Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

by Richard H. Thaler

15. Put a stop to people who blabber on. Stickk.com cofounder and Yale professor Ian Ayres has turned his interest in commitment strategies to the biggest fib in public speaking: “I’ll be brief.” Ayres is not a fan of this phrase and neither are we. Ayres says the phrase is nothing but cheap talk—easy to say, easy to ignore—and wants groups to develop a social norm that would have speakers publicly estimate how long they plan to talk. He suggests a speaker begin with the statement “Please interrupt me if I speak more than X minutes,” arguing that individuals retain the right to blabber—ahem, speak—for as long as they want while giving them a credible commitment device to cut it short. “The problem of speakers droning on at conferences and meetings isn’t one of the biggest problems in the world,” he writes, “but it is an example where cognitive error leads to a persistent dysfunction.”16 We like Ayres’s idea and think it could be combined with an idea that Thaler has been pushing for years. The goal is to design a plan to discipline people who make outrageously confident statements among groups that meet regularly. Thaler first thought about the idea in the context of academic workshops, but the solution is perfectly general, and indeed, has been adopted by his monthly wine-tasting group. Suppose that someone makes a claim whose truth can be determined such as, “These wines are obviously aged in American oak.” To avoid an endless, boring series of, “No they are not” and, “Y...