Feeling Is Believing: The Cudge Could Redesign How Good Choices Feel

Behavioral economics has spent two decades teaching governments to nudge. By restructuring the cognitive architecture of choice—adjusting defaults, simplifying forms, exploiting well-mapped mental shortcuts—the field has delivered measurable gains in retirement savings, organ donation, energy conservation, and nutrition. Yet according to a new theoretical framework published in Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, the most urgent policy problems of our time share a feature that nudges cannot touch: their barrier is not cognitive but emotional. Daniel Västfjäll, Erkin Asutay, and Gustav Tinghög of Linköping University argue that in domains from climate change to charitable giving to preventive health, people already know what matters; they simply do not feel it. Their proposed remedy is a new instrument they call the cudge, deployed under a framework they name Affective Paternalism.

The diagnosis begins with a systematic blind spot. Behavioral public policy has been built almost entirely on cognitive foundations: how people process information under uncertainty, how heuristics distort judgment, how choice environments trigger shortcuts. Affect—the immediate felt sense of goodness or badness that accompanies perception and judgment—has been treated mainly as noise to correct. But the authors contend that in the highest-stakes domains, affect is not distorting otherwise sound deliberation; it is doing most of the evaluative work, often in ways systematically miscalibrated to actual impact. People underinvest in high-impact climate actions not because they misunderstand climate science but because carbon emissions feel abstract while flying and eating meat feel rewarding and normal. Donors do not favor low-impact charities because they miscalculate effectiveness but because the local shelter evokes warmth and the global health initiative evokes little or nothing.

The clearest evidence for this affective gap is scope insensitivity, one of the most robust findings in decision science. In classic contingent-valuation work, willingness to pay to save migratory birds was virtually identical whether 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 birds were at risk. A single iconic photograph of one identified victim generates measurable surges in charitable response, while statistical representations of hundreds of thousands of deaths in the same crisis produce no comparable reaction—a phenomenon Slovic has described as psychic numbing. The behavioral consequence is impact neglect: choices fail to track the actual welfare consequences of available options. The felt reward for a symbolic low-impact action and the felt reward for an equivalent high-impact action are roughly equal, because both feel like doing something, and feeling like doing something is what drives choice.

Cognitive fixes for this problem have largely backfired. Presenting effectiveness rankings or comparative charitable returns tries to supply better input to the analytical system in hopes of overriding the affective system’s output. In a well-known experiment, Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic showed that adding statistical impact information to an identifiable-victim appeal actually reduced giving, because the deliberative framing attenuated the very emotional response that was sustaining donation. The alternative, the authors argue, is to redesign the affective landscape of the decision itself so that felt reward aligns more closely with actual welfare impact. That is the project of Affective Paternalism, which treats affect as a policy resource rather than a bias to be corrected.

The framework’s operative tool, the cudge—a portmanteau of cue and nudge—works by altering the affective meaning and motivational intensity of options rather than their cognitive structure. Where a nudge changes defaults or ordering to exploit shortcuts, a cudge embeds emotionally relevant cues that make the felt content of an option track its real consequences. The distinction is mechanistic, not merely cosmetic: choices made because an option genuinely felt right are, on theoretical grounds, more likely to be repeated and sustained than choices made because a shortcut was exploited. The authors illustrate the contrast across four policy targets. For charitable giving, a nudge makes the effective charity the default; a cudge bundles the personally meaningful charity with an expert-recommended one, generating a new feeling of competence alongside the familiar warm glow. For climate behavior, a nudge enrolls people in green energy defaults; a cudge prompts vivid mental imagery of local climate consequences, generating anticipatory emotion genuinely about inaction. For smoking, plain packaging with graphic warnings replaces the incidental positive affect engineered by brand imagery with integral negative affect about health consequences at the point of consumption. And for vehicle tax payment, a photograph of the recipient’s own car—captured by automatic number plate recognition—makes the specific obligation emotionally salient in a way a generic reminder cannot.

The most compelling demonstration of cudging at scale comes from donation bundling. Rather than asking donors to override their emotional attachment to personally meaningful causes—a cognitively demanding and emotionally costly ask—one platform offered donors the option to split their gift between their preferred charity and an expert-recommended high-impact cause. The result was a 76 percent increase in effective giving with no reduction in total donations or reported satisfaction, and the platform raised more than 1.5 million US dollars in its first fourteen months. Crucially, the authors argue, bundling does not merely reduce friction for donors who already wanted to split; it creates a new affective experience—competence glow alongside warm glow—that neither option alone could provide. No defaults were altered, no options removed, no information added. What changed was the emotional texture of the giving decision itself.

