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Kindle Notes & Highlights
good building is not merely attractive; it also ‘works.’
Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.
Take, for example, the ‘planning fallacy’ –the systematic tendency toward unrealistic optimism about the time it takes to complete projects.
What this means is that people do not assign specific values to objects. When they have to give something up, they are hurt more than they are pleased if they acquire the very same thing.
Loss aversion helps produce inertia, meaning a strong desire to stick with your current holdings.
As we will see, loss aversion operates as a kind of cognitive nudge, pressing us not to make changes, even when changes are very much in our interests.
Similarly, temptation is easier to recognize than to define.
According to economic theory (and simple logic), money is ‘fungible,’ meaning that it doesn’t come with labels. Twenty dollars in the rent jar can buy just as much food as the same amount in the food jar. But households adopt mental accounting schemes that violate fungibility for the same reasons that organizations do: to control spending.
The clear lesson here is that consistent and unwavering people, in the private or public sector, can move groups and practices in their preferred direction.
The three social influences that we have emphasized – information, peer pressure, and priming – can easily be enlisted by private and public nudgers.
If consumers have a less than fully rational belief, firms often have more incentive to cater to that belief than to eradicate it.
A well-designed system expects its users to err and is as forgiving as possible.
A cautionary note: surprise and serendipity can be fun for people, and good for them too, and it may not be entirely wonderful if our primary source of information is about what people like us like. Sometimes it’s good to learn what people unlike us like – and to see whether we might even like that.
one must be cautious in nudging people and forcing choices
