Boost in Public Policy: A Scoping Review and Research Directions

In the public policy context, a specific type of behavioural intervention, the boost (Grüne-Yanoff & Hertwig, 2016) aims at improving people's skills to influence their choices and behaviours, for example by enhancing targets' ability to understand statistics (Hertwig, 2017). Although less studied than nudge (Caballero & Ploner, 2022), boost has nevertheless generated an extensive literature. However, this literature is sometimes confused or imprecise about the characteristics of boost (Bieler et al., 2022) and its terminology. To accurately characterise the ‘boost' concept and identify gaps and opportunities in existing research, but also to help policy-makers, the literature needs to be mapped. However, no existing publication provides this detailed mapping. Our scoping review, following PRISMA recommendations, examines 118 publications from WoS and Google Scholar, since 2016 to 2023, in English or French. It shows the extent and nature of research activity on boosts and how research addresses the concept. It fills a gap by providing a comprehensive mapping of the literature, regardless of discipline, field of application or type of publication. It describes the main sources of knowledge and identifies/characterises the most frequent themes in the existing literature on ‘boosts', highlighting a key mechanism in particular: empowerment. It also highlights certain inaccuracies, discrepancies and even contradictions. Finally, it discusses all these elements identifying research gaps, and outlines the limitations of the present research as well as opportunities and avenues for future research arising from it.