Social psychology researchers have been shaking society's beliefs for decades. Consider Philip Zimbardo's discovery that people can morph into torturers with little prompting, or Claude Steele's finding that simply invoking stereotypes can make people perform significantly better or worse.
But social psychology has probably never held as much potential to change global outcomes as it does now. Governments and other organizations are applying "nudge principles" — psychologists' findings about the human propensities that influence our decisions and actions — to collect unpaid taxes, reduce child mortality, and help people choose healthier foods and make better environmental choices. In one line of study, for example, researchers found that people recycled much more when their trash bin lids featured cut-out shapes of the objects to be recycled, be they circles for cans and bottles or slits for paper.
The nudge bandwagon got rolling in 2008 when "Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness" by Richard H. Thaler, PhD, and Cass R. Sunstein, JD, hit bookstores. The book examines how organizations might use behavioral science to subtly guide people into better choices, sometimes with little awareness that they are being led. (Sunstein has since written another book on nudge principles, the 2013 "Simpler: The Future of Government.")
When the 2008 book came out, the authors got flak from both ends of the political spectrum. Conservatives accused them of meddling in people's private business, while liberals contended they didn't go far enough to spur people into healthy or prosocial choices. The book also garnered a lot of positive press, and governments, corporations and others began applying these principles in their own spheres.
"Nudge has taken academics and policymakers by storm, both in this country and abroad," says Oren Bar-Gill, PhD, who studies nudge-style interventions at Harvard Law School.
A few examples:
- In Britain, a government nudge team increased tax payments by millions of dollars simply by informing delinquent taxpayers that most citizens in their communities had paid up.
- In the United States, federal agencies have used notions about people's difficulty processing too much complex information to make credit card fees and interest rates easier for consumers to read, understand and hence act on.
- Nudge efforts in Norway and Denmark prompted the European Union to create its own nudge network in June. European countries have used these tactics to prompt consumers to buy more energy-efficient appliances, reduce the amount they litter and board planes more easily.
There are significant public health applications, as well:
- In Mozambique, public health officials have used timed text messages to remind HIV-positive patients to take their medications and keep their doctor's appointments.
- In Kenya, officials have installed chlorine dispensers at communal water sources, which significantly boosted household use of chlorinated water and lowered child mortality rates.
- In South Africa, government lenders have reduced their array of "example loan" options, making the information easier to grasp and increasing the number of low-income people taking advantage of them.
A kinder, gentler approach
Nudge is a colloquial way of saying "libertarian paternalism," a concept developed by Thaler and Sunstein. The phrase combines the notions of libertarianism, or people's inalienable right to choose for themselves, and paternalism, or a government or other entity's stance of acting on behalf of the individual or group.
Thaler and Sunstein call those who study and implement nudge "choice architects" because they test, craft and improve interventions that are designed to make it easy, even automatic, for people to make healthier or better decisions.
"Tiny details can matter — a lot," Thaler says.
Think of your immediate reaction to the same food. In one case it is labeled "90 percent fat free," and in another it is "10 percent fat." "Even subtle changes in how information is presented can have significant and predictable impacts on how people process and act on it," Thaler says.
Governments use nudge — if not stronger tactics — by default or deliberate action anyway, asserts Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who served as administrator of the nudge-friendly White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the first term of the Obama administration. The office's achievements include changing fuel-economy labeling on cars to be more transparent and useful, and simplifying federal student loan applications so they're easier to complete.
"Why not use these principles in an intelligent manner, with information and evidence?" Sunstein asks.
In the case of better fuel-economy labels or loan applications, nudge researchers draw on data showing that people absorb simple, attractive, social and timely information far more easily than complex, difficult-to-process information. In other nudge applications, they take psychological research on some of our less laudatory traits — short-sightedness, inertia, inflated optimism and our tendency to submit to peer pressure, for example — and use them in the same way a jujitsu fighter transforms a weak position into a strong one, says Colin Camerer, PhD, a behavioral economist at the California Institute of Technology.
One nudge tactic, for example, triggers prosocial actions by making use of "default bias" — the finding that, thanks to many of these unattractive psychological tendencies, people tend to opt for the first choice in front of them.
A famous example is organ donation. In a 2003 article in Scienceopens in new window, psychologists Eric J. Johnson, PhD, and Daniel Goldstein, PhD, compared organ-donation rates across 11 European countries. They found that countries with policies that automatically opted citizens into organ donation with the choice to opt out had vastly higher donation rates than policies that gave citizens the choice to donate — nearly 100 percent in Austria compared with 12 percent in Germany, for example.
Or take a cafeteria line. Instead of telling people outright that cookies are bad for them or simply not offering them, nudgers may place fruit before sugary desserts so people are more likely to reach for the healthier snack. That's one of many such strategies that psychologist Brian Wansink, PhD, who heads Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, has been using in schools and other settings, work that earned him a White House appointment from 2007–09 as executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion.
"You're using mindlessness to help people mindlessly make good choices," says Wansink, author of "Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life" (2014).
In a similar vein, other nudge researchers are using findings by Columbia University Business School psychologist Sheena Iyengar, PhD, and others showing that too many choices may stymie our ability to make decisions. For example, many companies have started to default employees into retirement plans instead of having them choose from an overwhelming panoply of options they don't understand.
