đź“š Book Notes: Nudge - Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Here are my notes from Nudge - Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness:
- Simply by rearranging the cafeteria, Carolyn was able to increase or decrease the consumption of many food items by as much as 25 percent. Carolyn learned a big lesson: school children, like adults, can be greatly influenced by small changes in the context. The influence can be exercised for better or for worse. For example, Carolyn knows that she can increase consumption of healthy foods and decrease consumption of unhealthy ones.
Carolyn is what we will be calling a choice architect. A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions. Although Carolyn is a figment of our imagination, many real people turn out to be choice architects, most without realizing it. If you design the ballot voters use to choose candidates, you are a choice architect. If you are a doctor and must describe the alternative treatments available to a patient, you are a choice architect. If you design the form that new employees fill out to enroll in the company health care plan, you are a choice architect. 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). - Small and apparently insignificant details can have major impacts on people’s behavior. A good rule of thumb is to assume that “everything matters.” In many cases, the power of these small details comes from focusing the attention of users in a particular direction. A wonderful example of this principle comes from, of all places, the men’s rooms at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. There the authorities have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men usually 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. According to the man who came up with the idea, it works wonders. “It improves the aim,” says Aad Kieboom. “If a man sees a fly, he aims at it.” Kieboom, an economist, directs Schiphol’s building expansion. His staff conducted fly-in-urinal trials and found that etchings reduce spillage by 80 percent.
- A nudge is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.
- It is true, of course, that some nudges are unintentional; employers may decide (say) whether to pay employees monthly or biweekly without intending to create any kind of nudge, but they might be surprised to discover that people save more if they get paid biweekly because twice a year they get three pay checks in one month.
- An especially good way to gain weight is to have dinner with other people. On average, those who eat with one other person eat about 35 percent more than they do when they are alone; members of a group of four eat about 75 percent more; those in groups of seven or more eat 96 percent more.
- Many of life’s choices are like practicing putting without being able to see where the balls end up, and for one simple reason: the situation is not structured to provide good feedback. For example, we usually get feedback only on the options we select, not the ones we reject.
- Birth control pills present a special problem along these lines, because they are 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 typically 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.
- Salience can be manipulated, and good choice architects can take steps to direct people’s attention to incentives. The telephones at the insead School of Business in France are programmed to display the running costs of long-distance phone calls. If we want to protect the environment and to increase energy independence, similar strategies could be used to make costs more salient. Suppose the thermostat in your home was programmed to tell you the cost per hour of lowering the temperature a few degrees during the heat wave. This would probably have more effect on your behavior than quietly raising the price of electricity, a change that will be experienced only at the end of the month when the bill comes. Suppose in this light that government wants to increase energy conservation. Increases in the price of electricity will surely have an effect; making the increases salient will have a greater effect. Cost-disclosing thermostats might have a greater impact than (modest) price increases designed to decrease use of electricity.
If you liked the above content, I'd definitely recommend reading the whole book. đź’Ż
Until We Meet Again...
đź–– swap
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