Nudge
Notes from Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Thaler and Sunstein
Chapter 5: Choice Architecture
- The “Automatic Systems” will always tell us instinctly how we should react.
- “Stimulus response compatibility”
- “Automatic Systems always win over Reflective Systems”
- “If you indirectly infludence the choice other people make, you are a choice architect”
DEFAULTS: PADDING THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE
- “Defaults are ubiquitous and powerful”
- Great difference between “self-serving” and “helpful” defaults
- No Child Left Behind opt-in vs opt-out default
- Complex choices are bad to be required choosing
EXPECT ERROR
- The Paris Le Metro expects users to mess up, and is set up to handle that
- “Postcompletion” error – predictable error, once the main task is finished, folks forget things that relate to the previous steps
- “Forcing function” – “in order to get what you want, you have to do something else first”
- The more you have to do something, the more you can forget.
- “Habits are controlled by the Automatic System”
GIVE FEEDBACK
- Good to provide feedback to humans
- Assumed feedback (digital coping analog noises)
- Don’t give too much feedback
UNDERSTANDING “MAPPINGS”: FROM CHOICE TO WELFARE
- Provide proper mappings to understand the choices given
- RECAP: Record, Evaluate, and Compare Alternative Prices
- RECAP programs help people make smarter decisions
STRUCTURE COMPLEX CHOICES
- “Elimination by aspects” acts like a filter.
- The more choices folks have, the more important choice architecture becomes
- Netflix success in part comes from good choice architecture.
- Some people like collaborative filtering
- Don’t just show folks what other folks like them like, also show what other people with different tastes like.
INCENTIVES
- Questions to ask: who uses / chooses / pays / profits?
- Supply & Demand
- Salience is important, and can be manipulated.
- Being more blunt now has a bigger effect than being blunt later.
NUDGES
- iNcentives
- Understand Mappings
- Defaults
- Give feedback
- Expect error
- Structure complex choices
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