Nudging: How to Get People to Do the Right Thing
Sometimes it's better to lure -- not order -- people into the right choice.
Sept. 6, 2009 — -- "Nudge," a book by cognitive psychologist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein that came out last year, puts forward a simple thesis. Because people often behave unthinkingly, it's better in some cases to lure (or nudge) them into making the right choice rather than trying to convince them of its rightness and/or imposing legal sanctions against the wrong choices.
To achieve this end, common psychological foibles can be used, as well as appropriate "choice architectures" and default options.
The urinals at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam provide an odd introductory example of this. In an effort to reduce the amount of spillage on the floor, small depictions of houseflies were embossed on the porcelain at the base of the urinals. These "fly targets," which have since been adopted all over the world, reduced spillage by 80 percent without the necessity of written notices, larger basins or other expensive interventions.
A similarly non-directive nudge results from taping a picture of human eyes over an unattended receptacle meant to collect money on the honor system from the sale of, let's say, doughnuts or coffee.
Yet another is the placement of food in a school cafeteria line. If healthful foods are placed first, they're more likely to be chosen than if desserts or fried foods are at the beginning of the line.
Other cognitive lapses also give rise to nudges. "Save to Win," a savings program devised by Harvard Business School professor Peter Tufano, is a more recent instance. It relies on people's exaggerated estimation of their likelihood of winning a lottery.
A response to Americans' perennially low savings rate, the program induces the members of eight credit unions in Michigan to buy certificates of deposit by automatically enrolling purchasers in a lottery. The monthly drawings pay out $400 and the annual one $100,000. Bigger organizations would no doubt have bigger jackpots. The CD pays a slightly lower rate of interest than do standard CDs, presumably to pay for the lottery.
