Thaler himself became famous with Nudge (2008), co-written with Cass Sunstein. It showed a way of integrating BE into public policy by introducing a form of soft paternalism (they call it libertarian paternalism) that aimed, through gentle and sometimes subliminal encouragement, to induce people to do the right thing, which was also the thing they really wanted to do. The most famous example was the drawing of a fly in the urinals at Schiphol Airport that cut cleaning costs by nudging men to aim straighter. David Cameron’s government embraced the idea — not the fly, the analysis — and Nudge was, for a while, the policy wonks’ favourite book.
How exactly did they know that the right thing was also the thing that people wanted to do? I have happily not encountered any fly drawings in urinals. I would think that, once you caught on that it was just a drawing, you would ignore it afterward. Presuming you noticed it in the first place. John Broadus Watson, the founder of behavioral psychology who ended up in advertising, would not have been surprised by any of this. In fact, that you can minipulate human behavior was surely known by ancient rhetoricians and the sophists. Reason and rationality are not the same, just as humanity and mankind are not (as Schiller has a character observe in Don Karlos, the lovers of the former are frequently the persecutors of the latter). Humanity and rationality are abstractions, mere ideas. The exercise of reason is an art, and human beings are persons.
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