This subtler approach to decision-making is exciting precisely because it has the potential to be more effective than traditional approaches, Camerer adds.
"In economics we used to think there were only two things we could do to change behavior: giving people information they didn't have, or changing the price," he says.
Nationwide interventions
One of nudge's largest and most successful efforts is taking place in Great Britain via a think tank formed in 2010 as part of Prime Minister David Cameron's Cabinet. Now a semi-private company called the Behavioural Insights Team (www.behaviouralinsights.co.ukopens in new window) and owned equally by the British government, company employees and the charitable endowment Nesta, the 19-member group applies principles of behavioral science, psychology and social anthropology to socially minded projects for the British government, other governments and private entities worldwide. The team is headed by Cambridge University psychologist and former British government official David Halpern, PhD, with consultation from Thaler.
The team starts by identifying the outcomes it wants to see — lowered energy use or an increase in the number of people who insulate their homes, for example — and then designs studies to find the best strategy for gaining that outcome. In this sense it is a version of applied science: Rather than testing a theory and then viewing the outcomes, nudge interventions start with the outcomes they want to see and find the most effective way to reach them from a range of predesigned solutions.
A paper for Britain's National Bureau of Economic Research demonstrates the strategy in action. In one study, the team sent several versions of a similar letter to 120,000 delinquent British taxpayers, and tested responses to each. The letters used descriptive social-norm statements ranging from general — "The great majority of people in the U.K. pay their taxes on time" — to specific — "Most people with a debt like yours have paid it by now." In some cases the letters included an "injunctive norm," saying what fellow citizens feel fellow taxpayers should do: "The great majority of people agree that everyone in the U.K. should pay their taxes on time."
The interventions all resulted in more people paying their taxes, leading to an extra $15 million in all. However, missives using descriptive norms and those stating that citizens would face a penalty for nonpayment were more effective than those using an injunctive norm, demonstrating the work's aim to find and ultimately use the most effective strategy.
The United States also is continuing to tap the power of nudge. In January, the U.S. government created a behavioral insights team, the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. Run and led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the team is a cross-agency effort based out of the General Services Administration. The group is working closely with federal agencies to translate social and behavioral science insights into concrete recommendations and interventions intended to save money, improve public health, set more effective environmental standards, and achieve other positive results. The office also designs rigorous field trials to determine which interventions are most effective.
The future of nudge
It may go without saying that nudge policies have long been used by companies to sell products. But now they are being embraced by individuals, thanks to apps and Web programs. Using principles of behavioral economics, for instance, Stickk.com and Beeminder.com allow people to set goals and pay a fine if they don't meet them.
Despite their promise and some early successes, however, nudge policies aren't always foolproof. Take retirement savings. While the nudge policy aimed at increasing retirement savings did boost the number of people who defaulted into retirement plans, the overall amount people saved failed to rise. Why? Because people who had actively chosen their own plans in the past but changed over to the default plan saved in aggregate less than before.
"You really need to think hard about how you design these disclosures and how you set the default," says Harvard's Bar-Gill. "If you don't, the results can backfire."
Critics point to other potential pitfalls of nudge policies as well. Some say nudge tactics aren't always enough to make a difference, at least in the policy arena. In 2011, the Science and Technology Select Committee of the British House of Lords concluded that the nudge approach is insufficient to tackle large-scale behavioral problems, such as obesity or getting people to change their transportation habits to more environmentally friendly ones. Such entrenched issues "require … a massive shove rather than a nudge," wrote the committee's chair, Lord Krebs, in a Sept. 6, 2012, online editorial in The Guardianopens in new window.
Meanwhile, although Iyengar's work on choice has been used by nudge researchers and policymakers, she cites philosophical differences with strategies that automatically make it easier for people to make a good choice.
"For me, that's a danger because at some point a nudge provider may not be so benevolent, and that could become risky" if the provider sets bad policies into motion, she says. "My view in general is that it's safer in the long run to teach people how to choose."
Iyengar freely admits that her methods reap smaller benefits than nudge tactics, but she still prefers the autonomy they offer (See A different take on nudge).
On a related note, nudges may reduce the role of debate and exchange so central in a democratic system, contends Sherzod Abdukadirov, PhD, a research fellow in the regulatory studies program at George Mason University's Mercatus Center.
"By giving the most vocal opponents of a policy a chance to opt out, nudges reduce the opponents' incentives to track the policy and to express their views. Thus, nudges may face less scrutiny than other policies," Abdukadirov wrote in a 2013 article in U.S. News & World Reportopens in new window.
Given the increasing technological, environmental and personal complexity of our lives, however, it seems almost inevitable that we need equally sophisticated methods to address some of our consumer-related, environmental and other problems. That means addressing human behavior using all the tools of modern technology and data analysis, Sunstein asserts.
"In the next 10 to 20 years, wherever there's a problem — whether it's poverty, dirty air, traffic safety, school violence or sexual harassment — I think there will be a growing interest in seeing if we can address it by getting clarity on its psychological or behavioral foundations," he says.
Tori DeAngelis is a journalist in Syracuse, New York.