What is Boosts?
Boosts are interventions that enhance a person’s competence to make good decisions rather than steering them toward a pre-determined choice. Unlike nudges, which work by changing the choice architecture, boosts work by building the person’s own decision-making skills or knowledge.
How it works
Hertwig and Grüne-Yanoff (2017) distinguish boosts from nudges on a key dimension: boosts respect and develop autonomy while nudges bypass deliberation. Boosts include risk literacy training (teaching people to understand statistical formats), simple decision rules (heuristics like ‘take-the-best’), and improved information presentation (icon arrays instead of percentages for health risks). They require the person’s cooperation, whereas nudges work even without awareness.
Applied example
Instead of nudging patients toward a treatment by making it the default, a boost approach teaches them how to read a fact box comparing treatment outcomes in natural frequencies (’23 out of 100′ rather than ‘23%’), enabling them to make an informed choice themselves.
Why it matters
Boosts matter because they produce lasting improvements in decision competence that transfer across contexts, unlike nudges that only work within a specific choice architecture.
