Behavioral Economics in the Wild
Behavioral economics is all around us — at work and on vacation, in the apps we use and at the stores where we shop. Behavioral nudges can help us follow through on things we know we want to do, but that sometimes slip through the cracks, like voting and getting flu shots. They can also help us begin tasks that may otherwise seem daunting, like starting to compost food scraps or creating a habit of biking to work. And sometimes all it takes to finally get around to doing a tedious task is adding an element of fun and pleasure.
I recently completed Irrational Labs’ Behavioral Economics Bootcamp, a 9-week part time course teaching designers, product leaders, and social-good practitioners how to integrate behavioral economics (BE) principles into their work, with the ultimate goal of helping people make better decisions and achieve their goals. Since the bootcamp ended, I have been noticing BE principles all around me, as well as opportunities to use them even more effectively.
Foot-in-the-door & identity
At the annual CSUN Assistive Technology Conference this past March, Sagar Barbhaya and Ted Drake gave a talk entitled Coaching and Celebrating Accessibility Champions. Accessibility refers to the practice of building products and experiences that can be used by anyone, regardless of any impairment they may have, such as a motor disability or visual impairment. Everyone from product managers to designers to engineers plays a part in this work, so it’s important to get all of these people on board with that goal.
In Barbhaya’s and Drake’s talk, they described Intuit’s Accessibility Champions program, which has the goal of engaging people throughout the company in accessibility work. This program makes use of two key BE principles: foot-in-the-door and identity.
Foot-in-the-door involves making a small ask of someone to prompt them to subsequently agree to a bigger ask. In a study by Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser, they asked people to put a small sticker in their window promoting safe driving or environmental protection. They then came back a week later and asked them to put a sign with the same message in their yard. They found that people who had agreed to put the sticker in their window were more likely to agree later on to the bigger ask of putting a large sign in their yard.
In the Accessibility Champions program at Inuit, employees can up-level their champion status as they take on progressively more complex tasks. Level 1 tasks include:
- Joining an accessibility Slack channel
- Setting up a screen reader on your laptop
- Installing an accessibility browser plugin
- Attending an accessibility training
Many of these level 1 tasks can be completed in under 5 minutes. However, the act of doing these tasks may make a person more likely to take on more involved tasks in subsequent levels, like creating captions or an audio description for a video (level 2), or providing accessibility training for other employees (level 3). The level 1 & 2 tasks are very generalized and focused on learning about and developing empathy for accessibility work, while level 3 tasks are much more specific to a person’s role.
In addition to getting employees’ feet in the (accessibility) door, the level 1 & 2 tasks do a great job of building identity. When a person invests the time and effort to learn about a new domain or cause, such as accessibility, they come to identify with that work and see themselves as someone who cares about that thing. That identity then pushes them to consider accessibility in their day-to-day work and prioritize it when building products.
Framing & future state
One place I didn’t expect to see BE principles at play was at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. In April, I spent a week in Hawaii, where I saw an energetic pod of spinner dolphins, vibrant coral reefs, a volcano that looks like Mars, and the crater of the recently erupted Kilauea volcano. At the park’s visitor center, they had a display that did a great job of framing information and presenting a future state.
This graphic helps a person understand their carbon emissions over the course of a year based on certain activities, like driving to work, doing a load of laundry, and recycling. Framing emissions in the context of an entire year is a good idea — it helps people understand the larger impact of what may feel like an insignificant activity at the time (e.g. doing a single load of laundry). They make the information even more impactful by reframing carbon emissions as money lost: “…you could save 20,000 pounds of CO2 and over $1500 from your annual home energy and gasoline bills.” They could take this a step further by helping a person imagine what they could do with that $1500, e.g: “That’s enough for two round-trip flights from New York to London!”
Importantly though, the exhibit doesn’t stop at just telling people that they are using lots of carbon dioxide. This is key, because just knowing you are doing something “bad” isn’t an effective way of changing that behavior. Instead, the exhibit suggests concrete techniques for reducing your carbon emissions, from small things like changing the light bulbs in your home to larger commitments like replacing your refrigerator with a more energy efficient model.
The main problem here, though, is that the information isn’t salient. A person might be willing to change their light bulbs, take the bus to work, and buy a new refrigerator while reading this exhibit on a beautiful day in Hawaii, and they may even take pictures of the exhibit to remind themselves of these tasks when they get home. But more likely than not, that picture will get lost among the far more beautiful photos of waterfalls, sunsets, and coffee farms, and these energy saving actions will never materialize.
Implementation intentions
Wasn’t that sunset incredible?! Wouldn’t you love to visit that beach? Have you already forgotten about how you plan to change your energy usage habits? I don’t blame you.
One way of combating this issue is to help park visitors create implementation intentions. An implementation intention is essentially a plan for taking an action. It works because when you take the time to consider when/where/how you will do something, you greatly increase the chance that you’ll follow through on doing so.
Imagine if there were a QR code on the emissions display at Volcanoes National Park. When you scanned the code with your phone, it would ask you a few simple questions:
- When will you be back home?
- What is one action listed here that you commit to taking when you return home?
- When will you take this action?
Then, a week after you return home from your trip, you receive a text message reminding you of the action you committed to and when you wanted to complete it. At this point, your text reminder may also prompt you to consider further execution details, like how you might overcome any blockers to completing your chosen action. This would make the exhibit much more impactful by reminding people of these energy saving actions at a place and time when they are more likely to have the attention and resources to act upon them. And if all the people who visited Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park actually changed their energy consumption behaviors, that might help ensure that the spinner dolphins, coral reefs, and volcanoes are around for many more years to come.
Whimsy
Goby is a giant see-through fish sculpture made of iron, and he loves eating plastic — recyclable plastic bottles, that is. There are currently a few different incarnations of Goby, everywhere from Malpe Beach in India, to Bali, to the Philippines.
Goby’s mission is twofold: to educate people about marine plastic pollution and to encourage them to responsibly dispose of their plastic bottles. It’s hard to know whether people make the connection between feeding Goby plastic bottles and the very serious issue of plastic pollution in our oceans that is being ingested by real life “Gobys.” But the project is certainly motivating people to recycle their plastic bottles instead of leaving them on the beach as trash.
When considering how to prompt people to do something now that will benefit them in the future, it’s helpful to consider the desired action in the context of Time (now vs. in the future) and Motivation (functional vs. hedonic). The following graph from Irrational Labs illustrates the interaction between these two dimensions:
Ideally, we want a person to be in the Hedonic/Now quadrant, where they want to do something and they are motivated to do it now. One way we can move people toward the hedonic end of the spectrum is by introducing and element of fun or whimsy to a desired action. This can turn what may otherwise be a tedious task into something more immediately gratifying or enjoyable, and that enjoyment may be just the motivation a person needs to actually carry out the task that they know they should do, but may otherwise ignore.
Goby is a perfect example of this principle. By replacing regular old recycling bins with an eye-catching sculpture, the project has successfully turned recycling from a tedious task (find and walk to the nearest recycling bin to discard your empty bottle) into a fun activity (“feed” a giant fish and marvel at the sculpture itself). And the proliferation of Gobys on beaches around the world indicates that this idea must really be working.
Want to learn more?
Thanks for reading! Learn more about Irrational Labs or apply to be part of their Fall 2019 Behavioral Economics Bootcamp cohort (Early Bird application deadline is June 30th). And feel free to leave a comment below sharing your own experiences with behavioral economics in the wild.
