Nudge by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein is a New York Times bestseller that explores how people's decisions can be subtly shifted and improved using behavioral economics. It provides readers with insight into how humans can be nudged in a positive direction, whether it be encouraging people to save more for retirement or picking more healthy options during lunch.
For UX Designers:
- Nudge provides insight into how to use behaviour change as a way to designs services and products that are more successful at meeting goals.
- It provides strategies to create experiences that are both more effective and ethical.
- The book is helpful for UX designers looking to create meaningful change through their design that is based on behavioral economics.
Other Suggestions:
- Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
✏️ Highlights
Home improvement projects are often settings where this bias is observed. A family decides that after twenty years of neglect, the kitchen really needs to be upgraded. The initial to-do list includes new appliances and cabinets, but of course, the floor will be ruined during the construction, so we’d better replace that, and gosh, if we just pushed that wall out a bit, we could add a new window, which looks out on the patio, but oh dear, who wants to look at that patio . . . In the military this is called mission creep. Here we plead guilty to book revision creep. The revision that we planned to knock off during the summer was not given to the publisher until late November. However, to continue the home remodeling analogy, in spite of our slow pace, what we have here
Home improvement projects are often settings where this bias is observed. A family decides that after twenty years of neglect, the kitchen really needs to be upgraded. The initial to-do list includes new appliances and cabinets, but of course, the floor will be ruined during the construction, so we’d better replace that, and gosh, if we just pushed that wall out a bit, we could add a new window, which looks out on the patio, but oh dear, who wants to look at that patio . . . In the military this is called mission creep. Here we plead guilty to book revision creep. The revision that we planned to knock off during the summer was not given to the publisher until late November.
Sure, listing ingredients on the side of food packages
Two important topics are given new chapters early on. The first is what we call Smart Disclosure. The idea is that governments should consider the radical thought of moving at least into the twentieth century in the way they disclose important information.
listing ingredients on the side of food packages is useful, especially for those with very good eyesight, but shouldn’t Sunstein be able to search online for foods that contain shellfish, given that they can make him very sick?
The Internet is not exactly a cutting-edge technology. Widespread use of Smart Disclosure would make it possible to create online decision-making tools that we call choice engines, which can make many tasks as easy as it has become to find the best route to get to a new restaurant.
If you design the ballot voters use to choose candidates, you are a choice architect. If you organize a drugstore or a grocery, you are a choice architect (and you confront many of the questions that Carolyn did). If you are a parent describing possible educational options to your son or daughter, you are a choice architect. If you are a salesperson, you are a choice architect (but you already knew that).
Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. At one point, the authorities etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men often do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess, but if they see a target, attention and therefore accuracy are much increased.
The location of the coffee machines, for example, may influence workplace interaction.
Libertarian Paternalism
people should be “free to choose.” We strive to design policies that maintain or increase freedom of choice. When we use the term libertarian to modify the word paternalism,
We also acknowledge that if people are making really terrible choices and harming their future selves, nudges might not be enough. We’ll get to that, too.)
We know from decades of behavioral science research that people often make poor decisions in laboratory experiments. People also make plenty of mistakes in real life, which reinforces the view well stated by the Beatles: “we get by with a little help from our friends.” Our goal, in short, is to help people make the choices that they would have made if they had paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive ability, and complete self-control. (That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t sometimes stay out late, overeat, and have fun. As they say, “enjoy life now; this is not a rehearsal.”)
If people want to smoke cigarettes, eat a lot of candy, choose an unsuitable health care plan, or fail to save for retirement, libertarian paternalists will not force them to do otherwise—or even make things hard for them.
They are not Homo economicus; they are Homo sapiens. To keep our Latin usage to a minimum, we will hereafter refer to these imaginary and real species as Econs and Humans. Consider the issue of obesity. Rates of adult obesity in the United States are over 40 percent,1 and more than 70 percent of American adults are considered either obese or overweight.
According to the World Health Organization, obesity rates have risen threefold since 1980 in some areas of North America, the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, Australia, and China.
everything takes longer than you think, even if you know about the planning fallacy.* Thousands of studies confirm that human forecasts are flawed and biased.
consider what is called the status quo bias, a fancy name for inertia. For a host of reasons, which we shall explore, people have a strong tendency to go along with the status quo or default option.
Humans respond to incentives too, but they are also influenced by nudges.* By properly deploying both incentives and nudges, we can improve our ability to improve people’s lives, and help solve many of society’s major problems.
The first misconception is that it is possible to avoid influencing people’s choices. In countless situations, some organization or agent must make a choice that will affect the behavior of some other people.
Would anyone object to putting the fruit and salad before the desserts at an elementary school cafeteria if the result were to induce kids to eat more apples and fewer brownies? Is this question fundamentally different if the customers are teenagers, or even adults? Is a GPS device an intrusion on freedom, even if it is paternalistic, in the sense that it tries to tell you how to get to your preferred destination?
Freedom to choose is the best safeguard against bad choice architecture.
this book is not a call for more bureaucracy, or even for an increased role of government. We just strive for better governance.
the problem is that we are fallible and life is hard. If every time we went food shopping, we tried to solve the problem of choosing the very best possible combination of items to buy, we would never get out of the store.
“No more than 25 percent of the guests at a university dinner party can come from the economics department without spoiling the conversation.”
Tom Parker’s fascinating 1983 book, Rules of Thumb.
asking friends to send him examples. These include: “One ostrich egg will serve 24 people for brunch.” “Ten people will raise the temperature of an average size room by one degree per hour.”
When technology stocks have done very well, people might well buy technology stocks, even if by that point they’ve become a bad investment. People might overestimate some risks, such as a nuclear power accident, because of well-publicized incidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. They might underestimate others, such as strokes, because they do not get much attention in the media.
Linda’s description seems to match “bank teller and active in the feminist movement” far better than “bank teller.” As Stephen Jay Gould once observed, “I know [the right answer], yet a little homunculus in my head continues to jump up and down,
The “above-average” effect is pervasive. In some studies, 90 percent of drivers say they are above average behind the wheel. And nearly everyone thinks they have an above-average sense of humor, including some people who are rarely seen smiling. (That is because they know what is funny!) This applies to professors, too. One study found that about 94 percent of professors at a large university believed they were better than the average professor, and there is every reason to think that such overconfidence applies to professors in general.8 (Yes, we admit to this particular failing.)
about 40 to 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, and this is a statistic most people have heard.
about 40 to 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, and this is a statistic most people have heard. (The precise number is hard to nail down.)
around the time of the ceremony, almost all couples have been found to believe that there is approximately a zero percent chance that their marriage will end in divorce—even those who have already been divorced!9 (Second marriage, Samuel Johnson once quipped, “is the triumph of hope over experience.”)
Unrealistic optimism can explain a lot of individual risk-taking, especially in the domain of risks to life and health. Asked to envision their future, students typically say that they are far less likely than their classmates to be fired from a job, to have a heart attack or get cancer, to be divorced after a few years of marriage, or to have a drinking problem. Older people underestimate the likelihood that they will be in a car accident or suffer major diseases.
