Ethical Guidelines for the Construction of Digital Nudges
This work provides ethical guidelines for researchers and practitioners in Information Systems to distinguish digital nudging from manipulation, though it is incremental as it builds on prior literature.
The paper addresses the lack of ethical guidelines for digital nudging, which aims to help users make better choices in virtual environments, by proposing a conceptualization based on existing literature to ensure its applicability and legitimization.
Under certain circumstances, humans tend to behave in irrational ways, leading to situations in which they make undesirable choices. The concept of digital nudging addresses these limitations of bounded rationality by establishing a libertarian paternalist alternative to nudge users in virtual environments towards their own preferential choices. Thereby, choice architectures are designed to address biases and heuristics involved in cognitive thinking. As research on digital nudging has become increasingly popular in the Information Systems community, an increasing necessity for ethical guidelines has emerged around this concept to safeguard its legitimization in distinction to e.g. persuasion or manipulation. However, reflecting on ethical debates regarding digital nudging in academia, we find that current conceptualizations are scare. This is where on the basis of existing literature, we provide a conceptualization of ethical guidelines for the design of digital nudges, and thereby aim to ensure the applicability of nudging mechanisms in virtual environments.