“Big nudging” is scary, but we should use it

We like to think that we are in control of our own decisions. Yet, quite often we are not. We are influenced by many seemingly insignificant details.

The textbook example of this is organ donation in Germany and Austria. In Germany, 12% of citizens consent to donate their organs after death. In Austria, it is 99%. The reason? In Germany, you tick the box to donate organs; in Austria, you tick it to opt-out from donating. Ticking boxes takes effort. Default behaviour is to leave it as it is.

Phrasing of the question, default options, presence of other options — all of this has the potential to alter your mind. If you have two products, cheap and expensive, adding a third, ultra-expensive option, will make more people buy the originally expensive product. Placing £100 T-shirt next to £15,000 handbag makes the T-shirt a bargain.

These tricks are powerful. By carefully architecting people’s choices, you can “nudge” them to choosing more beneficial options. Or, you can control masses to follow your suit.

Big data and machine learning techniques turn this up to 11. The biases we know about are kind-of meaningful. We can explain them; a lot of them were discovered by Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky in conversations while strolling through a park. Today, machines can spot even most bizarre correlations among petabytes of data from all aspects of human life. We don’t need to understand the connections; it is enough to ask the machine to show people options that maximise a certain outcome.

Potential for abuse is rife. Many governments would love to turn their electorate into an obedient appendage that always agrees with official policies.

And yet, we should embrace big nudging. Saving for retirement, donating organs, consuming less sugar — these are great choices that people often struggle to make. Refusing to use the knowledge of nudging in designing options would amount to failing people, because leaving the outcome to randomness is not a good policy when lives are at stake.

The key to success is transparency. If governments and corporations made their intentions clear, we could still hold them accountable for their policies. In a healthy society, there is enough mutual trust and respect for this to happen. In a society less fortunate, other issues will have to be solved first.

Yet, governments are not the only game in town. Every time you present other people with choices, you are assuming a role of the choice architect. Maybe it is about delivering the project on time, or maybe it is about choosing a place for dinner. Either way, you will influence others by how you frame the choice.

Make your influence informed.

An amazing source of knowledge on human biases is “Thinking Fast and Slow” by D. Kahnemann. The idea of nudging is well-presented in “Nudge” by R. Thaler and C. Sunstein.