Nudgetopia

In a world of increasing globalization people with very different experiences and backgrounds are bound to interact even more intensely. The nudge approach offers its own ways of smoothing the process and Singapore leads the way.

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Traffic Nudge: Countdown Traffic Lights

Green man walk, Red man STOP! - but the red man not only stops you from walking, he also prevents you from thinking of much else than when the lights turn green again. Faced with the uncertainty, we all know how impatience starts to build up threatening to turn us into jaywalkers.

Read the full blog-post here: Traffic Nudge: Countdown Traffic Lights

New Op-Ed on Nudging Smokers Away from Tobacco Risks

A new Op-ed by Alberto Alemanno on "Nudging Smokers Away from Tobacco Risks" has just appeared on RegBlog.

... read more about it on our new site.

Thaler and Hansen take up prompted choice for organ donation in Denmark

Prompted choice in US and UK 

Contrary to what is often thought by commentators Thaler and Sunstein argues for prompted choice for registering for organ donation in Nudge: Improving decision on health, wealth and happiness - not presumed consent.

As Thaler and Sunstein reports in, prompted choice has already been introduced with success in Illinois, US.

Since then Thaler has been advisor for the UK Behavioral Insight Team (the so-called "Nudge-unit") - a collaboration that led to the introduction on prompted choice in the UK last year.

In a recent OPC in The American Journal of Bioethics titled 'Getting the purpose of mandated choice wrong: Is Increasing Supply of Donated Cadaver Organs really what we want to nudge?' I've defended prompted choice against criticism suggested by Whyte et al. supporting presumed consent (see paper here).

Prompted choice in Denmark?

Against this background it was only a natural next step that we... read the rest here.

Nudge, Fun Theory and the role of incentives in libertarian paternalism

Recently Richard Thaler featured with the Op. ed. in the New York Times:  Making Good Citizenship Fun. In this he mentions the Piano Stairs of Volkswagen sponsored Fun Theory as a prominent example of how government may include positive reinforcement as an effective tool to encourage citizens to engage in civic behavior.

As readers of this blog are likely to have noticed we have our qualms and concerns with the validity of the Piano Stairs of Volkswagen Sponsored Fun Theory as well as with the place of Fun Theory within the nudge approach to behavioral change.

On the first node, there is little evidence of (if any at all), and we have little reason to believe that the piano stairs work outside touristic settings. On the second node, the piano stairs introduces incentives and thus breaks with the definition of a nudge.

Still, in our outreach work (lectures, workshops, etc.) we constantly experience how strongly attracted decision and policy makers are to Fun Theory - even when the arguments are put forth and the missing validity is pointed out....

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Yes! We are on CNN.com!

I promised to say when it would happen.

Richard Thaler, Robert Cialdini, and David Halpern... they are definitely on the top 5 list of my intellectual heroes. Needless to say, I'm very proud to see my name next to theirs... and then it's on CNN.com.  Now I've said it and tomorrow will be one of those days where our hard work will feel a little less hard.

Remember to follow us by subscribing on WWW.INUDGEYOU.COM and then check out:

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/08/tech/innovation/green-nudge-environment-persuasion/index.html

Sincerely yours, Pelle

Green nudge: The Wattson clock cuts your electricity bill with style

Green nudges may improve the road to a more sustainable world. We take a look at how the Watson Clock nudges you to cut down on the electricity.

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The Watson ClockYou might remember the OKITE clock we featured a while back, which effectively countered our own laziness and inability to get up on time by tweeting your friends everytime you hit snooze?

Now we turn to a clock with an even greater potential – Wattson from the company Energeno. Wattson initially looks just like a ordinary although fancy clock, but along with the clock you get a clip and a transmitter. These are connected to your home´s electricity meter and with them connected, Wattson starts measuring your total energy of your home's use in real time. Besides giving you the watts used, Wattson can calculate the costs and give you an idea of how much money your air-con or your fancy stereo is actually burning up. On top of that, Wattson can be made to glow in different lights that correspond to your energy usage, blue for low energy use, purple for average and red for high.

How does it work?
The Wattson clock qualifies as a nudge, since it doesn't really give you any new information. You could easily get the same data from your home's energy meter, look up the price for every watt consumed and calculate your costs. It doesn´t change the options you have, you still need to regulate your electric products yourself.

