Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness

in line? When people have a hard time predicting how their choices will end up affecting their lives, they have less to gain by numerous options and perhaps even by choosing for themselves. A nudge might be welcomed.

*It is possible to predict the outcome of congressional elections with frightening accuracy simply by asking people to look quickly at pictures of the candidates and say which one looks more competent. These judgments, by students who did not know the candidates, forecast the winner of the election two-thirds of the time! (Toderov et al. [2005]; Be

changes, even when changes are very much in our interests.

When "availability bias" is at work, both private and public decisions may be improved if judgments can be nudged back in the direction of true probabilities. A good way to increase people's fear of a bad outcome is to remind them of a related incident in which things went wrong; a good way to increase people's confidence is to remind the

Slightly broadening these findings, social scientists have found that they can "prime" people into certain forms of behavior by offering simple and apparently irrelevant cues. It turns out that if certain objects are made visible and salient, people's behavior can be affected. Objects characteristic of

This is what is often called a "tragedy of the commons." Each dairy farmer has an incentive to add more cows to his herd, because he obtains the benefits of the additional cows while suffering only a fraction of the costs; but collectively the cows ruin the pasture. Dairy farmers need to find some way to avert this tragedy, perhaps throug

The idea is that choices depend, in part, on the way in which problems are stated. The point matters a great deal for public policy. Energy conservation is now receiving a lot ofattention, so consider the following information campaigns: (a) If you use energy conservation methods, you will save $350 per year; (b) If you do not use energy conservati

business environments, such as briefcases and boardroom tables, make people more competitive, less cooperative, and less generous.25 Smells matter too: mere exposure to the scent of an all-purpose cleaner makes people keep their environment cleaner while they eat.26 In both cases, people were not consciously aware of the effect of the cue on their

methods, you will lose $ 3So per year. It turns out that information campaign (b), framed in terms of losses, is far more effective than information campaign (a). If the government wants to encourage energy conservation, option (b) is a stronger nudge.Framing works because people tend to be somewhat mindless, passive decision makers. Their Reflecti

A while back Sunstein took his teenage daughter to Lollapalooza, the three-day rock festival held every year in Chicago. On Friday night a huge sign, with changing electronic messages, often showed the schedule of performances, but interspersed that information with a message saying, "DRINK MORE WATER." The print was large; the message wa