Lotteries are successful partly because of unrealistic optimism.11 Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive feature of human life; it characterizes most people in most social categories.
Yet when offered the opportunity to switch from a mug to a candy bar or vice versa, only one in ten switched. Loss aversion has a lot of relevance to public policy. If you want to discourage the use of plastic bags, should you give people a small amount of money for bringing their own reusable bag, or should you ask them to pay the same small amount for a plastic bag? The evidence suggests that the former approach has no effect at all, but that the latter works; it significantly decreases use of plastic bags. People don’t want to lose money, even if the amount is trivial.13 (Environmentalists, please remember this point.)
giving up what we have is painful. But the phenomenon has multiple causes. William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser have dubbed this behavior status quo bias,
in retirement savings plans most participants pick an asset allocation when they join the plan and then forget about it. A study conducted in the late 1980s looked at the decisions of participants in a pension plan that covered many college professors in the United States. The median number of changes in the asset allocation over a lifetime was, believe it or not, zero.
Many people often adopt what we call the “yeah, whatever” heuristic. A good illustration is the carryover effect that occurs when people start binge-watching a television series. On most streaming networks if you do nothing when you reach the end of one episode, the next one just starts showing. At that point many viewers (implicitly) say,
“yeah, whatever,” and keep watching. Many an intended short evening has dragged long into the night as a result, especially on shows with cliffhanger endings.
“Of one hundred patients who have this operation, ten are dead after five years.” If you’re like most people, the doctor’s statement will sound pretty alarming and you might not have the operation. Instinctively, you might think: “A significant number of people are dead, and I might be one of them!” In numerous experiments, people react very differently to the information that “ninety of one hundred are alive” than to “ten of one hundred are dead”—even though the content of the two statements is exactly the same.
consider the following information campaigns: (a) If you use energy conservation methods, you will save $350 per year; (b) If you do not use energy conservation methods, you will lose $350 per year. There is evidence that information campaign (b), framed in terms of loss, might be more effective than information campaign
two components or systems. One is fast and intuitive; the other is slow and reflective. Kahneman adopts the terminology of the psychology literature on which he draws, and calls these two components System 1 and System 2. One of us had trouble remembering which one is the fast one (it is 1), so we prefer to use names that remind the reader what they are. We call them the Automatic System and the Reflective System.
most people are overconfident and optimistic—but not everyone. In fact we have a good friend who has the opposite traits—he is never confident and is always worried about something, or many things.
Two Cognitive Systems: AUTOMATIC SYSTEM Uncontrolled Effortless Associative Fast
two kinds of thinking.17 Two Cognitive Systems: AUTOMATIC SYSTEM Uncontrolled Effortless Associative Fast Unconscious Skilled REFLECTIVE SYSTEM Controlled Effortful Deductive Slow Self-aware Rule-following
It was Declan’s System 1 that urgently wanted to go into toy stores, although his System 2 fully knew he had enough toys. For a few weeks, the explanation appeared to work, and Declan could pass by toy stores without uttering a word. But one day, he looked seriously at his father and asked, “Daddy, do I even have a System Two?”
Accomplished chess players have pretty fancy intuitions; their Automatic Systems allow them to size up complex situations rapidly and respond with both amazing accuracy and exceptional speed.
Automatic System is your gut reaction and the Reflective System is your conscious thought.
too much on our Automatic System. The Automatic System says, “The airplane is shaking, I’m going to die,” while the Reflective System responds, “Plane crashes are extremely rare!” The Automatic System says, “That big dog is going to hurt me,” and the Reflective System replies, “Most dogs are quite sweet.”
Reflective System. (Homer once replied to a gun store clerk who informed him of a mandatory five-day waiting period before buying a weapon, “Five days? But I’m mad now!”) One of our major goals in this book is to see how the world might be made easier, or safer, for the Homers among us (and the Homer lurking somewhere in each of us). If people can rely more on their Automatic Systems without getting into terrible trouble, their lives should be easier, better, and longer. Put another way, let’s design policies for Homer economicus.
Captain!”) In contrast, Homer Simpson seems to have forgotten where he put his Reflective System. (Homer once replied to a gun store clerk who informed him of a mandatory five-day waiting period before buying a weapon, “Five days? But I’m mad now!”) One of our major goals in this book is to see how the world might be made easier, or safer, for the Homers among us (and the Homer lurking somewhere in each of us). If people can rely more on their Automatic Systems without getting into terrible trouble, their lives should be easier, better, and longer. Put another way, let’s design policies for Homer economicus.
think of Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame as someone whose Reflective System is always in control. (Captain Kirk: “You’d make a splendid computer, Mr. Spock.” Mr. Spock: “That is very kind of you,
Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, which hugs the Lake Michigan coastline that is the city’s eastern boundary. The drive offers stunning views of Chicago’s magnificent skyline.
one stretch of this road that puts drivers through a series of S curves. These curves are dangerous. For a long time, many drivers failed to take heed of the reduced speed limit (25 mph) and wiped out. In response, the city adopted a distinctive way of encouraging drivers to slow down.
a sign painted on the road warning of the lower speed limit, and then a series of white stripes painted onto the road. The stripes do not provide much if any tactile information (they are not speed bumps) but rather just send a visual signal to drivers.
We have been nudged.
In economics (and in ordinary life), a basic principle is that you can never be made worse off by having more options, because you can always turn them down.
Human beings have been aware of the concept of temptation at least since the time of Adam and Eve, but for purposes of understanding the value of nudges, that concept needs elaboration. What does it mean for something to be “tempting”?
Thaler is a sucker for a good bottle of wine and has trouble resisting just one more small glass from a special bottle. Sunstein hates the stuff, but drinks Diet Coke in large quantities. For us the crucial fact about temptation is that people’s state of arousal varies over time. To
the two end points: hot and cold. When Sally is very hungry and appetizing aromas are emanating from the kitchen, we can say she is in a hot state. When she is thinking abstractly on Tuesday about how much food to eat at dinner on Saturday, she is in a cold state.
Thaler is a sucker for a good bottle of wine and has trouble resisting just one more small glass from a special bottle. Sunstein hates the stuff, but drinks Diet Coke in large quantities. For us the crucial fact about temptation is that people’s state of arousal varies over time. To simplify things, we will consider just the two end points: hot and cold. When Sally is very hungry and appetizing aromas are emanating from the kitchen, we can say she is in a hot state. When she is thinking abstractly on Tuesday about how much food to eat at dinner on Saturday, she is in a cold state.
Consider Luke, who is on a diet but agrees to go out for a business dinner, thinking that it will be easy enough to have just one cocktail and no dessert. But then the host orders a bottle of wine and the waiter brings by the dessert cart, and all bets are off.
Or Janet, who plans to go into a department store when it is having a big sale and just see whether it has something on sale that she really needs. Janet ends up with shoes that have no obvious use but look good, and they hurt only a bit (but were 70 percent off).
shopping as “therapy.” Self-control problems can
alcohol, a compulsion to exercise, and shopping as “therapy.”