What it does, and does well, is that it predicts how we are going to act and is designed to counter that. We know that we should be aware of our exact energy spending, but inertia postpones looking up the watts and calculating the costs. Even if we do look it up, it's an abstract number and we have to constantly update it if we want it to be meaningful. By giving us the number in real time, and calculating the costs for us, Wattson makes it a salient piece of information that we can then act on all the time. It even predicts that we would probably come to ignore even this very salient information after a short while when the novelty wears of, and counters this by making its presence felt with the different lights. By hooking it up to your computer, you can store the information and see your energy usage go down over a period of time, which encourages you to keep saving or risk loosing money.

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Cost and benefit
If you´re worried about the costs of the clock, we can tell you that the developers at Energeno claims it reduces energy usage by 25 pct and given the features and their collaboration with how we humans work, we're pretty sure that's this estimate is likely to be reliable. Given that a typical Danish household consumes 3-5.000 kWh per year – the clock pays for itself within a half to a whole year while saving the environment for a lot of co2.

By Andreas Maaløe Jespersen

Green nudge: trayless cafeterias for reducing food waste

We do throw out an incredible amount of food, and little do we think about the role that trays in cafeterias play in this. But the truth can be surprising.

A tray of spicy dishes
At the moment I’m living in wonderful Singapore. A couple of days ago I got shown around the city by an Indonesian guy, who lives partly in Indonesia and Singapore. After a long walk at the Marina Bay, we went for some Asian food at a cafeteria. Asian food is amazingly delicious, but, as you probably already know, it is usually also really, really spicy.

In the cafeteria I grabbed a tray and walked around selecting a series of dishes – and as long as there was room on my tray, I kept putting food on it. But imagine the size of a tray, and compare it with the size of an average plate - it may be difficult to eat up a plate of food, but very few people are actually able to eat an entire tray of food! Unintentionally, I was headed either for a severe stomach ache, or making a rather large contribution to the global problem of food waste.

After trying most the food, burning of my tongue and sweating chili out of my forehead I had to give up. This definitely wasn’t in the favor of my Indonesian friend who pointed at me: “Eat up! Don’t throw food away!” And he couldn’t be more right. (Though, I am pretty sure, that I would have pasted out eating up the rest).

How trays contribute to food waste and how to prevent it
We do throw out an incredible amount of food, and little do we think about the role that trays play in this. However, a study at...

read the rest at our new and improved site: www.inudgeyou.com

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.

READ THE IMPROVED AND REVISED VERSION OF THIS TEXT

By Pelle Guldborg Hansen & Andreas Maaløe Jespersen

Nudging by visual illusions

Traffic is fast, furious and dangerous....

Green nudges: saving trees by default

Credit: David Castillo Dominici

Computers and the Internet could save us millions of trees as well as dollars each year. Still, we stick to our habits and keep on harming the environment because of the status quo bias. In this post we give you a neat little trick to help you save the environment as well as your money - nudging the default.    

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Teaching and preaching
Though, we now read books on our iPad's and Kindles, research papers on our laptops and buy train tickets on our smart phones there is still one place where we use a great amount of paper – our educational institutions and our workplaces.

I remember when I was just a little girl our teacher used to preach about how there wouldn’t be any trees to climb, if we weren’t careful with the paper we used. Usually, these sermons were more like prayers since it would only take a short while before we had slipped into our usual habits for using paper - after all, it seemed that no matter how much paper we used, the trees were always there in the school yard the next day.

Obviously, it isn’t only children who are immune to these kinds of preaches. Adults are as well. So how do we nudge people to save paper, short of providing the feedback by cutting down trees outside their windows?

Handing in your paper assignment

Each semester millions of students hand in their essays and assignments on printed paper. Multiply these millions of assignments with the number of the pieces of papers and you could probably reach the moon.

Credit: Salvatore Vuono

For instance, a very conservative estimate for Denmark would be that there are approx. 200.000 students. If each hand in 20 pages twice a year (very very conservative estimate), that makes 8.000.000 pieces of paper. A piece of paper weight 4,8 gr. Thus, the total weight would be 38.400 KG paper. According to some websites it takes 1 tree to produce 2,6 KG of paper. That makes 14.769 trees!... just for the number of university assignments handed in! 

By the way 2,6 KG is what one of those boxes of office paper weights - so it seems that you're cutting a tree down for every box that you open.

(We would be very happy if anyone out there has more precise numbers)

Saving trees by default

While most of us already think of the world in a sustainable perspective by default, few of us have truly aligned our behavior and decisions with this. We mostly do our work and business as usual, and only activate our environmental perspective when prompted.

