Arable land protection is critical to the sustainable development of agriculture in China and acceleration of the realization of the trinity protection goal of the quantity, quality, and ecology of arable land. As a new program of behavioral science to promote social development, nudge has gradually gained the favor of researchers and policy makers due to its unique advantages of small cost and substantial effect. However, current research and practical exploration of arable land protection behavior intervention based on the idea of nudging are still lacking. Implicit nudging strategies directly target the heuristic and analytic systems of arable land protection behavior of each stakeholder and possess more advantages than traditional intervention strategies. Therefore, this article designs six arable land protection behavior nudging strategies from the perspectives of cognition and motivation to realize the theoretical discussion of “generating medium-scale returns with nano-level investment”. The nudging strategies of the cognitive perspective include default options, framing effects, and descriptive norms, while those of the motivation perspective aim to stimulate home and country, and heritage and benefit motives to promote arable land protection behavior of various stakeholders. The utility of nudge to arable land protection behavior may be controversial in practice. Therefore, the implementation in China should be based on the division of farmers, the number of options should be appropriate, and the external environment of arable land protection behavior should be fully considered.

The effective implementation of cultivated land protection policies (CLPP) has important practical significance for improving China’s food security and ecological security. The central government, local governments, and farmers have mutually restricted and influencing interest relations. At the same time, the codes of behavior of multistakeholders also affect the implementation of CLPP in the social system. Therefore, this article discusses the behavioral tendencies and game relationships of relevant stakeholders in the implementation of CLPP from the perspective of evolutionary games and portrays a cognitive decision-making process closer to reality. Finally, numerical simulation reveals the key variables that affect the stability strategy. Results show the following: (1) As the main body of system supply, the central government should reconstruct the political achievement evaluation system and improve the status of the effective implementation of cultivated protection policies in the political achievement evaluation of local governments. (2) The central government should increase incentives for local governments to implement CLPP and increase penalties for violations to improve the effectiveness of policy implementation. (3) To optimize the actual implementation of CLPP, increasing awareness of farmers’ rights protection, reducing rights protection costs of farmers, and increasing the constraints on the flexible implementation of CLPP are necessary.