Nudging traffic safety by visual illusions

Can you count the black spots? Traffic is fast and dangerous, and often it's fractions of a second that matters. While regulation and incentives are already in place, it's impossible to cover any situation and keep these structures in mind all the time. Using optical illusions like this one seems to be the perfect way to nudge traffic safety on the spot. Here follows some great examples for reflection.

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By Pelle Guldborg Hansen & Andreas Maaløe Jespersen

Nudging by visual illusions

Traffic is fast, furious and dangerous....

Nudge - By Definition

By Pelle Guldborg Hansen & Andreas Maaløe Jespersen

Confusing confusion


"The definition of nudge is vague and more work should be done on clarifying this before we can consider..." 

"Nudging is basically about controlling incentives - penalties and rewards..."


These are just some of the remarks we are often confronted with - even by Academics, including people who sit on boards and committees who's function is to hand out money and thus invest and direct future research.

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What is most disturbing about this, isn't that these remarks are plain wrong. Rather, it's that they seem to result from people confusing their own confusion with regard to some simple facts and concepts that may quite easily be checked.

Nudge - by definition
On page 6 in both the US and UK version of Thaler & Sunstein's Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth & Happiness (2008) it is written that:  

A nudge, as we will use the term, 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.

Now superficially, this may seem as a straight-forward definition liable for vagueness. However, what one has to remember, that this definition is coined against the background of behavioral economics. 

If you don't have the time or patience to sit down and work through the literature in this field, this is the rule of thumb: any intervention that would influence an unbounded, unrestricted rational agent, is not a nudge. Hence, a nudge does not invoke incentives - positive or negative.

At a more abstract level, a direct consequence of this is that 'a nudge' is defined as effecting a deviation from mathematically well-defined baseline models. Hence, saying that the definition of nudge is vague is straight-forwardly wrong.

A problem with the original definition   

However, the attentive reader will by now have discovered a flaw in Thaler & Sunstein's original definition (we think it is an unfortunate simplification). 

The payoff-functions of rational agents are affected by other things than mere economic variables. For instance, the expectation of cake, electric shock or social ostracism. Hence, restricting the definition to economic incentives seems wrong. For this reason we usually adopt the definition provided by Hausman & Welch (2010):

Nudges are ways of influencing choice without limiting the choice set or making alternatives appreciably more costly in terms of time, trouble, social sanctions, and so forth. They are called for because of flaws in individual decision-making, and they work by making use of those flaws. 

(Hausman & Welch 2010:126)

God and evil nudges
However, while Thaler & Sunstein as well as Hausman & Welch extends the notion of 'a nudge' to cover any attempt of influencing behavior - well- or ill-intended (in fact, Thaler & Sunstein's notion is even broader) - we suggest limiting the notion to only well-intended for several important conceptual reasons of conistency.*

Nudge - US paperback version 

Nudge US hardcover version

Nudge UK paperback version

This post draws on points from a forthcoming journal article of ours. Thus, if you intend to cite or use points from the above, please contact us.  

Why nudging is better than the fat tax and other tools of the trade

By Andreas Maaløe Jespersen & Pelle Guldborg Hansen

"We do not first see, then define,
we define first and then we see."
              - Walter Lippmann (cited in Plous 1993)

Taxation and regulation are the traditional tools of the trade in policy-making. Thus, we've just seen here in Denmark how policy-makers have tried to prevent people from eating unhealthy foods: the fat tax. 


But honestly, in the months that have past we are yet to actually observe someone saying "ooohh, my Danish pastry costs 9 cents more than a couple of months ago. I better cut down!" Is someone actually expecting this tax to change behavior? We doubt it, but let's play along.  


Tools of the trade
What the fat tax seems to confirm is the old saying: "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." (and additionally: if everyone expect you to use a hammer, they'll accept it, no matter how stupid the idea). 

credit to africa

In our jurney outside of Academia we've started to learn that this not only holds true in research, but also in the worlds of policy-making, marketing and advertisement as well. Seeking to influence behavior, policy-makers readilly opt for taxation and regulation, doctores opt for medicine, intellectuals opt for talking and teaching, and the advertising and marketing industry opt for hillariously expensive campaigns featuring material or events with half-naked women or celebreties (and often cutting expenses by finding someone who is both). 


We've also been confirmed in our belief that when policy-makers learn that their attempts to influence behavior by taxation and regulation fails, or when they find these meaures to be too invasive, they have for a long time turned to the advertisement and marketing industry - perhaps because it seems to be the most fun alternative. 


Measuring success
Yet, how is success usually measured in these branches? Well, the success of a new tax often seems to be measured by the tax collected, talk and teaching by the number of people who listens, and advertisements by the number of people who remembers to have seen the half-naked celebrety. 


The most recent plague in this business seems to the success meassured by the number of people signing up to a facebook group, or the number of people that have clicked a video on youtube - after all, numbers are objective, right?


However, notice that none of these approaches actually measures behaviour change! 


Self-fulfilling prophecies
When the rare occassion do happen and impact is actually measured on behavior or parameters closely associated with this, the tools of the trade are often given a biased evaluation. When these tools are seen to work (even the slightest), it is usually taken to confirm that we are using the right tools, but when they don't, it is just taken to confirm that we have not applied them with enough force. In sum: raise the taxes, harsher punishment, more information, more education, and more... well, half-naked celebreties.


Depending on one's point of view, this may be seen as (1) a reaction to sunk costs based on loss-aversion, (2) a reaction to the cognitive dissonance arising from being wrong, while at the same time believing oneself to be flawless, or (3) confirmation bias.

However, the most interesting reaction are the rare occasion where the tools of the trade are recognized to fail. In these cases, the people responsible for the behavior targeted are blamed.  Had they just been super-rational economic beings - as we all would like to be - they would have reacted in the way intended and according to their own interests. They're to blame! Not us!


Nudge
Readers of this blog will know that Nudge offers a different set of tools aimed at influencing the same behavior as usually targeted by the tools of the trade. However, it is important that we remember not to make the same mistake as the more "experienced players" in the game of behavioral change. 

Thus, it is important to remember that the nudge-doctrine is not a catch-all strategy that completely wipes out the need for more traditional policy measures (a). Nor does signs of success imply with necessity that we should always be restricted to keeping within the nudge-doctrine. There might be cases where stronger interventions are needed.

Instead Nudge should be seen as an addition to the already existing toolbox.

Still, the nudge-doctrine does possess one strict advantage over other tools of the trade. It expands the perception of what is constitutive of the behavior targeted and requires a good account of this behavior.

When we fail, we're to blame - not them.