We know carrots and sticks can be used to motivate others, but have you heard of the nudge?
Photo: Victoriano Izquierdo / Unsplash
Behavioural economist Richard Thaler won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating how people can be nudged into making decisions.
Now more than 13 years after co-writing the book that lays out these ideas, Thaler has released an updated edition - Nudge: The Final Edition.
Sludge - aka "the evil version" of nudge - is one of the new concepts in Nudge's update, Thaler tells Jesse Mulligan.
Sludge can take the form of an overly bureaucratic system that effectively discourages behaviour that's in a person's best interest, Thaler has written.
"If you think about all the forms you have to fill out to get a passport or driver's license or to get a permit to open a new business ... The United States has the worst sludge-ridden tax system in the world. The average person spends hours and hours filling out their taxes."
In comparison, nudging is about making decision-making easier for people, such as increased access to Covid-19 vaccinations, he says.
Yet when it comes to vaccinating Americans, the nudge has stopped being effective.
"We've now reached a stage in the US where the remaining 25-35 percent of people that are unvaccinated are quite hardcore in their beliefs, some of which are completely unscientific.
"I think it's time to move on from nudges to shoves."
In the United States, the single best predictor of whether a person is vaccinated against Covid-19 is who they voted for in the 2020 presidential election, Thaler says.
"The percentage of Trump voters in a county strongly predicts what percentage of the county is vaccinated. How being vaccinated became a political statement is a bit of a mystery."
The 2017 Nobel laureate for Economic Sciences, Richard Thaler Photo: AFP
Humans have a strong drive to follow what others are doing, both for good or for bad," he says.
When a female politician told Thaler she scolded other women who didn't vote, he reminded her the nudge works best with positivity.
"I told her that the research shows that she would be better off praising all the women who had turned out and elected people like her and just say 'if even more of you did it, we would have even more success'."
Another way to 'nudge' people into action is to entice them with some enjoyment, Thaler says.
"If you think about how we spend our time, we choose to spend our time in ways that entertain us, from watching movies to playing sports, to going to the beach or having a beer.
"So if we can put those things into play, they can help with all kinds of things ... learning probability and statistics isn't all that much fun, but if you teach [children] they can do better at playing games against their friends then all of a sudden they get motivated."
Thaler challenges the idea that our choices are neutral because the environment in which we make them is not.
Our in-store shopping choices, for example, are skewed by architecture and marketing, he says.
"It's certain that [the shop] will lead you on a path that will have you walk by things that are both tempting and profitable for [them] ... In America, the stuff you see at the checkout counter appeals to your basic instincts and the stuff that's easily reachable by a toddler is the stuff that's attractive to a toddler."
Although Thaler says he's usually an optimistic person, one thing particularly concerns him about the future - climate change.
"The only way we're going to make any progress on this is an international unified effort and that's going to take a lot of heavy lifting."
