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The article focuses on the hitherto unresearched impact of nudging on the successful completion of HEIs studies. The aim of the study is to find out how HEIs students accept different forms of nudging and how individual forms of nudging can contribute to the successful completion of studies. The explanatory paradigm is anchored in nudge theory. Based on a systematic literature review, key behavioral factors and forms of nudge that influence the successful completion of studies are identified. A two-phase empirical research was conducted (questionnaire among university students, N = 207) and a structured interview with experts (N = 22). High-touch nudges were far more acceptable. By contrast, 40% of low-touch nudges were considered somewhat unacceptable. Students do not mostly accept reminders and defaults. Students differed in their evaluation of proposed techniques and their acceptance according to their socio-economic and socio-demographic characteristics. Support was slightly stronger among men, part-time students, and economists. Female, graduate, medical, health, and social study students, and students up to 25 years of age were more likely to be against the interventions. Students having at least one parent with higher education showed slightly less acceptance of nudges. The study's insights provide a deeper understanding of diverse needs regarding behavioral tools and enable derive of guidelines for the education policy implementation and development.

Type 2 diabetes (DM2), a major lifestyle disease, extends beyond medical issues, with social sciences offering solutions such as changing eating habits through nudging interventions. This study examines the acceptability of 33 food-nudging interventions among Czech diabetics (N = 456) via an electronic questionnaire, assessing responses on a scale from 1 (acceptable) to 4 (unacceptable). With 87.8% of nudges scoring within the acceptable range, the highest support was for shopping trolleys promoting fruits and vegetables (1.27), while reduced portions in public canteens had the lowest (3.31). Findings suggest that non-digital nudges are widely accepted and can inform effective DM2 preventive strategies and health policy recommendations.

The impact of the simulated large-scale atmospheric circulation on the regional climate is examined using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model as a regional climate model. The purpose is to understand the potential need for interior grid nudging for dynamical downscaling of global climate model (GCM) output for air quality applications under a changing climate. In this study we downscale the NCEP-Department of Energy Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP-II) Reanalysis using three continuous 20-year WRF simulations: one simulation without interior grid nudging and two using different interior grid nudging methods. The biases in 2-m temperature and precipitation for the simulation without interior grid nudging are unreasonably large with respect to the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) over the eastern half of the contiguous United States (CONUS) during the summer when air quality concerns are most relevant. This study examines how these differences arise from errors in predicting the large-scale atmospheric circulation. It is demonstrated that the Bermuda high, which strongly influences the regional climate for much of the eastern half of the CONUS during the summer, is poorly simulated without interior grid nudging. In particular, two summers when the Bermuda high was west (1993) and east (2003) of its climatological position are chosen to illustrate problems in the large-scale atmospheric circulation anomalies. For both summers, WRF without interior grid nudging fails to simulate the placement of the upper-level anticyclonic (1993) and cyclonic (2003) circulation anomalies. The displacement of the large-scale circulation impacts the lower atmosphere moisture transport and precipitable water, affecting the convective environment and precipitation. Using interior grid nudging improves the large-scale circulation aloft and moisture transport/precipitable water anomalies, thereby improving the simulated 2-m temperature and precipitation. The results demonstrate that constraining the RCM to the large-scale features in the driving fields improves the overall accuracy of the simulated regional climate, and suggest that in the absence of such a constraint, the RCM will likely misrepresent important large-scale shifts in the atmospheric circulation under a future climate.

Concern for a diminished human experience of nature and subsequent decreased human well-being is addressed via a consideration of green infrastructure's potential to facilitate unplanned or incidental nature experience. Incidental nature experience is conceptualized and illustrated in order to consider this seldom addressed aspect of human interaction with nature in green infrastructure planning. Special attention has been paid to the ability of incidental nature experience to redirect attention from a primary activity toward an unplanned focus (in this case, nature phenomena). The value of such experience for human well-being is considered. The role of green infrastructure to provide the opportunity for incidental nature experience may serve as a nudge or guide toward meaningful interaction. These ideas are explored using examples of green infrastructure design in two Nordic municipalities: Kristianstad, Sweden, and Copenhagen, Denmark. The outcome of the case study analysis coupled with the review of literature is a set of sample recommendations for how green infrastructure can be designed to support a range of incidental nature experiences with the potential to support human well-being.

High-frequency cyclical assimilation of the retrieved rainwater and estimated in-cloud water vapor by radar reflectivity has positive impacts on convective precipitation forecasting but usually causes overestimation. The application of large-scale constraints will produce more balanced dynamical and thermal fields, which can address the above issue to some degree. In this study, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) global forecast fields are utilized as large-scale constraints that are imposed on the regional model by the grid nudging method. Two heavy rainfall events that occurred in Jiangsu (the South case) and Hebei (the North case) Provinces with different water vapor background conditions are chosen. The results show that the experiment with dynamical constraints (nudging of the horizontal wind field only) performs the best 6-h precipitation location and intensity forecasts for both cases. The experiment that nudged the water vapor mixing ratio together with the horizontal wind field could significantly weaken the forecast precipitation intensity. Although it produces good precipitation forecasts in the first 3-h for the South case (under higher water vapor conditions), it produces an unreliable precipitation forecast with rapid decay for the North case. For the North case which is accompanied by significant cooling, the experiment nudging the water vapor mixing ratio, temperature and horizontal wind fields simultaneously performs better than the experiment nudging the water vapor mixing ratio together with the horizontal wind field.

