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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

People hate losses (and their Automatic Systems can get pretty emotional about them). Roughly speaking, losing something makes you twice as miserable as gaining the same thing makes you happy. In more technical language, people are "loss averse." How do we know this?Consider a simple experiment.13 Half the students in a class are given co