Self-control problems can be illuminated by thinking about an individual as containing two semiautonomous selves: a farsighted “Planner” and a myopic “Doer.”
think of the Planner as speaking for your Reflective System, or the Mr. Spock lurking within you, and the Doer as heavily influenced by the Automatic System, or everyone’s Homer Simpson. The Planner is trying to promote your long-term welfare but must cope with the feelings, mischief, and strong will of the Doer, who is exposed
think of the Planner as speaking for your Reflective System, or the Mr. Spock lurking within you, and the Doer as heavily influenced by the Automatic System, or everyone’s Homer Simpson. The Planner is trying to promote your long-term welfare but must cope with the feelings, mischief, and strong will of the Doer, who is exposed to the temptations that come with arousal.
Some parts of the brain get tempted, and other parts are prepared to enable us to resist temptation
The optimistic Planner sets the alarm for 6:15 A.M., hoping for a full day of work, but the sleepy Doer turns off the alarm and goes back to sleep until 9:00. This can lead to fierce battles between the Planner and the Doer. Some Planners put the alarm clock on the other side of the room, so the Doer at least has to get up to turn it off, but if the Doer crawls back into bed, all is lost.
David’s inner Planner knew that he needed to stop procrastinating and get his thesis done, but his Doer was involved in many other more exciting projects and always put off the drudgery of writing up the thesis. (Thinking about new ideas is usually more fun than writing up old ones.)
According to economic theory (and simple logic), money is fungible, meaning that it doesn’t come with labels. Twenty dollars in the rent jar can buy just as much food as the same amount in the food
because the relevant account is already depleted.
evidence reveals that people are more willing to gamble with money that they consider house money.
When investments (say, in the stock market) pay off, people are willing to take big chances with their “winnings.” For example, mental accounting contributed to the large increase in stock prices in the 1990s, as many people took on more and more risk with the justification that they were playing only with their gains from the past few years.
Some people actually have trouble spending! If their problem is extreme, we call such people misers, but even regular folks can find that they don’t give themselves enough treats in life.
For each of us, using mental accounts can be extremely valuable. They make life both more pleasurable and more secure.
Econs (and some economists we know) are pretty unsociable creatures. They communicate with others only if they can gain something from the encounter, they care about their reputations (because a good reputation is valuable), and they will learn from others if actual information can be obtained,
Econs (and some economists we know) are pretty unsociable creatures. They communicate with others only if they can gain something from the encounter, they care about their reputations (because a good reputation is valuable), and they will learn from others if actual information can be obtained, but Econs are not followers of fashion.
most people learn from others. This is usually good, of course. Learning from others is how individuals and societies develop. But many of our biggest
most people learn from others. This is usually good, of course. Learning from others is how individuals and societies develop. But many of our biggest misconceptions also come from others.
It is almost as if people can be nudged into identifying a picture of a dog as a cat as long as other people before them have done so.
Sometimes people will go along with the group even when they think, or know, that everyone else has blundered.
We can see here why many traditions are robust over decades or centuries, even if they really are arbitrary, in the sense that they make no sense and serve no purpose.
why many groups fall prey to what is known as “collective conservatism”:
Asked privately, a mere 12 percent chose subversive activities. But when exposed to a group that unanimously selected that option, 48 percent of people made the same choice!15 In a similar
Asked privately, a mere 12 percent chose subversive activities. But when exposed to a group that unanimously selected that option, 48 percent of people made the same choice!
Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic.18 In late March 1954, a group of people in Bellingham, Washington, noticed some tiny holes, or pits, on their windshields.
If people in one part of the world are told that people in another part of the world are recycling, becoming vegetarians, or wearing masks, they could think: “Oh, I should do that too!” But they might also react this way: “Well, thank goodness I’m not like those people!” For choice architects who want to use social influences, a challenge is to work with, rather than against, people’s sense of who they are.
At one point, “Don’t Mess with Texas” was voted America’s favorite slogan by a landslide and was honored with a parade down New York City’s Madison Avenue. (We are not making this up. Only in America, to be sure.) More to the point: Within the first year of the campaign, litter in the state had been reduced by a remarkable 29 percent. In its first six years, there was a 72 percent reduction in visible roadside litter.
A public health initiative in India, designed to increase use of toilets, has emphasized Mahatma Gandhi’s commitment to cleanliness and so appealed directly to national pride.
Montanans fishing, skiing, and bowhunting, with the caption MONTANANS WEAR FACE COVERINGS ALL THE TIME.
dramatic example is Communism in the former Soviet bloc, which lasted in part because people were unaware of how large a share of the population despised the regime. As people became aware of what others actually thought, they were emboldened to say what they believed, and to act accordingly.
Consider, for example, the rise of gay marriage, #MeToo, and #BlackLivesMatter. All of these movements were fueled by visible actions, including vigorous social media campaigns, that permitted or encouraged people to reveal long-silenced anger and outrage.
Asking a large group of young married men in private whether they are in favor of female labor force participation, economist Leonardo Bursztyn and his colleagues learned that the overwhelming majority answer yes.
vivid example comes from an experiment in Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, they found that those men are profoundly mistaken about the social norm; they wrongly think that other, similar men, even those in their local community, do not want their wives to join the labor force.
“Nine out of ten taxpayers in Manchester pay on time.” The impact of these letters was substantial, increasing the number of people paying within the first twenty-three days by as much as five percentage points.24 That may not sound like a large
You’ve probably already guessed that asking guests to save the environment by reusing their towels wasn’t as effective as a message communicating a social norm: “Join your fellow guests in helping to save the environment. Almost 75 percent of guests . . . help by using their towels more
You’ve probably already guessed that asking guests to save the environment by reusing their towels wasn’t as effective as a message communicating a social norm: “Join your fellow guests in helping to save the environment. Almost 75 percent of guests . . . help by using their towels more than once.”
The researchers called such specific in-grouping “provincial norms.” As any adolescent will tell you, peer pressure is real.
business, the whole area would become less contested.
Every time someone shared, “I am gay,” or “I am a lesbian,” or “I am bisexual,” a small nudge was put in place. Once people began revealing their sexual orientation to friends and family, the floodgates started to open, perhaps especially when their family members were politicians who were members of a party opposed to this change.
You are trying to decide how to design the choice environment, what kinds of nudges to offer, and how subtle the nudges should be. What do you need to know to design the best possible choice environment?
Peter Gollwitzer, who found that people were more likely to fulfill their goals if they had made explicit “implementation intentions.”
the situation is not structured to provide good feedback.
Unless people go out of their way to experiment, they may never learn about alternatives to the familiar ones. If you take the longer route home every night, you may never learn there is a shorter one.
Someone can eat a high-fat diet for years without having any strong warning signs until they have a heart attack. When feedback is ineffective, we may benefit from a nudge.
Smart tourists often rely on others (waiters, for example) for help: “Most foreigners like x and hate y.” Even in less exotic locales, it can be smart to let someone else choose for you. Many of the best restaurants in the world give their diners very few choices. You might be asked whether you want the two-hour or three-hour treatment, and whether you have any dietary restrictions.
