## abstract In recent years, policy makers worldwide have begun to acknowledge the potential value of insights from psychology and behavioral economics into how people make decisions. These insights can inform the design of nonregulatory and nonmonetary policy interventions—as well as more traditional fiscal and coercive measures. To date, much of the discussion of behaviorally informed approaches has emphasized “nudges,” that is, interventions designed to steer people in a particular direction while preserving their freedom of choice. Yet behavioral science also provides support for a distinct kind of nonfiscal and noncoercive intervention, namely, “boosts.” The objective of boosts is to foster people’s competence to make their own choices—that is, to exercise their own agency. Building on this distinction, we further elaborate on how boosts are conceptually distinct from nudges: The two kinds of interventions differ with respect to (a) their immediate intervention targets, (b) their roots in different research programs, (c) the causal pathways through which they affect behavior, (d) their assumptions about human cognitive architecture, (e) the reversibility of their effects, (f) their programmatic ambitions, and (g) their normative implications. We discuss each of these dimensions, provide an initial taxonomy of boosts, and address some possible misconceptions ## notes - nudging is the libertarian paternalism that subtly influences choices - boosting is increasing the user's competence to make good decisions for themselves - five frameworks for analysing how people are: - heuristics and biases, which says that people act according to heuristics and biases - man as an intuitive statistician, which argues that actually 'the normative models provides a good first approximation for a psychological theory of inference' - heuristic systematic: an argument is processed systematically or heuristically - elaboration-likelihood: information is processed via either a central (if the listener is highly motivated) or peripheral route if the listener is on autopilot - naturalistic decision making, where experts are able to make snap decisions that tend to be correct - Bayesian rationality or 'the probabilistic mind', which argues that actually humans _are_ making rational, probabilistic decisions - nudges are specifically those that alter the architecture without taking choice away: auto enrolment in pensions does not remove the freedom to remove yourself from that pension, for example - this is different to boosts, which increase performance in a specific and limited way (short-term boosts) or more broadly, giving the recipient increased 'capital stock' - as an example, it seems that changing Bayesian problems to natural frequencies ($n$ in 100 people...) is a short term cognitive boost - _fascinating_ -