However, Rutgers University decided to nudge themselves by having their printers switched to printing double sided by default. This saved 7 million sheets of paper in just one semester!

Status Quo bias
Studies as well as real interventions thus show that just by installing printers with the standard option of printing doubled-sided as a default makes us much more likely to use this option.

Why? Because of the status quo bias.

You, or let's say a friend of yours, is probably familiar with buying a magazine subscription because it came with a free gift. But your friend probably also used an unplanned amount of money on the magazine subscription afterwards, because he didn’t make the necessary phone call to cancel the subscription again. Or perhaps your screen saver is still the same as when you received your computer? Or, you still haven't signed up for organ-donation, although you would be willing to donate your organs if the relevant worst case scenario should arise.

Credit: digitalart

You can blame all of this on the status quo bias. The status quo bias keeps us from changing how things are, and instead leaves us floating with the stream.

But as well as magazine companies can take advantage of this bias, it can also be nudged to work in our favor. By installing doubled-sided print as the default, you have to be prompted by a special reason to print one-sided papers before you care about switch the print option back to one-sided prints.

This is an easy change, with a massive beneficial result to help our environment.

How about you - what is your printer set up to?

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By Katrine Lund Skov 
with Pelle G. Hansen (since he was never a little girl)

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 - 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.  

Nudge yourself to a healthier life: plate size

By Pelle Guldborg Hansen

This is a classic. Still, we thought that X-mas might just be the right occasion to write about Wansink's famous study of the effect that your plate's size has on your intake of calories.

Mindless eating
Brian Wansink is professor in consumer behavior and nutritional science. However, to most people outside of academia he is perhaps best known as the author of Mindless Eating: Why we eat more than we think (2006).

The multiple studies of food psychology and behavior reported by Wansink in Mindless eating carries a simple message: most of our eating behavior occurs through non-conscious processes and is thus also affected by cues, feats, and factors that we do not know about. In the language of Kahneman: most of our eating behavior is controlled by System 1.

Plate size
One of the features that affect how much we eat and hence also how many calories we consume is plate size. In a study carried out by Wansink and his team it was shown that moving from a 12-inch dinner plate to a 10-inch dinner plate leads people to serve and eat 22% less!*

Obviously, plate size shouldn't have any effect on an unconstrained and hyper-rational person. Such a person would have a plan as to how much to eat and know exactly how to carry this plan out to perfection.

Such ideal behavior is by no means unattainable. Heck, I once had great success monitoring my calorie intake through an electronic food diary called Madlog. The only problem was that my everyday life didn't allow be to give that much attention to closely monitor my intake. Weighing and measuring everything that I was eating throughout the day while doing my job and enjoying myself with my family turned out to be impossible. It just required too much effort and attention from system 2.

Consequently, as so many others, I need to find some simple and smart ways and heuristics to nudge myself to a healthier lifestyle... and when we can't manage to monitor the details of everything we eat, plate size does matter.

Why plate size matters
There are several causes to why the size of your plate matters. For one, the size of your plate effects the visual representation and following evaluation of how much food is on your plate.  

Of course, while this may cause you to put more food on your plate, it isn't sufficient for making you eat more. Unfortunately, your brain takes care of that - often even if you think about.

For one, food on a plate in front of you acts as a multi-level sensory cue for your brain to activate eating behavior and continue eating until you reach your physical limit. Behind this behavior lies the fact, that we didn't evolve at McDonalds, but in environments where scarcity of food was the fundamental human condition. Perhaps that explains why my Grand mom always says "eat while you can".   

Second, it takes a while before your stomach gets around sending that signal to your brain, that you're full. Some say that it takes as much as 15 minutes - and those 15 minutes can become very dangerous for your health.

Finally, there are social norms associated with leaving food on your plate. These might in turn be associated with norms of masculinity, politeness and norms of sustainability - it's masculine to eat much, it's not polite to leave food on the plate when you're a guest and it's just plain wrong to throw out food. All of these values enforce the norm of finishing your plate - especially when you think about it.

Do yourself a favor - nudge thyself
Now there is little chance that your brain or stomach will change. Further, the values coordinated through social norms may be to our liking and thus a matter of preference that it is not our job to judge or influence.

But fortunately, the size of our plates is under your control and thus you can nudge yourself. By simply finding some smaller plates you can affect the amount of food you eat. Also, you may do your guest a favor at the X-mas dinner - after all, it's unfortunate to kill your guests slowly by having norms of masculinity, politeness and sustainability finish them off.