At the best sushi bars, the tradition is to let the chef decide what you eat. Just ask for “omakase” and you will eat well.
Choosing a car isn’t the hardest decision in the world, but exactly which features do you want your car to have? Traction control? Adaptive headlights? Blind-spot warning? Rear cross-traffic alert? When people have a hard time predicting how their choices will end up affecting their lives, they have less to gain from having numerous options and perhaps even from choosing for
The setup in the classic western movie version shares features of many scams and swindles that regularly reemerge in slightly different forms over the years. A “doctor” in a covered wagon comes into town and opens for business somewhere near the local saloon. He offers to sell bottles of his special brew of snake oil, which can cure whatever ails you. As it happens, someone in the crowd on crutches soon emerges and challenges the doctor, calling him a fraud. Pointing to his gimpy leg that prevents him from walking, he says, “I bet you can’t cure this, doc!” The doctor generously offers the poor man a free sample, and miraculously, the next night his leg is healed!
the question we want to discuss here is larger: whether competitive markets protect consumers from such scams. Sadly, the answer is no.
sports betting or do-it-yourself options trading. They compete by offering enticing environments, free drinks, and sometimes better odds. But no one has gotten rich by convincing people not to gamble.
Bars make a lot more money than Alcoholics Anonymous.
Isn’t it obvious that the largest buttons on a television remote control should be the power, channel, and volume controls?
how many remotes do we see that have the volume control the same size as the input control button (which, if pressed accidentally, can cause the picture to disappear, sometimes until a teenager can be found to fix things)?
The spirit of this chapter is that good design is often no more expensive than bad design. In fact, a simple plate that is labeled “push” has to be less expensive than an elaborate bronze or wooden pull.
Lewin argued that similarly tiny factors can create surprisingly strong inhibitors to behavior that people want to take. Often we can do more to facilitate good behavior by removing some small obstacle than by trying to shove people in a certain direction.
Most of the students were convinced by the lecture and said that they planned to go get the shot, but these good intentions did not lead to much action. Only 3 percent actually went and got the shot.
Yale seniors who were given some persuasive education about the risks of tetanus and the importance of going to the health center to receive an inoculation. Most of the students were convinced by the lecture and said that they planned to go get the shot, but these good intentions did not lead to much action. Only 3 percent actually went and got the shot.
Other subjects were given the same lecture but were also given a copy of a campus map with the location of the health center circled. They were then asked to look at their weekly schedules, make a plan for when they would go and get the shot, and look at the map and decide what route they would take. With these nudges, 28 percent of the students managed to show up and get their tetanus shot.
nine times as many students got shots, illustrating the potential power of channel factors. This is the same principle that was used in the get-out-the-vote study mentioned earlier.
public and private sectors. In
In 1938, Germany held an election in which voters were asked, “Do you approve of the reunification of Austria with the German Reich accomplished on 13 March 1938 and do you vote for the list of our Führer, Adolf Hitler?” As shown in Figure 5.2, the option “ya” was more than gently nudged.4 Similarly, in the private sector, firms often can and do choose defaults that are either well-meaning guesses about what their customers would prefer or self-serving grabs of privacy data or money.
For example, people will be more likely to override the default if the outcome is obviously bad and the cost of opting out is low. When most cars are started, the default setting for the sound system is to play the previous source at the volume setting last used. That works well enough if the car has only one driver, but a parent whose normal choice is a news station at a low volume will quickly change the volume, source, or both if the last user was a teenager who listens to hip-hop at high volume. In fact, the two drivers are likely to adopt the habit of immediately changing the music as soon as they enter the car (the same way that they alter the position of the driver’s seat and mirrors if they are very different heights). Modern cars allow the second adjustments to be automatic if the keys electronically identify the drivers. Maybe music will be next?
reflect an emerging legal right: the right not to be manipulated.) Active
reflect an emerging legal right: the right not to be manipulated.)
software example, it is really helpful to know what the recommended settings are. Most users do not want to have to read an incomprehensible manual to determine which arcane setting to select.
When choice is complicated and difficult, people might greatly appreciate a sensible default. It is hardly clear that they should be forced to choose.
your car makes an unpleasant sound.
If you wander into another lane, your car makes an unpleasant sound. If you back up and are close to hitting something, you hear a loud warning. If you drive for three hours or more without stopping, your car might ask you if you would like to stop for a cup of coffee.
some error-forgiving innovations are surprisingly slow to be adopted. Take the case of the gas tank cap. On most cars, the gas cap is now attached by a piece of plastic, so that when you remove the cap you cannot possibly drive off without it.
Once some carmaker had the good idea to include this feature, what excuse can there ever have been for building a car without one? Leaving the gas cap behind is a special kind of mistake psychologists call a “postcompletion” error.7 The idea is that when you have finished your main task, you tend to forget things relating to previous steps. Other examples include leaving your ATM card in the machine after getting your cash or leaving the original in the photocopier after getting your copies. Most ATMs (but still not all!) no longer allow this error because you get your card back immediately.
if you have to remove the card in order to get your cash, you will not forget to do so. Unless, of course, you forget why you came to the ATM.
The nozzles that deliver diesel fuel are too large to fit into the opening on cars that use gasoline, so it is not possible to make the mistake of putting diesel fuel in your gasoline-powered car (though it is still possible to make the opposite mistake).
common error was that the hose for one drug was hooked up to the wrong delivery port, so the patient received the wrong drug.
This problem was solved by designing the equipment so that the connectors were different for each drug. It became physically impossible to make this previously frequent mistake.
since people tend to take more pills as they age, adding another is not a problem. (Pill container boxes, one for each day, are useful nudges.)
Birth control pills present a special problem along these lines, because they are generally taken every day for three weeks and then skipped for one week. To solve this problem and to make the process automatic, the pills are sold in a special container that contains twenty-eight pills, each in a numbered compartment. Patients are instructed to take a pill every day, in order. The pills for days twenty-two through twenty-eight are placebos whose only role is to facilitate compliance for Human users.
Google was experimenting with a new feature of its email program, Gmail, that would solve this problem. A user who mentions the word attachment but does not include one would be prompted: “Did you forget your attachment?”
Visitors to London who come from the United States or other parts of Europe have a problem being safe pedestrians. They have spent their entire lives expecting cars to come at them from the left when they cross the street, and their Automatic System knows to look that way. But in the United Kingdom, automobiles drive on the left-hand side of the road, so the danger often comes from the right. Many pedestrian accidents occur as a result. The city of London tries to help with good design. On many corners, especially in neighborhoods frequented by tourists, the pavement has signs that say, “Look right!” After the initial publication of this book, Thaler became a frequent visitor to London and was always grateful to those signs for preventing unhappy collisions with oncoming traffic.
Tesla will alert a driver on a trip whether there is enough power left in the battery to reach the destination, and if not, it will alter the GPS directions to include a stop at a charging station.
