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Nudge

2023/11/06 07:07:24瀏覽248｜回應0｜推薦9

Nudge shows you how you can unconsciously make better decisions by designing your environment so it nudges you in the right direction every time temptation becomes greatest and thus build your own choice architecture in advance.

Nudge was co-authored by two professors. One is Cass Sunstein, who taught law for 27 years and worked in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2012. He recently made his debut on Four Minute Books the wonderful, but totally unrelated The World According to Star Wars.

His partner in nudging, Richard Thaler, is a professor of behavioral economics at the University of Chicago, where Sunstein also taught. Thaler has worked with Nobel prize laureate Daniel Kahneman, and both have pushed the envelope of the science of decision-making quote a bit. He was even featured as himself in the Hollywood blockbuster The Big Short.

What makes this choice-book different is its focus on environment design, rather than improving your inner strength, willpower, etc. to make better decisions.

Here are my 3 favorite lessons:

A nudge is a subtle cue or context change that pushes you to make a certain decision without forcing you to.
One of the most powerful nudges is the default.
When states use nudges well, they can improve entire countries.

Need a nudge in the right direction? This ought to do it!

Lesson 1: Nudges are tiny hints or changes, which push you in one direction, but leave all options open.

Have you ever been talked into going out by a friend, at first not wanting to go, but after she teased you a bit and you dressed up, you ended up having a really good time? That’s a nudge in action.

Used right, a nudge is a very small action or change in environment, which makes it easier for you to make the decision that’s best for you, without forcing you to decide a certain way.

For example, if the cafeteria put the fruits next to the registrar, and not the candy bars, you’d eat more bananas – simply because they’re easier to pick up. When the cashier at McDonald’s asks you “Do you want fries with that?” that’s also a nudge (but one in the wrong direction). The little flag some mailboxes have that turns up when mail is inside the box? Another nudge.

Lesson 2: A default is a very powerful nudge, as it requires you to actively object it for it not to work.

Sometimes, it’s possible to design situations where decisions need to be made in a way that if you decide automatically, you naturally make the right choice.

For example, if you send an email through Gmail and type something like “please find attached” or “I’ll attach the file” in the email’s body and you then forget to upload the actual attachment, Gmail automatically prompts you with the question “Did you want to send an attachment with this?” It’s a very situation-specific nudge, but it can save tons of time and frustration in the long run.

This particular type of nudge is called a default. Default nudges are set up in a way that if you do nothing, you’ll still do the right thing by sticking to the preset standard.

At scale, companies can use this by automatically enrolling their employees in their matching-retirement plan programs, unless they explicitly object to participating. This helps a lot of lazy people save for retirement because they would never have enrolled if they’d had to actively do it themselves.

Similarly, gyms and magazines abuse this by automatically renewing your subscription, unless you cancel it. Again, nudges can be used both ways.

Lesson 3: States and other large institutions can use nudges to improve societies and countries as a whole.

Here’s a really basic way of describing how states work: if the majority of its members make good decisions, the welfare of the state grows. If the majority makes bad decisions, it declines.

For example, 75% of Americans make bad food choices and are therefore either obese or overweight. Imagine all of these people would eat healthier. Obesity would go away, and thus the expensive health problems that come with it. The country would save billions of dollars in treatments, surgery costs, health insurance expenses, etc. It’d be a win-win. Same with smoking.

Sure, a nudge at scale costs a bit to set up, but its effects usually kick in fast. For example, since it’s become mandatory to report carbon emissions, the emissions themselves have gone down significantly – just because companies have to be transparent. No law says they have to emit less carbon dioxide, yet because critics can point fingers, businesses naturally compete to be eco-friendlier.

Another cool state-side nudge is the dollar-a-day program, which gives teenage mothers $1 each day they don’t get pregnant again. $365 may sound like a lot but is much cheaper than having to take care of a newborn or trying to relocate it to a good family.

If they use nudges right, governments and large institutions can spur wise decisions at scale and thus, make life better for everyone!

Questions:

· Are nudges just ways to manipulate people?

A double-edged sword, nudge shows the bright or dark side depends on your heart

· What’s the most ingenious nudge you’ve found yourself influenced by? Are you as influenced by nudges as others are?

A cold mind , a warm heart and a fast feet

· What factors can make us more immune to nudges?

Too emotional to make right decision.

· When does a nudge risk becoming a shove and how do you avoid crossing that line?

emotion overwhelm most of the peoples mindCan even the most well-intentioned nudges produce unintended consequences?

· One important role of choice architects is setting default options — or defining what happens when people do nothing. How can something so seemingly innocuous be so important?

Polls released in Israel showed that as demonstrations spread in Israel, the majority of people want Prime Minister Netanyahu to resign due to Hamass attack on Israel on October 7 and his mishandling of the current Gaza war.

· The authors tout libertarian paternalism as a promising foundation for bipartisanship. How, exactly, does it bring Democrats and Republicans together?

"Nudge" is mostly concerned with how companies and governments can practice what the authors term "libertarian paternalism"--gently, noncoercively pushing people toward doing something that they really want to do.(r.2)

It’s kind of butterfly effect: "...whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. Why, when a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes round the world."-- The Princess of Pure Reason(r.3)

Civil Service Legislator Zhao Tianlin and Vice President of the Executive Yuan Zheng Wencan whose sex scandals affects DPP votes. Questions:

Are nudges just ways to manipulate people? Nudging is about how we through a better ‘choice architecture’ – a term used when indirectly changing people’s decisions in a predictable way – can help people make the choice they really want to make. The choices we, as autonomous, rational people, would like to make, but which our surroundings, temptations and unconscious irrationality refrain us from. Advocates of nudging do not believe that it is a matter of manipulation as long as you, as a choice architect, do not deprive man of any choice. After all, it is all about helping them make the best possible decisions. That is, the ones they would have made themselves if they could assess the long-term consequences. For example, by making them choose fruit over cake provided that they want to live healthy. But doesn’t nudging easily become a slippery slope where less noble intentions can lead to more or less appropriate manipulation?
Because when organisations and public institutions use nudging to push people in one direction or another, it can never be innocent or unpolitical. The nudge is non-transparent, so that the individual does not discover that it is a nudge, and what its purpose is. The nudge manipulates with our freedom of choice (as opposed to our behavior), so that the individual’s choices are limited.

