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?

A Nudge to walk around the Earth

Digital artist: chrisroll 

By Pelle Guldborg Hansen & Katrine Lund Skov

Last week we attended the Nudge-Camp arranged by the Metropolitan University College (you can see the announcement in the DNN newsletter vol.2, and read more about the Nudge-Camp in a coming post). More than 50 students were gathered to try to develop ideas for nudging concrete problems which was delivered on the spot by institutions and organizations, many of which were members of the nudging network (The Danish Cancer Society, Odense Municipality, The Roskilde Festival, Provokator).

One of the nudges we found most interesting was a nudge to walk around the earth. Yes, that's right - to walk around the earth!

The idea was developed to solve a challenge posed by Odense Municipality of how to get employees within the eldercare not just to be a bit more physically active at work, but also to enjoy it.

So how does it work?

Digital artist: vorakorn kanokpipat

The idea is strikingly simple. The first “step” is to equip employees with a pedometer. Well, that's not new you think. Haven't we known for a long time that a pedometer may increase awareness of and thus the number of steps taken through the mechanism of disclosure combined with self-competition? Well, at least that it works for a while?

Yes, and that's the problem. Disclosure may change behavior, but the battery of the pedometer lasts longer than its behavioral impact.

What the students suggested was to invigorate the behavioral effect of the pedometer by attaching it to a social nudge. Now this is always a dangerous strategy, and as we have written about in an earlier post, one should be particularly careful of not combining social nudges with incentive schemes.

So how did the students combine the pedometer nudge with a social nudge in a pleasant and non-coercive way?

Well, they suggested that the number of steps were aggregated before being publicly disclosed on a world map, showing how far the team had walked together on a trip around Earth.

Extension
Simple, small, pleasant, and social - and if one finds it impossible to refrain from adding some kind of incentive scheme, then it is possible to find some insignificant but still pleasant ways to extend the nudge. One week the apples might be from Italy, next week the coffee might be from Turkey, the week after the lobby may play music from Egypt, and so on...


Ooh - by the way
There are 3 things that we would really like you to do:)

1. If you liked this post, why not share it with your social network - you can find the Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. buttons just down to your left.
2. Did you know that "Prof. Nudge" aka Richard Thaler is coming to Copenhagen this month? And did you remember to sign up for his Public Lecture? If not, you may do it here.
3. Finally, don't miss the next post - you may sign up for e-mail subscription in the top right corner of this post. 

The perfect nudge: Freedom to Nudge yourself

By Pelle Guldborg Hansen & Andreas Maaløe Jespersen

We all know it, but we can't help it - or can we? 
We all have that tendency to procrastinate, junk around for news, or try to multi-task. All of these behaviors stand in our way of productivity, yet it seems we just can't help it.

The Internet has only helped to make the possibility of indulging in these behaviors even worse. YouTube, Facebook, online news, Zite,... well, even the blog you're reading right now, may be the only thing that stands between you and your next promotion (or just some of that precious quality time with your family).

But now there is hope. Freedom is the productivity application that offers you the perfect $10 nudge to free yourself from online distractions - at least for a while.

Up until now, only a perfectly rational agent could prevent himself from getting distracted by online temptations. Freedom lets you aspire to your rational ideals by providing you with a self-commitment strategy for cutting off the internet. You choose for how long, press OK - and then it is only by rebooting your device that it is possible to bypass your self-commitment to concentrate.

A nudge to reduce injuries at work

By Pelle Guldborg Hansen & Andreas Maaløe Jespersen

"It's just easier to do it yourself, rather than asking and then waiting for somebody to come and help." We all know this way of reasoning. However, it may easily become a huge problem and a big expense at work, if a helping hand is what ultimately stands between another day at work and a long term working injury.

This is especially true if you are working in a team, but fail to call upon a helping hand when handling heavy objects and other physically taxing working tasks. In such situations, 'just doing it yourself' may lead to the repetition of unhealthy movements or just that one wrong lift that your back will regret for months to come.