How to solve this problem? Some helpful person invented a type of ceiling paint that goes on pink when wet but appears white when dry. Unless the painter is so colorblind that she can’t tell the difference between pink and white, this solves the problem.
A good system of choice architecture helps people to improve their ability to map choices onto outcomes and hence to select options that will make them better off.
Home improvement projects are often settings where this bias is observed. A family decides that after twenty years of neglect, the kitchen really needs to be upgraded. The initial to-do list includes new appliances and cabinets, but of course, the floor will be ruined during the construction, so we’d better replace that, and gosh, if we just pushed that wall out a bit, we could add a new window, which looks out on the patio, but oh dear, who wants to look at that patio . . . In the military this is called mission creep. Here we plead guilty to book revision creep. The revision that we planned to knock off during the summer was not given to the publisher until late November. However, to continue the home remodeling analogy, in spite of our slow pace, what we have here
Home improvement projects are often settings where this bias is observed. A family decides that after twenty years of neglect, the kitchen really needs to be upgraded. The initial to-do list includes new appliances and cabinets, but of course, the floor will be ruined during the construction, so we’d better replace that, and gosh, if we just pushed that wall out a bit, we could add a new window, which looks out on the patio, but oh dear, who wants to look at that patio . . . In the military this is called mission creep. Here we plead guilty to book revision creep. The revision that we planned to knock off during the summer was not given to the publisher until late November.
Sure, listing ingredients on the side of food packages
Two important topics are given new chapters early on. The first is what we call Smart Disclosure. The idea is that governments should consider the radical thought of moving at least into the twentieth century in the way they disclose important information.
listing ingredients on the side of food packages is useful, especially for those with very good eyesight, but shouldn’t Sunstein be able to search online for foods that contain shellfish, given that they can make him very sick?
The Internet is not exactly a cutting-edge technology. Widespread use of Smart Disclosure would make it possible to create online decision-making tools that we call choice engines, which can make many tasks as easy as it has become to find the best route to get to a new restaurant.
If you design the ballot voters use to choose candidates, you are a choice architect. If you organize a drugstore or a grocery, you are a choice architect (and you confront many of the questions that Carolyn did). If you are a parent describing possible educational options to your son or daughter, you are a choice architect. If you are a salesperson, you are a choice architect (but you already knew that).
Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. At one point, the authorities etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men often do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess, but if they see a target, attention and therefore accuracy are much increased.
The location of the coffee machines, for example, may influence workplace interaction.
Libertarian Paternalism
people should be “free to choose.” We strive to design policies that maintain or increase freedom of choice. When we use the term libertarian to modify the word paternalism,
We also acknowledge that if people are making really terrible choices and harming their future selves, nudges might not be enough. We’ll get to that, too.)
We know from decades of behavioral science research that people often make poor decisions in laboratory experiments. People also make plenty of mistakes in real life, which reinforces the view well stated by the Beatles: “we get by with a little help from our friends.” Our goal, in short, is to help people make the choices that they would have made if they had paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive ability, and complete self-control. (That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t sometimes stay out late, overeat, and have fun. As they say, “enjoy life now; this is not a rehearsal.”)
If people want to smoke cigarettes, eat a lot of candy, choose an unsuitable health care plan, or fail to save for retirement, libertarian paternalists will not force them to do otherwise—or even make things hard for them.
They are not Homo economicus; they are Homo sapiens. To keep our Latin usage to a minimum, we will hereafter refer to these imaginary and real species as Econs and Humans. Consider the issue of obesity. Rates of adult obesity in the United States are over 40 percent,1 and more than 70 percent of American adults are considered either obese or overweight.
According to the World Health Organization, obesity rates have risen threefold since 1980 in some areas of North America, the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, Australia, and China.
everything takes longer than you think, even if you know about the planning fallacy.* Thousands of studies confirm that human forecasts are flawed and biased.
consider what is called the status quo bias, a fancy name for inertia. For a host of reasons, which we shall explore, people have a strong tendency to go along with the status quo or default option.
Humans respond to incentives too, but they are also influenced by nudges.* By properly deploying both incentives and nudges, we can improve our ability to improve people’s lives, and help solve many of society’s major problems.
The first misconception is that it is possible to avoid influencing people’s choices. In countless situations, some organization or agent must make a choice that will affect the behavior of some other people.
Would anyone object to putting the fruit and salad before the desserts at an elementary school cafeteria if the result were to induce kids to eat more apples and fewer brownies? Is this question fundamentally different if the customers are teenagers, or even adults? Is a GPS device an intrusion on freedom, even if it is paternalistic, in the sense that it tries to tell you how to get to your preferred destination?
Freedom to choose is the best safeguard against bad choice architecture.
this book is not a call for more bureaucracy, or even for an increased role of government. We just strive for better governance.
the problem is that we are fallible and life is hard. If every time we went food shopping, we tried to solve the problem of choosing the very best possible combination of items to buy, we would never get out of the store.
“No more than 25 percent of the guests at a university dinner party can come from the economics department without spoiling the conversation.”
Tom Parker’s fascinating 1983 book, Rules of Thumb.
asking friends to send him examples. These include: “One ostrich egg will serve 24 people for brunch.” “Ten people will raise the temperature of an average size room by one degree per hour.”
When technology stocks have done very well, people might well buy technology stocks, even if by that point they’ve become a bad investment. People might overestimate some risks, such as a nuclear power accident, because of well-publicized incidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. They might underestimate others, such as strokes, because they do not get much attention in the media.
Linda’s description seems to match “bank teller and active in the feminist movement” far better than “bank teller.” As Stephen Jay Gould once observed, “I know [the right answer], yet a little homunculus in my head continues to jump up and down,
The “above-average” effect is pervasive. In some studies, 90 percent of drivers say they are above average behind the wheel. And nearly everyone thinks they have an above-average sense of humor, including some people who are rarely seen smiling. (That is because they know what is funny!) This applies to professors, too. One study found that about 94 percent of professors at a large university believed they were better than the average professor, and there is every reason to think that such overconfidence applies to professors in general.8 (Yes, we admit to this particular failing.)
about 40 to 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, and this is a statistic most people have heard.
about 40 to 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, and this is a statistic most people have heard. (The precise number is hard to nail down.)
around the time of the ceremony, almost all couples have been found to believe that there is approximately a zero percent chance that their marriage will end in divorce—even those who have already been divorced!9 (Second marriage, Samuel Johnson once quipped, “is the triumph of hope over experience.”)
Unrealistic optimism can explain a lot of individual risk-taking, especially in the domain of risks to life and health. Asked to envision their future, students typically say that they are far less likely than their classmates to be fired from a job, to have a heart attack or get cancer, to be divorced after a few years of marriage, or to have a drinking problem. Older people underestimate the likelihood that they will be in a car accident or suffer major diseases.
Lotteries are successful partly because of unrealistic optimism.11 Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive feature of human life; it characterizes most people in most social categories.