Other blog entries on food and health:

How to grow your own nudge

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

A Nudge to walk around the Earth

Read more: 
Wansink, Brian (2006) Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. Bantam Books.

* "The Perils of Plate Size: Waist, Waste, and Wallet (2008), Brian Wansink and Koert van Ittersum, Journal of Marketing (the paper is not yet published, but it may be downloaded here). 

Nudging employees' behaviours

See the video here

By Pelle Guldborg Hansen

I just found this on Youtube and thought I would share it with all of you. The original content description is as follows:  

"On 23rd November 2011, Prof. Adrian Furnham (UCL) gave a talk to the guests of Mountainview Learning on how the Nudge theory can be used by HR professionals to increase employee motivation and engagement.

In the first part of this talk, Prof. Furnham discusses why Nudge is such an attractive concept and begins to explain how human decision-making process works."

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.

Nudge: when knowledge becomes a Democratic challenges

By Pelle Guldborg Hansen & Andreas Maaløe Jespersen

Some days ago we were asked by the leading Danish forum for communication professionals to write something up about the nudge-doctrine. You may find the result HERE.

While it's in Danish, Google translate shoudl be able to do the job.

NudgeNews, December, 2011

By Pelle Guldborg Hansen

Everyday quite a few articles, blogs and papers on Nudge and related issues are made available online. NudgeNews is our way of trying to facilitate a better understanding of nudging by giving you access and an overview.

Dec. 14, 2011

Nudge-initiative to nudge consumers toward sustainable practices

(consumer, sustainability, marketing)

Akshay R. Rao at the Carlsson School of Management, University of Minnesota is reported to have started up an initiative or consortium involving goverment agencies as well as companies aimed at boosting research in earth-friendly behavior and products:

Initiative to nudge consumers toward sustainable practices

Suggestion that UK government should counter market's use of behavioral economics with a ban

(consumer, alcohol consumption, marketing)

One of the issues that keeps coming up, is how to counter the industry's use of behavioral economics, especially when it leaves to severely harmful behavior. In this piece from The Telegraph Andrew M. Brown provides a balanced and sound argument for why we should consider to counter use of insights from behavioral economics by banning multi-buy deals in relation to alcohol consumption:  

Boozy Britain: your very good health?

Dec. 12, 2011

UK to nudge job creation

(work, incentive schemes)

Ed Davey, employment relations minister in the UK, has announced a plan for re-arranging incentives for employment providers that will have them pay more attention to whether they provide a sustainable job opportunity. Read more about it in the following two links:

A small job can boost job creation says Davey

'Nudge in the right direction' helpful for job creation  

Dec. 4, 2011

Nudging for healthier hospital cafeterias

(health, cafeterias, food)

A new study evaluates cafeterias in children's hospitals. Standards on how to present food and other nudges could be part of such evaluations in the future, says Dr. Lenard Lesser, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation clinical scholar at UCLA's medical school and the lead author of the study.

UCLA study on healthy food at children's hospitals

Dec. 2, 2011

Smarter lunch rooms
(health, cafeterias, food)

Stargazette.com reports on a programme called "smarter lunch rooms" working in collaboration with Cornell. The article features little documentation, but some great ideas and illustrations of how one works with nudging healthier food choices in cafeterias and lunch rooms.

School lunchrooms strive to get smarter

Dec. 1, 2011

Nudging in the UK 
(nudge politics, problematic cases, car-theft)

A blog update on Marketing about Nudging in the UK by Nicola Clark seemingly based on a talk by Sam Nguyen from the Behavioural Insight Team at Marketing's Trends+ conference.   While there is no direct point in the update, it does feature three pieces of interest: (1) an attempt to get UK consumers to use more money with a nudge that seems samewhat unlikely to succeed; (2) the usual case of a  seemingly problematic case out of reach for the nudge-doctrine; and (3) a very interesting report of a social disclosure nudge in car-theft security.

Nudge theory or fudge theory?

Nudging traffic: How to save lives in a hurry

By Katrine Lund Skov & Andreas Maaløe

I’m a little late again. Driving a bit too fast, but what the hell, if that’s what it takes to avoid the bosses accusing glance of ‘you’re-late-again’ then it’s worth it right? Speeding just a little can’t be that dangerous anyway. Tomorrow I’ll get out of the door in time. I promise!

