Are Health Nudges (Dis)Empowering?

Health nudges have become popular in public health and health promotion, not least in countries that have liberal or libertarian policies. One reason is that nudges aim to change people's health-related behavior in a positive direction without infringing upon their freedom. There are other strategies to try to achieve health. Comparing behavior change and empowerment models, previous research found that empowerment is morally recommendable, both as a strategy and as a goal. Empowered people are good at taking care of their health. Using empowerment as an evaluative model, this paper investigates to what extent nudging as a health-promotion strategy leads to empowerment. Nudging can be empowering insofar as it leads to better health, although its effects on people's empowerment might be rather small, depending on whether the nudge creates a healthy habit or not. However, nudges do not, in general, have positive effects on other empowering factors, such as a person's knowledge, skills, self-confidence, self-esteem, or autonomy, since nudges typically bypass deliberate reflection. Moreover, nudging belongs to a group of manipulative strategies that appear to be detrimental to people's ability for autonomy. Thus, nudges risk being disempowering.