meanings for some everyday words.
Another example: instead of regulating testing for travel, allow third party companies to manage official testing certificates and set their own prices. This happened in the UK, where Covid tests were free from the government unless you wanted to travel - at which point you had to pay a private clinic upwards of £50 (sometimes more like £150) to get a 24 hour pass.
Nudging looks very much like incentives and restrictions in a mobile game.
Nudges don't need to be rational - at least not directly. They need to push people to do what you want them to do to attain some opaque goal.
Similar to dark patterns, nudging is not about creating reasonable guides for people to follow, it's about making them feel less contempt for being shoehorned into taking actions they'd otherwise prefer not to. Maybe people don't want to pay taxes, but the proverbial "we" decided long ago that taxes are a necessity to maintain the state and so we punish people with prison time for cheating on them. In nudging, "we" don't choose anything, the institution quietly forces our hand without any democratic process.
The idea being people who are on the fence are more likely to just accept the "yes" than go through the effort to check "yes"
If you want people to take the stairs you might make the elevator stay at the top floors so that people always have to press the call elevator button, they might choose to walk up instead of waiting.
If you want people to eat less animal based proteins you can make vegan options the default for catering/meal options with meat only available as a option you can request. Some people will take whatever is the default.
You want more organ donations you make being a organ donor the default with a option to opt-out.
The goal is to make the desired option the easiest way out so most people will avoid the cognitive work of doing what they would actually prefer if they thought about it.
What led me to quit wasn't any 'nudging' by the government but simply that vaping is a lot more convenient than smoking and lacked the finger-wagging inherent in other nicotine replacement approaches, and once I was only vaping I could turn down the nicotine over the course of six months or so to spare the worst of the grimness of quitting.