Yet when offered the opportunity to switch from a mug to a candy bar or vice versa, only one in ten switched. Loss aversion has a lot of relevance to public policy. If you want to discourage the use of plastic bags, should you give people a small amount of money for bringing their own reusable bag, or should you ask them to pay the same small amount for a plastic bag? The evidence suggests that the former approach has no effect at all, but that the latter works; it significantly decreases use of plastic bags. People don’t want to lose money, even if the amount is trivial.13 (Environmentalists, please remember this point.)
giving up what we have is painful. But the phenomenon has multiple causes. William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser have dubbed this behavior status quo bias,
in retirement savings plans most participants pick an asset allocation when they join the plan and then forget about it. A study conducted in the late 1980s looked at the decisions of participants in a pension plan that covered many college professors in the United States. The median number of changes in the asset allocation over a lifetime was, believe it or not, zero.
Many people often adopt what we call the “yeah, whatever” heuristic. A good illustration is the carryover effect that occurs when people start binge-watching a television series. On most streaming networks if you do nothing when you reach the end of one episode, the next one just starts showing. At that point many viewers (implicitly) say,
“yeah, whatever,” and keep watching. Many an intended short evening has dragged long into the night as a result, especially on shows with cliffhanger endings.
“Of one hundred patients who have this operation, ten are dead after five years.” If you’re like most people, the doctor’s statement will sound pretty alarming and you might not have the operation. Instinctively, you might think: “A significant number of people are dead, and I might be one of them!” In numerous experiments, people react very differently to the information that “ninety of one hundred are alive” than to “ten of one hundred are dead”—even though the content of the two statements is exactly the same.
consider the following information campaigns: (a) If you use energy conservation methods, you will save $350 per year; (b) If you do not use energy conservation methods, you will lose $350 per year. There is evidence that information campaign (b), framed in terms of loss, might be more effective than information campaign
two components or systems. One is fast and intuitive; the other is slow and reflective. Kahneman adopts the terminology of the psychology literature on which he draws, and calls these two components System 1 and System 2. One of us had trouble remembering which one is the fast one (it is 1), so we prefer to use names that remind the reader what they are. We call them the Automatic System and the Reflective System.
most people are overconfident and optimistic—but not everyone. In fact we have a good friend who has the opposite traits—he is never confident and is always worried about something, or many things.
Two Cognitive Systems: AUTOMATIC SYSTEM Uncontrolled Effortless Associative Fast
two kinds of thinking.17 Two Cognitive Systems: AUTOMATIC SYSTEM Uncontrolled Effortless Associative Fast Unconscious Skilled REFLECTIVE SYSTEM Controlled Effortful Deductive Slow Self-aware Rule-following
It was Declan’s System 1 that urgently wanted to go into toy stores, although his System 2 fully knew he had enough toys. For a few weeks, the explanation appeared to work, and Declan could pass by toy stores without uttering a word. But one day, he looked seriously at his father and asked, “Daddy, do I even have a System Two?”
Accomplished chess players have pretty fancy intuitions; their Automatic Systems allow them to size up complex situations rapidly and respond with both amazing accuracy and exceptional speed.
Automatic System is your gut reaction and the Reflective System is your conscious thought.
too much on our Automatic System. The Automatic System says, “The airplane is shaking, I’m going to die,” while the Reflective System responds, “Plane crashes are extremely rare!” The Automatic System says, “That big dog is going to hurt me,” and the Reflective System replies, “Most dogs are quite sweet.”
Reflective System. (Homer once replied to a gun store clerk who informed him of a mandatory five-day waiting period before buying a weapon, “Five days? But I’m mad now!”) One of our major goals in this book is to see how the world might be made easier, or safer, for the Homers among us (and the Homer lurking somewhere in each of us). If people can rely more on their Automatic Systems without getting into terrible trouble, their lives should be easier, better, and longer. Put another way, let’s design policies for Homer economicus.
Captain!”) In contrast, Homer Simpson seems to have forgotten where he put his Reflective System. (Homer once replied to a gun store clerk who informed him of a mandatory five-day waiting period before buying a weapon, “Five days? But I’m mad now!”) One of our major goals in this book is to see how the world might be made easier, or safer, for the Homers among us (and the Homer lurking somewhere in each of us). If people can rely more on their Automatic Systems without getting into terrible trouble, their lives should be easier, better, and longer. Put another way, let’s design policies for Homer economicus.
think of Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame as someone whose Reflective System is always in control. (Captain Kirk: “You’d make a splendid computer, Mr. Spock.” Mr. Spock: “That is very kind of you,
Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, which hugs the Lake Michigan coastline that is the city’s eastern boundary. The drive offers stunning views of Chicago’s magnificent skyline.
one stretch of this road that puts drivers through a series of S curves. These curves are dangerous. For a long time, many drivers failed to take heed of the reduced speed limit (25 mph) and wiped out. In response, the city adopted a distinctive way of encouraging drivers to slow down.
a sign painted on the road warning of the lower speed limit, and then a series of white stripes painted onto the road. The stripes do not provide much if any tactile information (they are not speed bumps) but rather just send a visual signal to drivers.
We have been nudged.
In economics (and in ordinary life), a basic principle is that you can never be made worse off by having more options, because you can always turn them down.
Human beings have been aware of the concept of temptation at least since the time of Adam and Eve, but for purposes of understanding the value of nudges, that concept needs elaboration. What does it mean for something to be “tempting”?
Thaler is a sucker for a good bottle of wine and has trouble resisting just one more small glass from a special bottle. Sunstein hates the stuff, but drinks Diet Coke in large quantities. For us the crucial fact about temptation is that people’s state of arousal varies over time. To
the two end points: hot and cold. When Sally is very hungry and appetizing aromas are emanating from the kitchen, we can say she is in a hot state. When she is thinking abstractly on Tuesday about how much food to eat at dinner on Saturday, she is in a cold state.
Thaler is a sucker for a good bottle of wine and has trouble resisting just one more small glass from a special bottle. Sunstein hates the stuff, but drinks Diet Coke in large quantities. For us the crucial fact about temptation is that people’s state of arousal varies over time. To simplify things, we will consider just the two end points: hot and cold. When Sally is very hungry and appetizing aromas are emanating from the kitchen, we can say she is in a hot state. When she is thinking abstractly on Tuesday about how much food to eat at dinner on Saturday, she is in a cold state.
Consider Luke, who is on a diet but agrees to go out for a business dinner, thinking that it will be easy enough to have just one cocktail and no dessert. But then the host orders a bottle of wine and the waiter brings by the dessert cart, and all bets are off.
Or Janet, who plans to go into a department store when it is having a big sale and just see whether it has something on sale that she really needs. Janet ends up with shoes that have no obvious use but look good, and they hurt only a bit (but were 70 percent off).
shopping as “therapy.” Self-control problems can
alcohol, a compulsion to exercise, and shopping as “therapy.”
