How to nudge your bartender to give you a bigger drink

By Katrine Lund Skov & Pelle Guldborg Hansen

Low on cash?
At the end of the month, when the money is low, we often find ourselves Friday night at a bar stuck with the problem of maximizing fun (read: alcohol) at the lowest cost. To many this means ordering cheap brands, but here’s how to nudge your bartender to fill the glass more than he intends so you can stick with the good stuff.

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In the book Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink, Wansink explains how the shape of glasses has an effect on just how much people pour into them. As it turns out, people pour 20 to 30% more fluid into a glass when it is short and wide rather than tall and slender.

If you have problems believing this, then you might want to read up on Wansink’s study.

In this Wansink asked 45 bartenders pour up 40-ml. of liquor into various types of glasses. While some of the bartenders were men, some women, some young, some old, some working at expensive restaurants serving Dom Pérignon, others working at places usually serving tequila shots, they all had at least 5 years of experience. While the bartenders didn’t have much of a problem when the glasses were tall and slender, none of them were able to pour the right amount of liquor into glasses when these were short and wide. Instead, they poured 37% too much up.

Thus, if you want to maximize the amount of liquor relative to cost, please ask your bartender to give you a wider, though shorter glass, instead of the regular tall and slender one. You might just end up with a bigger drink which ultimately will allow you to stick to the good stuff.

Low on calories?

Fortunately, this nudge can also be used the other way around. When serving expensive or high calorie drinks for yourself or for your dinner guests, give them tall and slender glasses. For water, use the short glasses.

How come a simple design can fool us?
If you take a look at the figure to the right, which line do you find longer?

The vertical one!

Nonetheless, this is not the case. Both lines have the exact same length. However, we automatically find the vertical line longer due to a visual illusion. This is also what happens when we, or even the experienced bartenders, are pouring up liquor. The tall and slender glasses appear smaller, than the low and wide glasses, why you can nudge a bartender, your guests or even yourself to drink more or less all depending upon your intentions.

P.s. One of us, Pelle, used to be a bartender for many years. He also makes the mistake. Still, as you probably have noticed most regular restaurants have adopted the standard counter nudge of using measuring cups and like instruments. More expensive restaurants, however, are still usually too proud to use such rude instruments for their fine liquors.

How to Nudge your Xmas dinner even better

By Katrine Lund Skov & Pelle Guldborg Hansen

Recently we wrote about how the size of your plate affects how much you eat. But at Christmas people take eating a step further. In Denmark alone 50 – 100 people end up hospitalized because they eat too much.

In this post we continue in the food & Christmas section, and let you know, how to nudge your family to love the Xmas dinner even more – after all you have prepared this for several hours, or perhaps even days!

First of all you can put a lot of salt sugar and fats in the food. Our ancestors ate salt to prevent dehydration, fat helped them to fill up their calorie reserves for winter seasons and sugar helped them know the difference between sweet eatable berries, and sour poisonous berries (Wansink 2008:188). This has given humans an insatiable craving for these ingredients, which you can take advantage of. Though, if you want your family members to be able to walk around the Christmas tree you probably shouldn’t.

Confirmation bias at the X-mas dinner

Wansink's bestselling book

Instead use our plan B: Just tell them how delicious it’s going to be. Let them know it’s home cooked. How you have used special recipes. How creamy, juicy and delicious you have prepared it to be - use details to tell them exactly just how tasty your home cooked Christmas dinner will be.

At least this is what American nutrition professor Brian Wansink’s (1960) suggest as to how to turn the confirmation bias to our advantage: If we believe that the food we are about to eat will taste good, our taste buds can be preprogrammed.

To examine just how effective the confirmation bias is, Wansink sat up a test where 32 persons had to test the taste of a new strawberry yoghurt flavor. Wansink didn’t want the appearance of the yoghurt to have any influence on how well they liked it, why they ate it in a dark lab. 19 contestants told that it had a great strawberry taste, and one contestant even said it was her new favorite. There was just one twist to the test – it was not strawberry yoghurt, it was chocolate yoghurt. Just by telling the contestants it was strawberry yoghurt, their taste buds got preprogrammed and thereby told them so. Restaurants have used the trick of our confirmation bias for several years. Wansink calls this the magic of the menu card. Similarly, you can preprogram your guests to enjoy your Christmas dinner even more than they probably already would have merely by telling how delicious it is.

