I’m reading Nudge, a book about how to improve individual choice through public policies that highlight beneficial choices. The idea is to improve society through “strongly suggesting” certain options in the daily choices made by individual citizens, especially in decisions concerning physical and financial health.
Individuals’ decisions about health and wealth are not limited to an impact on the individual. The health of one person influences the health of those around the person; studies suggest that even debt and obesity are viral and can spread throughout an infected society.
A person is influenced by choices made by friends, family, and one’s community. This is why we speak in terms of a “national obesity epidemic” in the United States. It’s also why the sub prime mortgage, while perhaps exacerbated by a few financially fallible individuals, is bringing down our global economy and causing concern throughout different societies at both international and domestic levels.
What to do? Nudge “strongly suggests” some future changes in our public presentation of individual options. The authors emphasise that no options are eliminated—only highlighted. They suggest highlighting decidedly healthier alternatives in individual decisions is the equivalent to putting the oranges at eye level and the chocolate on the top shelf. This makes the oranges an obvious choice. Choosing the chocolate requires conscious thought.
Since studies show that most people choose to go with the default option, the option “at eye level”, Nudge explains, why not make the default (the oranges) the obvious choice? This doesn’t prohibit or even obscure the chocolate. The chocolate is still there and still affordable, financially speaking. The choice of chocolate is just less noticeable in comparison with the oranges. The person has to think about the chocolate, while the oranges are…just there.
The authors use the US pension and investment plans as examples. I like how the book explains that in studying and understanding how a group of people construct their decisions can help the same group of people learn to re-construct their environment to improve decision-making with benefits for both the individual and society.
1 comments:
I'm also reading this book and it is really very interesting. I was particularly interested in the example (on page 59) that they use about the rise of nazism being an effect of unconscious bandwagon following. It made their theoiries come into sharp relief for me.
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