Self-control problems can be illuminated by thinking about an individual as containing two semiautonomous selves: a farsighted “Planner” and a myopic “Doer.”
think of the Planner as speaking for your Reflective System, or the Mr. Spock lurking within you, and the Doer as heavily influenced by the Automatic System, or everyone’s Homer Simpson. The Planner is trying to promote your long-term welfare but must cope with the feelings, mischief, and strong will of the Doer, who is exposed
think of the Planner as speaking for your Reflective System, or the Mr. Spock lurking within you, and the Doer as heavily influenced by the Automatic System, or everyone’s Homer Simpson. The Planner is trying to promote your long-term welfare but must cope with the feelings, mischief, and strong will of the Doer, who is exposed to the temptations that come with arousal.
Some parts of the brain get tempted, and other parts are prepared to enable us to resist temptation
The optimistic Planner sets the alarm for 6:15 A.M., hoping for a full day of work, but the sleepy Doer turns off the alarm and goes back to sleep until 9:00. This can lead to fierce battles between the Planner and the Doer. Some Planners put the alarm clock on the other side of the room, so the Doer at least has to get up to turn it off, but if the Doer crawls back into bed, all is lost.
David’s inner Planner knew that he needed to stop procrastinating and get his thesis done, but his Doer was involved in many other more exciting projects and always put off the drudgery of writing up the thesis. (Thinking about new ideas is usually more fun than writing up old ones.)
According to economic theory (and simple logic), money is fungible, meaning that it doesn’t come with labels. Twenty dollars in the rent jar can buy just as much food as the same amount in the food
because the relevant account is already depleted.
evidence reveals that people are more willing to gamble with money that they consider house money.
When investments (say, in the stock market) pay off, people are willing to take big chances with their “winnings.” For example, mental accounting contributed to the large increase in stock prices in the 1990s, as many people took on more and more risk with the justification that they were playing only with their gains from the past few years.
Some people actually have trouble spending! If their problem is extreme, we call such people misers, but even regular folks can find that they don’t give themselves enough treats in life.
For each of us, using mental accounts can be extremely valuable. They make life both more pleasurable and more secure.
Econs (and some economists we know) are pretty unsociable creatures. They communicate with others only if they can gain something from the encounter, they care about their reputations (because a good reputation is valuable), and they will learn from others if actual information can be obtained,
Econs (and some economists we know) are pretty unsociable creatures. They communicate with others only if they can gain something from the encounter, they care about their reputations (because a good reputation is valuable), and they will learn from others if actual information can be obtained, but Econs are not followers of fashion.
most people learn from others. This is usually good, of course. Learning from others is how individuals and societies develop. But many of our biggest
most people learn from others. This is usually good, of course. Learning from others is how individuals and societies develop. But many of our biggest misconceptions also come from others.
It is almost as if people can be nudged into identifying a picture of a dog as a cat as long as other people before them have done so.
Sometimes people will go along with the group even when they think, or know, that everyone else has blundered.
We can see here why many traditions are robust over decades or centuries, even if they really are arbitrary, in the sense that they make no sense and serve no purpose.
why many groups fall prey to what is known as “collective conservatism”:
Asked privately, a mere 12 percent chose subversive activities. But when exposed to a group that unanimously selected that option, 48 percent of people made the same choice!15 In a similar
Asked privately, a mere 12 percent chose subversive activities. But when exposed to a group that unanimously selected that option, 48 percent of people made the same choice!
Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic.18 In late March 1954, a group of people in Bellingham, Washington, noticed some tiny holes, or pits, on their windshields.
If people in one part of the world are told that people in another part of the world are recycling, becoming vegetarians, or wearing masks, they could think: “Oh, I should do that too!” But they might also react this way: “Well, thank goodness I’m not like those people!” For choice architects who want to use social influences, a challenge is to work with, rather than against, people’s sense of who they are.
At one point, “Don’t Mess with Texas” was voted America’s favorite slogan by a landslide and was honored with a parade down New York City’s Madison Avenue. (We are not making this up. Only in America, to be sure.) More to the point: Within the first year of the campaign, litter in the state had been reduced by a remarkable 29 percent. In its first six years, there was a 72 percent reduction in visible roadside litter.
A public health initiative in India, designed to increase use of toilets, has emphasized Mahatma Gandhi’s commitment to cleanliness and so appealed directly to national pride.
Montanans fishing, skiing, and bowhunting, with the caption MONTANANS WEAR FACE COVERINGS ALL THE TIME.
dramatic example is Communism in the former Soviet bloc, which lasted in part because people were unaware of how large a share of the population despised the regime. As people became aware of what others actually thought, they were emboldened to say what they believed, and to act accordingly.
Consider, for example, the rise of gay marriage, #MeToo, and #BlackLivesMatter. All of these movements were fueled by visible actions, including vigorous social media campaigns, that permitted or encouraged people to reveal long-silenced anger and outrage.
Asking a large group of young married men in private whether they are in favor of female labor force participation, economist Leonardo Bursztyn and his colleagues learned that the overwhelming majority answer yes.
vivid example comes from an experiment in Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, they found that those men are profoundly mistaken about the social norm; they wrongly think that other, similar men, even those in their local community, do not want their wives to join the labor force.
“Nine out of ten taxpayers in Manchester pay on time.” The impact of these letters was substantial, increasing the number of people paying within the first twenty-three days by as much as five percentage points.24 That may not sound like a large
You’ve probably already guessed that asking guests to save the environment by reusing their towels wasn’t as effective as a message communicating a social norm: “Join your fellow guests in helping to save the environment. Almost 75 percent of guests . . . help by using their towels more
You’ve probably already guessed that asking guests to save the environment by reusing their towels wasn’t as effective as a message communicating a social norm: “Join your fellow guests in helping to save the environment. Almost 75 percent of guests . . . help by using their towels more than once.”
The researchers called such specific in-grouping “provincial norms.” As any adolescent will tell you, peer pressure is real.
business, the whole area would become less contested.
Every time someone shared, “I am gay,” or “I am a lesbian,” or “I am bisexual,” a small nudge was put in place. Once people began revealing their sexual orientation to friends and family, the floodgates started to open, perhaps especially when their family members were politicians who were members of a party opposed to this change.
You are trying to decide how to design the choice environment, what kinds of nudges to offer, and how subtle the nudges should be. What do you need to know to design the best possible choice environment?
Peter Gollwitzer, who found that people were more likely to fulfill their goals if they had made explicit “implementation intentions.”
the situation is not structured to provide good feedback.
Unless people go out of their way to experiment, they may never learn about alternatives to the familiar ones. If you take the longer route home every night, you may never learn there is a shorter one.
Someone can eat a high-fat diet for years without having any strong warning signs until they have a heart attack. When feedback is ineffective, we may benefit from a nudge.
Smart tourists often rely on others (waiters, for example) for help: “Most foreigners like x and hate y.” Even in less exotic locales, it can be smart to let someone else choose for you. Many of the best restaurants in the world give their diners very few choices. You might be asked whether you want the two-hour or three-hour treatment, and whether you have any dietary restrictions.
At the best sushi bars, the tradition is to let the chef decide what you eat. Just ask for “omakase” and you will eat well.
