"Humans have many more options before them than they currently believe, but what to do with too much information is a great riddle of our time", says Theodore Zeldin.
The concept of nudging has been in vogue recently, with its notions of "choice architecture" and gently pushing people towards pro-social behaviours, including ideas as prosaic as painting a fly onto urinals to help men take better aim! (Persuasive technology and captology cover similar themes.)
Can we yet be convinced, however, that nudging is really that much further up the food chain than subliminal advertising? We may in fact need to be more open about which behaviours we wish to encourage, partly at least by engaging more people about what those behaviours and related shared values should be.