Boosts

What are boosts?

Boosts are interventions intended to improve people’s ability to make their own decisions. They may change skills, knowledge, decision tools, or the way relevant information is represented.

Boosts versus nudges

Hertwig and Grüne-Yanoff (2017) distinguish this competence-building objective from steering choices through nudges. Their account includes short-term, context-specific boosts as well as longer-term approaches. Transfer to other decisions is therefore not part of every boost.

Example and evaluation

A fact box can show outcomes for comparable groups of people under different options. A boost might teach someone how to read it and compare the numbers, rather than simply selecting an option for them. Risk-literacy training, visual information formats, and simple decision rules are other possibilities.

A worked fact-box example

Suppose a company is comparing two equipment service plans. These invented figures describe 100 comparable machines over one year:

A competence-building exercise would teach the reader to check the denominator, time period, outcome and cost before comparing the plans. Plan B has 10 fewer shutdowns per 100 machines, an absolute difference of 10 percentage points, and costs $50 more per machine. Its shutdown rate is also half as large. Those descriptions answer different questions; the absolute figures show the scale of the tradeoff.

The reader still has to decide what avoiding a shutdown is worth. Changing “20%” to “20 out of 100” alone does not demonstrate learning. To test the boost, give the reader another comparison and see whether they can identify the relevant differences without being told which option to choose.

Check whether people understand the information and can use it independently. If the claim is that the skill lasts or transfers, test those outcomes too. The name does not establish them.

The distinction is not simply conscious versus unconscious influence: the authors also discuss overlap between short-term boosts and educative nudges.