Merry X-mas from the iNudgeYou-team!

PS. Make the table decoration beautiful. Just by having a great mood setting atmosphere your family members will enjoy the whole arrangement even better, which also will effect their appreciation of the dinner.

Nudge in business: mission impossible or win-win?

By Andreas Maaløe Jespersen & Pelle Guldborg Hansen

The nudge-doctrine is primarily developed as a strategy for creating smarter public solutions in health, economy and citizenship. But as the idea has evolved and disseminated, private companies and non-profit organizations have shown a keen interest in adopting nudge-like strategies as well. 

Credit to Xedos4

Businesses in the private market have a long history of using behavioral strategies when engaging with their customers, and they definitely have a lead on the public institutions when it comes to knowledge about their customers behavior and how to affect it. 

In the private market this has traditionally been referred to as marketing strategies, and it covers everything from fancy "buy one get one for free" offers to the supermarket's space-management that always makes us buy more than we thought we needed. 

At just a quick glance marketing and nudge could easily be confused as being the same thing - they both shape behavior by adjusting the context in which we choose or our perception thereof, and they both aim at actual behavior change rather than just information change. But in fact, there is especially one key factor that separates nudging from marketing, and prompts the question “is nudge really a viable strategy for businesses?” 

The key to unlocking the answer is found in the observation that in traditional marketing, there is no real need for the concept 'nudge'.

This crucial element for this difference is that a nudge by definition aims at making people better of: according to their own reflected judgment. This means, that when we nudge people, we have to make certain that we nudge them in a direction they themselves would have taken if they had thought things through and following had unlimited energy to constantly monitor their preferences, without restricting those who reach different conclusions than then one nudged for. 

Credit to Xedos4

Marketing usually aims at increasing profits, and usually does this without considering what people would actually prefer if given the time to think things through. As a result increasing profits often make people worse off according to their own judgment. No one thinks that leaving a supermarket having spend 30 pct more than they initially planned actually leaves better them off (especially not when the 30 pct is spend on items that will also ruin their desire to loose weight), and who is really satisfied by watching money disappear every month for a fitness subscription they no longer use?

Of course, when it has already happened, we are rarely willing as consumers to admit our own failure, and to resolve the resulting cognitive dissonance we come up with reasons that rationalize our actions to save our self-image as rational and responsible decision makers.  

The difference between nudge and marketing comes down to which end we aim to satisfy - the customer's or the business? Unsurprisingly these elements are not as incompatible as they initially seem - take a company like Apple - who have made a hefty profit of supplying their customers with gadgets that are user friendly and intuitive, or a company like Amazon how have revolutionized customer service from something that used to be painful and slow to a pleasant hassle free process.


In fact, a hall-mark of paying proper attention to the nudge-doctrine and getting acquainted with insights from behavioral economics, cognitive psychology and marketing is that it open up new alleys for identifying win-win strategies in the interaction between marketing and consumer welfare. Why not sell more mineral water instead of more softdrinks? And why not sell more whole wheat bread instead of bad white toast bread?   

If businesses are serious about nudge - we hope that the future will bring supermarkets that make you healthier by default, fitness subscriptions that automatically goes on time-out when you're not using them and plane tickets that actually state the full costs before you buy them - only by then can the market truly be said to be nudgers.

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.

Interview with Richard Thaler and Guldborg Hansen

By Pelle Guldborg Hansen

Yesterday, The Engineer - a newspaper with approx. 60.000 subscribers (mostly engineers for some odd reason!) - featured a long article about nudging. The article incorporates and is based on an interview with Prof. Richard Thaler (Chicago Booth) and Pelle Guldborg Hansen (Co-Director of ISSP and Chairman of the Danish Nudging Network) given Oct. 22 - the day after Prof. Thaler's ISSP Public Lecture about nudging held at Metropol.

The article is written by Robin Engelhard who is a highly respected science journalist in Denmark. The interview shows why Robin Engelhardt is highly respected - it is both sound, critical and balanced.

If you know how to read Danish (or just how to use google translate), but don't subscribe to The Engineer you may read the unedited edition of the article at Robin's Depot.