● What’s the most ingenious nudge you’ve found yourself influenced by? Are you as influenced by nudges as others are? Economist Magazine

● What factors can make us more immune to nudges? Because some people cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons, and some are too young for vaccination, widespread vaccination is a social and an individual good: widespread vaccination leads to ‘herd immunity’, which is a social good accruing to the vaccinated and the non-vaccinated alike. But an increasing number of people today refuse vaccination. The scare caused by Andrew Wakefields infamous and fraudulent linking of vaccination to autism has never receded, and many parents remain convinced that vaccinations represent a risk to their children and resist the evidence that their fears are misplaced. The phenomenon of motivated resistance has attracted a great deal of attention from psychologists. They have studied the correlates and causes of such resistance, and they have examined how false beliefs might be corrected. Some of their findings are depressing (indicating that people may actually become more entrenched in false beliefs when presented with good evidence against them), but some offer hope. The aim of this paper is to survey some of this work, preparatory to assessing the ethical permissibility of using suggestions for addressing false beliefs that arise from it. The proposals that arise may be seen as belonging to the broader class of ways of affecting behaviour that have come to be called nudges. Nudges are controversial for several reasons, but the central objection to them, and the objection on which I will focus here, is that they are unacceptably paternalistic and therefore threaten the autonomy of agents. Autonomy is very plausibly a great good, so even if nudges conduce to the well-being of the nudged or to social goods, they may be impermissible. In this paper, I identify a class of nudges that I call nudges to reason. I argue that these nudges do not threaten our autonomy. Interventions into decision-making and belief formation threaten our autonomy when they bypass our capacities for deliberation. Nudges to reason do not bypass our capacities for deliberation. Rather, they address themselves to capacities that are partially constitutive of our reasoning. There are therefore strong reasons to think that nudges to reason are permissible.

● When does a nudge risk becoming a shove and how do you avoid crossing that line?

When a nudge is used to sell a product or persuade a user to do something they didn’t want to do though, they start to resemble dark patterns. A common example of a nudge for social good is changing organ donation from opt-in to opt-out (which happened in the UK on 20 May 2020). Suddenly a lot of people who wouldn’t have bothered before, are automatically signed up and thousands of lives are saved. Hooray!

● Can even the most well-intentioned nudges produce unintended consequences?

One of the reasons why nudging is difficult to implement is that its outcomes are not always easy to predict. Even in cases where the behavioral effects of an intervention seem obvious, nudging can backfire and even lead to entirely opposite outcomes.
For example, one project aimed at reducing the average households energy consumption by sending out letters informing people of how much they were using compared to others in their neighborhood. While these letters prompted some high consumers to limit their energy use, it also had unexpected effects, with people who learned that they consumed less energy than others in their area started increasing their usage.

● One important role of choice architects is setting default options — or defining what happens when people do nothing. How can something so seemingly innocuous be so important? The authors tout libertarian paternalism as a promising foundation for bipartisanship. How, exactly, does it bring Democrats and Republicans together?

Choice architecture interventions may fail to produce their desired result for several reasons. First, individual differences may lead consumers to respond differently to information. For example, liberals and conservatives have been shown to respond differently to information about the environmental consequences of energy-related behaviors,^[34] while individual numeracy has also been linked to different responses to choice architectures.^[7] A second major challenge is assessing whether choice architectures are, in fact, improving decision-making. One way of assessing this is to evaluate consumer experiences after the choice has been made both in the short and long-term

November Book Club Meeting

We had a great and lively discussion today about a book that is not only controversial but also helps to explain a lot of the changes that have taken place globally. More than a decade after it was published, Nudge is one of the most influential academic books in the USA today, and is studied and taught as a textbook. Asked in an interview with Behavioral Scientist to characterize reactions to the book, Thaler, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and one of the authors, responded, “Am I too old to just say OMG?” The book was a surprise bestseller. More importantly, it has had a real impact on US policy. In 2009, then-US president Barack Obama made Sunstein the head of The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, charged with using nudges to improve regulations. The UK, meanwhile, in 2010 established a Behavioural Insights Unit (BIT) to promote nudges. Many other countries, including Canada, Germany, and Qatar, have done the same. Companies like General Motors have also taken the lesson of Nudge to heart, using the book’s insights to get women to opt in to an employee resources and mentorship program. The members of the group added insights that were valuable to our discussion thanks to Ming Li and Faye and of course contributions from Emma and Lydia are invaluable to our discussions. Thank you to Belinda for coming today and our new guest Monica who we hope will return.

Some critics say that the value of nudges is overblown. Tim Adams at The Guardian points out that while nudges like telling people how much their neighbor pays for electricity may marginally reduce their energy consumption, it’s the big decisions like a nationwide carbon tax that really matter. Focusing on nudges may lead to quick fixes rather than comprehensive solutions. Sunstein disputes the idea that lots of small nudges can’t add up to large impacts. He points to the automatic enrollment of millions children in a free meals program in the US as a high-impact nudge. Only time will tell. For now we are nudging the end of the year and our next meeting is also a Christmas meeting.