Choosing a car isn’t the hardest decision in the world, but exactly which features do you want your car to have? Traction control? Adaptive headlights? Blind-spot warning? Rear cross-traffic alert? When people have a hard time predicting how their choices will end up affecting their lives, they have less to gain from having numerous options and perhaps even from choosing for
The setup in the classic western movie version shares features of many scams and swindles that regularly reemerge in slightly different forms over the years. A “doctor” in a covered wagon comes into town and opens for business somewhere near the local saloon. He offers to sell bottles of his special brew of snake oil, which can cure whatever ails you. As it happens, someone in the crowd on crutches soon emerges and challenges the doctor, calling him a fraud. Pointing to his gimpy leg that prevents him from walking, he says, “I bet you can’t cure this, doc!” The doctor generously offers the poor man a free sample, and miraculously, the next night his leg is healed!
the question we want to discuss here is larger: whether competitive markets protect consumers from such scams. Sadly, the answer is no.
sports betting or do-it-yourself options trading. They compete by offering enticing environments, free drinks, and sometimes better odds. But no one has gotten rich by convincing people not to gamble.
Bars make a lot more money than Alcoholics Anonymous.
Isn’t it obvious that the largest buttons on a television remote control should be the power, channel, and volume controls?
how many remotes do we see that have the volume control the same size as the input control button (which, if pressed accidentally, can cause the picture to disappear, sometimes until a teenager can be found to fix things)?
The spirit of this chapter is that good design is often no more expensive than bad design. In fact, a simple plate that is labeled “push” has to be less expensive than an elaborate bronze or wooden pull.
Lewin argued that similarly tiny factors can create surprisingly strong inhibitors to behavior that people want to take. Often we can do more to facilitate good behavior by removing some small obstacle than by trying to shove people in a certain direction.
Most of the students were convinced by the lecture and said that they planned to go get the shot, but these good intentions did not lead to much action. Only 3 percent actually went and got the shot.
Yale seniors who were given some persuasive education about the risks of tetanus and the importance of going to the health center to receive an inoculation. Most of the students were convinced by the lecture and said that they planned to go get the shot, but these good intentions did not lead to much action. Only 3 percent actually went and got the shot.
Other subjects were given the same lecture but were also given a copy of a campus map with the location of the health center circled. They were then asked to look at their weekly schedules, make a plan for when they would go and get the shot, and look at the map and decide what route they would take. With these nudges, 28 percent of the students managed to show up and get their tetanus shot.
nine times as many students got shots, illustrating the potential power of channel factors. This is the same principle that was used in the get-out-the-vote study mentioned earlier.
public and private sectors. In
In 1938, Germany held an election in which voters were asked, “Do you approve of the reunification of Austria with the German Reich accomplished on 13 March 1938 and do you vote for the list of our Führer, Adolf Hitler?” As shown in Figure 5.2, the option “ya” was more than gently nudged.4 Similarly, in the private sector, firms often can and do choose defaults that are either well-meaning guesses about what their customers would prefer or self-serving grabs of privacy data or money.
For example, people will be more likely to override the default if the outcome is obviously bad and the cost of opting out is low. When most cars are started, the default setting for the sound system is to play the previous source at the volume setting last used. That works well enough if the car has only one driver, but a parent whose normal choice is a news station at a low volume will quickly change the volume, source, or both if the last user was a teenager who listens to hip-hop at high volume. In fact, the two drivers are likely to adopt the habit of immediately changing the music as soon as they enter the car (the same way that they alter the position of the driver’s seat and mirrors if they are very different heights). Modern cars allow the second adjustments to be automatic if the keys electronically identify the drivers. Maybe music will be next?
reflect an emerging legal right: the right not to be manipulated.) Active
reflect an emerging legal right: the right not to be manipulated.)
software example, it is really helpful to know what the recommended settings are. Most users do not want to have to read an incomprehensible manual to determine which arcane setting to select.
When choice is complicated and difficult, people might greatly appreciate a sensible default. It is hardly clear that they should be forced to choose.
your car makes an unpleasant sound.
If you wander into another lane, your car makes an unpleasant sound. If you back up and are close to hitting something, you hear a loud warning. If you drive for three hours or more without stopping, your car might ask you if you would like to stop for a cup of coffee.
some error-forgiving innovations are surprisingly slow to be adopted. Take the case of the gas tank cap. On most cars, the gas cap is now attached by a piece of plastic, so that when you remove the cap you cannot possibly drive off without it.
Once some carmaker had the good idea to include this feature, what excuse can there ever have been for building a car without one? Leaving the gas cap behind is a special kind of mistake psychologists call a “postcompletion” error.7 The idea is that when you have finished your main task, you tend to forget things relating to previous steps. Other examples include leaving your ATM card in the machine after getting your cash or leaving the original in the photocopier after getting your copies. Most ATMs (but still not all!) no longer allow this error because you get your card back immediately.
if you have to remove the card in order to get your cash, you will not forget to do so. Unless, of course, you forget why you came to the ATM.
The nozzles that deliver diesel fuel are too large to fit into the opening on cars that use gasoline, so it is not possible to make the mistake of putting diesel fuel in your gasoline-powered car (though it is still possible to make the opposite mistake).
common error was that the hose for one drug was hooked up to the wrong delivery port, so the patient received the wrong drug.
This problem was solved by designing the equipment so that the connectors were different for each drug. It became physically impossible to make this previously frequent mistake.
since people tend to take more pills as they age, adding another is not a problem. (Pill container boxes, one for each day, are useful nudges.)
Birth control pills present a special problem along these lines, because they are generally taken every day for three weeks and then skipped for one week. To solve this problem and to make the process automatic, the pills are sold in a special container that contains twenty-eight pills, each in a numbered compartment. Patients are instructed to take a pill every day, in order. The pills for days twenty-two through twenty-eight are placebos whose only role is to facilitate compliance for Human users.
Google was experimenting with a new feature of its email program, Gmail, that would solve this problem. A user who mentions the word attachment but does not include one would be prompted: “Did you forget your attachment?”
Visitors to London who come from the United States or other parts of Europe have a problem being safe pedestrians. They have spent their entire lives expecting cars to come at them from the left when they cross the street, and their Automatic System knows to look that way. But in the United Kingdom, automobiles drive on the left-hand side of the road, so the danger often comes from the right. Many pedestrian accidents occur as a result. The city of London tries to help with good design. On many corners, especially in neighborhoods frequented by tourists, the pavement has signs that say, “Look right!” After the initial publication of this book, Thaler became a frequent visitor to London and was always grateful to those signs for preventing unhappy collisions with oncoming traffic.
Tesla will alert a driver on a trip whether there is enough power left in the battery to reach the destination, and if not, it will alter the GPS directions to include a stop at a charging station.
How to solve this problem? Some helpful person invented a type of ceiling paint that goes on pink when wet but appears white when dry. Unless the painter is so colorblind that she can’t tell the difference between pink and white, this solves the problem.
A good system of choice architecture helps people to improve their ability to map choices onto outcomes and hence to select options that will make them better off.