Converging evidence comes from several hundred randomized controlled trials run by the Behavioural Insights Team and comparable government units since 2010. The framework predicts that interventions engaging integral affect—feelings genuinely responsive to the actual properties of the decision—will outperform those engaging incidental affect, whose source is normatively unrelated to the choice. The pattern is striking. In one of the largest behavioral RCTs ever conducted, spanning 1,085,322 UK road taxpayers, a reciprocity message about organ donation increased registrations by 38 percent, while adding a photograph of smiling people to a social norms message made it perform worse. The reciprocity message made the symmetric obligation of donation viscerally present; the smiling faces introduced incidental positive affect that was discounted as a guide to action. Conversely, in a payroll-giving trial at HMRC, photographs of real colleagues who were themselves donors roughly doubled enrollment. The same surface intervention—photo plus prosocial framing—produced opposite outcomes depending on whether the emotional content stood integral to the decision. Similar patterns appear in court fines, where personalized text reminders naming the recipient and the specific amount owed raised average payments by 189 percent, and in vehicle tax notices, where a photograph of the recipient’s own car increased payment rates six-fold against four-fold without it.

To systematize intervention design, the authors introduce the CARE taxonomy: Create, Attenuate, Reinforce, Eliminate. Create builds new integral affective associations where the high-impact option is emotionally neutral, as when vivid imagery of local climate consequences generates anticipatory concern. Attenuate reduces affective intensity that is disproportionate to an option’s actual properties—pairing high-threat health information with credible efficacy messages prevents fear-driven avoidance, or weakening the felt equivalence between symbolic and substantive climate actions. Reinforce amplifies and redirects existing positive affect toward higher-impact alternatives, as donation bundling did by adding competence glow to warm glow. Eliminate, the most ethically demanding mode, disrupts specific affective responses that are demonstrably miscalibrated, as graphic tobacco warnings do by dismantling the glamour affect sustaining smoking. A randomized clinical trial showed that graphic labels elicit affective and deliberative responses that text-only warnings do not, with the felt aversiveness of the smoking cue driving the behavioral effect.

The ethical case rests on two pillars. First, targeting integral rather than incidental affect is the ethically preferable route: strengthening feelings that genuinely track the real features of a choice brings the emotional signal into closer alignment with the individual’s own values, in contrast to advertising’s characteristic use of arbitrary positive associations. Second, the framework satisfies the criterion of asymmetric paternalism articulated by Camerer and colleagues: it creates large benefits for people whose felt responses are miscalibrated while imposing little or no cost on those whose feelings are already well aligned with welfare. In scope-insensitive domains, where felt reward is approximately equal across low- and high-impact options, redirecting emotional engagement toward the higher-impact option preserves individual hedonic experience while substantially increasing social welfare—a rare property among paternalistic interventions. The authors also flag a temporal paradox for future design: anticipated, experienced, and remembered affect are poorly correlated, each shaped by characteristic distortions such as affective forecasting errors and the peak-end rule, and each implying a different intervention target.

The framework generates testable predictions that distinguish it from the cognitive nudge literature. In scope-insensitive domains, Create and Reinforce interventions should produce individual-level welfare gains that information-based approaches cannot; attenuating the felt equivalence of symbolic substitutes should be a prerequisite for high-impact Create interventions to take effect; the ethical case should strengthen predictably as affective equivalence between options is documented; and cudge-mediated behavior change should prove more durable than nudge-mediated change where the mechanism involves genuine motivational engagement. The authors do not claim to displace cognitive approaches but to identify the class of problems—scope insensitivity and impact neglect chief among them—where those approaches have repeatedly underperformed. If the donation bundling results generalize, the next frontier of behavioral public policy may be written not in defaults and friction but in the emotional grammar of choice itself.

Subject of Research: Beyond nudging: affective paternalism and affect architecture for impactful behavioral public policy

Article Title: Beyond nudging: affective paternalism and affect architecture for impactful behavioral public policy

Article References: Västfjäll, D., Asutay, E., & Tinghög, G. (2026). Beyond nudging: affective paternalism and affect architecture for impactful behavioral public policy. Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, 5, Article 1866819. https://doi.org/10.3389/frbhe.2026.1866819

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frbhe.2026.1866819

Keywords: affective paternalism, cudge, nudging, behavioral public policy, scope insensitivity, impact neglect, CARE taxonomy, affect heuristic, charitable giving, climate behavior, asymmetric paternalism, warm glow