Habit and overconfidence on the road
How many of the 2381 persons that got injured or killed in traffic last year reasoned somewhat like the above before they got in their cars? Or the previous year, where that number was 2801. The good news is, that this year the number of accidents and fatalities has gone down by 500, so what happened? To answer that question we must first understand what caused the accidents. In a review from the Danish Road Safety Council, 75% of the interviewed speed offenders said it was due to a lack of attention from their part, because they were in a hurry or the thought that the road conditions invited faster driving.

If anything, our behaviour in traffic is mostly automatic, something we do everyday without thinking, a habit. The potential catastrophic consequences of bad driving are hard to imagine. In addition, it always happen to someone else – right? In behavioral economics this latter bias in judgement is known as the overconfidence effect. When you ask a class of students, usually 90% estimate that they will do better than the average on the final test.

Finally, and the only feedback we get from erroneous driving is when its too late.

Nudging for traffic safety

We can hardly argue that we don’t know the rules of the road, and with automatic behaviour, little feedback and abstract (but deadly) consequences, driving is in need of a nudge, where the trick is to make the drivers behaviour salient with driver feedback signs.

Credit to Jim Parkin

When feedback signs were erected on the Øresund Bridge the amount of drivers that exceeded the 40 km speed limit was cut in half, which significantly lowed the risk of accidents for the staff working there and for drivers themselves. Feedback signs remind us of our behaviour right there and then, which in turn forces the driver out of the automatic behaviour pattern – she can still speed with no economic sanction, but now the speeding becomes a choice instead of habit.

Individual salience is one thing, but perhaps more interesting (from a nudge perspective) is the trafficants desire to drive at the same pace as that of their peers. By informing drivers about other drivers actual speed, a significant impact can be made on how many drivers choose to adjust the speed they are travelling. Most drivers erroneously believe that everyone else is speeding – which in turn makes them speed themselves.

So – driver feedback signs coupled with strategic information about the behaviour of peers seem to be the way forward, and if you’re wondering about if it’s all worth it, just think of the 255 who could still have been alive this year if national speeding had been reduced to the same levels as those on the Øresunds Bridge.

Next post: Nudging traffic safety by visual illusions

Challenge: Happy Birthday nudge!

By Pelle Guldborg Hansen

I don't think that my sister have ever paid serious attention to anything I've said in my life.

Not until last Sunday at my niece's Birthday, that is.

The birthday nudge
My sister works with the Danish Cancer Society - the same organization (but different section) that we are working with through the Danish Nudging Network. Although I've once told her about nudging, I guess it's there that she has picked up some ideas.

Thus, last Sunday at my niece's Birthday party, my sister suddenly makes the announcement at the table that she has made a little nudge-experiment.

What nobody had noticed was that there were two different varieties of Birthday buns served in each their basket: one variety with sugar, one variety without. Ultimately nobody had noticed, and thus the result was that 50% less sugar was eaten, since pick of bread basket was more or less random (my sister switched bread baskets once in a while during the party).

Is it a nudge?
Whether this is a nudge depends on a few decisions. Thaler and Sunstein's definition of a nudge doesn't say explicitly whether adding a choice-option rules out a nudge. Thus one has to go to the background theory of behavioral economics to get it right. According to this, adding an option is a nudge if it influences real world behavior, but leaves the ideal agent of homo economicus unaffected.  

Ultimately, the Birthday buns manage the fundamental requirements. Adding a sugarless variety of buns left the standard singleton-choice of buns with sugar feasible. Also, there were no cost-benefit adjustment attached in any way to the intervention - not even of the social kind, since my sister didn't inform us about the addition of a new choice.

Rational Birthday party challenge
But the decisive question is: would an ideal agent be influenced by the addition of a choice?

Well, on the one hand he wouldn't have any information about the sugarless variety to begin with. That seems to leave a Birthday party of rational agents to end up with eating 50% less sugar given their imperfect information and the assumption that choice of bread basket is made at random.  

But is this the right baseline to compare observed effect with when evaluating whether the intervention ultimately qualifies as a nugde?

I want to pose this as a challenge to you readers out there: is the Birthday Bun Nudge, really a nugde?

Clues
I'll provide my answer later on. For now, I leave you with the following clues.

(1) Ideal decision makers have taste-buds just like everyone else, but they also have perfect recall.
(2) At the rational birthday party ideal decision makers have imperfect information, but are also capable of learning.
(3) People did not eat the same number of Birthday buns. Some ate 1, most ate 2 or 3, and a few ate 4.
(4) My sister was willing to answer any question honestly.