The study examines the influence of nudging on the successful studies of Higher education institutions (HEI’s) students. Data from one of the typical countries of the Central European region (Czech Republic) is analyzed. The goal of the research was to find out how students accept individual forms of nudging. For this purpose, a questionnaire survey at Czech HEIs ( N = 207) and structured interviews with experts ( N = 19) were conducted. This study showed that information nudges and high-touch nudges enjoyed the highest level of acceptance. A strong correlation was also found between “most irritating” and group “manipulative” nudges. These forms of nudging fluctuated around the borderline value of acceptance. A strong or moderate correlation was also found between nudges with similar content and different forms. Structured interviews showed that experts supported the use of nudges. They considered it an important tool to influence the study’s success. Experts explained the differences in the acceptance of nudges in connection with the different ages of students, the type of study, the students’ life experiences, and partly with the type of field of study. They considered parents’ education rather ambivalent.

In areas such as health, environment, and energy consumption, there is a need to do better. A common goal in society is to get people to behave in ways that are sustainable for the environment or support a healthier lifestyle. Nudging is a term known from economics and political theory, for influencing decisions and behavior using suggestions, positive reinforcement, and other non-coercive means. With the extensive use of digital devices, nudging within a digital environment (known as digital nudging) has great potential. We introduce smart nudging, where the guidance of user behavior is presented through digital nudges tailored to be relevant to the current situation of each individual user. The ethics of smart nudging and the transparency of nudging is also discussed. We see a smart nudge as a recommendation to the user, followed by information that both motivates and helps the user choose the suggested behavior. This paper describes such nudgy recommendations, the design of a smart nudge, and an architecture for a smart nudging system. We compare smart nudging to traditional models for recommender systems, and we describe and discuss tools (or approaches) for nudge design. We discuss the challenges of designing personalized smart nudges that evolve and adapt according to the user’s reactions to the previous nudging and possible behavioral change of the user.

Nudging or ‘choice architecture’ refers to strategic changes in the environment that are anticipated to alter people’s behaviour in a predictable way, without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. Nudging strategies may be used to promote healthy eating behaviour. However, to date, the scientific evidence has not been systematically reviewed to enable practitioners and policymakers to implement, or argue for the implementation of, specific measures to support nudging strategies. This systematic review investigated the effect of positional changes of food placement on food choice. In total, seven scientific databases were searched using relevant keywords to identify interventions that manipulated food position (proximity or order) to generate a change in food selection, sales or consumption, among normal-weight or overweight individuals across any age group. From 2576 identified articles, fifteen articles comprising eighteen studies met our inclusion criteria. This review has identified that manipulation of food product order or proximity can influence food choice. Such approaches offer promise in terms of impacting on consumer behaviour. However, there is a need for high-quality studies that quantify the magnitude of positional effects on food choice in conjunction with measuring the impact on food intake, particularly in the longer term. Future studies should use outcome measures such as change in grams of food consumed or energy intake to quantify the impact on dietary intake and potential impacts on nutrition-related health. Research is also needed to evaluate potential compensatory behaviours secondary to such interventions.

Sudden turn from drought to flood (STDF) is a unique representation of intra-seasonal extreme events and occurs frequently. However, it is notoriously difficult to represent in climate simulations due to the accumulation of model errors. This study uses a regional climate model (RCM) with different initialization and nudging schemes to explore effective approaches for capturing a STDF event. Results show that the conventional continuous integration with single initialization cannot reproduce the STDF event, while nudging or re-initialization can. Furthermore, spectral nudging and re-initialization outperform the conventional continuous simulation in reproducing precipitation features, but grid nudging induces the largest biases for precipitation though it has the smallest biases for other meteorological elements. Scale separation analysis shows that the large-scale features of the conventional continuous simulation drift far from the actual fields and force erroneous small-scale features, whereas the nudging and re-initialization successfully prevent the model from drifting away from the forcing fields at large-scales. The different performance for simulating precipitation among spectral nudging, re-initialization and grid nudging can be attributed to that the former two methods generate their own small-scale information via the RCM, while grid nudging over-suppresses the small-scale information while retaining the large-scale features. The difference in small-scale features affects the simulation of different moisture fluxes and convergences, as well as clouds, and then results in diverse precipitation. These results illustrate that both the consistency with large-scale features and the local variability from small-scale features are both robust factors for reproducing precipitation features during extreme events using RCMs.

Recognizing the mindless nature of many food decisions, it has been suggested that attempts to increase healthy eating should not focus on convincing people what is 'right' but rather aim to adjust the environment such that people are automatically directed toward healthy choices. This study investigated a nudge aiming to promote healthy food choices in train station snack shops. The nudge involved a repositioning of food products: healthy foods were placed at the cash register desk, while keeping unhealthy products available elsewhere in the shop. Three snack shops were included: a control condition; a nudge condition repositioning healthy products and a nudge + disclosure condition employing the same nudge together with an explanatory sign. Next to examining its effectiveness during 1 week, the study assessed customers' acceptance of the nudge. Controlling for a baseline week, more healthy (but not fewer unhealthy) products were sold in both nudge conditions, with no difference between the nudge and the nudge + disclosure condition. A majority of customers reported positive attitudes toward the nudge. Repositioning healthy foods is a simple, effective and well-accepted nudge to increase healthy purchases. Moreover, disclosing its purpose does not impact on effectiveness.