It is not just that many workplaces are abundant with these kinds of hidden-risk tasks - i.e. tasks where the individual worker may obviously succeed in performing the task on her own, but a collective effort relieves long term, yet often, invisible consequences or seriously reduce the invisible risk of a sudden injury. It also seems reasonable to suspect that the problem may be reinforced by several external factors, such as norms of masculinity or self-reliance, or if the working team suffers from a low level of social capital.

So how do we deal with hidden-risk tasks?
One obvious "solution" is dealing with the problem by ignoring it and thereby failing to end up in the important conversation were we realize the hidden nature of the problem as a group or team. If this is the case, the hidden-risk problem is not only maintained in our working-environment. Its consequences may also persist to damage the team's social capital by increasing the frequency of replacements, drain the budget with temporaries, and causing the team to work faster, harder and at higher risk when being low on staff.

Even when we do succeed in establishing a mutual recognition of hidden-risk problems, my experience is that we often fail to take appropriate measures to deal with them. We approach problems of hidden-risk by targeting our social-norms or a team's social capital in the hope that the effect will then spill-over in the right situation.

At its worst this means talking about what we "ought to do" or "ought to have done" and possibly ending up playing the blame game. At its best it means building up the team's social capital and then crossing fingers hoping that this will kick in at just the right moment - i.e. when you need that helping hand, although you could have done it by yourself.

A nudge to reduce injuries at work
However, the other day when giving a talk at OKÆ, Pelle was presented with a good example of how to use nudging to deal with the problem of hidden-risk. In the municipality's big central kitchen OKÆ Foodservice a poster displays how many days have passed since the last working injury occurred. In fact, we've since then been told that this nudge has been used at factories since the '50ties! (please comment if you know anything about this).

This poster neither changes the options available to the staff, nor the structure of incentives embedded in their working environment. Thus, it qualifies as a nudge. Yet, I think it very likely that it may help reduce work injuries related to hidden-risk problems.

For one, as you can see, the chosen design requires the poster to be updated every day with a marker. Thus it functions as a continuous reminder. Everyday, at least one person has to think about the risk of injuries at work.

Second, it may function as a "catcher". That is, on the same line as the Fly in the Urinal and calorie labels on menus it may catch the attention of those working in a hidden-risk environment (though we think the there's some space for improving the chosen design).

Third, the poster re-frames the hidden-risk problems likely to cause injuries at work, so that from being a theme of individual consideration, responsibility and consequence, hidden-risk problems in the working environment become a collective consideration, responsibility and problem. Ideally this means that you will no longer need to ask for that helping hand, when you could do it on your own. Instead others will be on the look-out to prevent those hidden-risks from materializing. That is, it may help to promote ground-floor team-work as a means to avoid situations of risk by creating a new frame of reference that emphasizes the collective aspect of the possible consequences and creating a healthy competition where the team competes against itself.

HAVE YOU SIGNED UP FOR RICHARD THALER'S PUBLIC LECTURE IN COPENHAGEN?  

A word of caution

That said, a word of caution is also needed. The poster-nudge is a social nudge and as such it presents the usual dangers of invoking social dynamics as part of behavioral interventions.

While the poster may help avoid hidden-risk problems at work, it may also lead to some negative and unintended effects. Might workers for instance come to hide their work-injuries from co-workers and employers in order not to ruin the record?

Of course, this is one of those instances where the role of social capital becomes important. Yet, social capital may even worsen such unintended effects, if nudging is combined with other measures.

Why? Injuries will always happen, but just as hidden-risks, they may not be observable. The poster-system doesn't allow for that "margin of error" to save "the record". This means that if e.g. one tries to combine this nudge with a premium for achieving a particular record - e.g. 100 days - one may ultimately not only reinforce the unintended effect by having workers hide their injuries to save "the record". They will also have a strong reason to hide the injury in order to save the team's premium - a reason that may indeed be conjectured to be reinforced by higher levels of social capital within the team.

Unfortunately, the premium combination has been chosen at Foodservice - it's just so natural for us to reward behavior, even when we only need a nudge.