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Self-control problems can be illuminated by thinking about an individual as containing two semiautonomous selves: a farsighted “Planner” and a myopic “Doer.”
In some situations, people may want the government to help them deal with their self-control problems. Some items such as heroin are banned outright; a possible explanation is that people would be unable to resist the lure of the drugs.
An interesting example of a government-imposed self-control strategy is daylight saving time (or summer time, as it is called in many parts of the world).
Christmas clubs are in many ways an adult version of a child’s piggy bank, designed to make it easier to put money in than to take money out. The fact that it is hard to withdraw money is entirely the point of the device.
But even when we’re on our way to making good choices, competitive markets find ways to get us to overcome our last shred of resistance to bad ones.
Mental accounting is the system (sometimes implicit) that households use to evaluate, regulate, and process their home budget.
Experimental evidence reveals that people are more willing to gamble with money that they consider house money.
When investments (say, in the stock market) pay off, people are willing to take big chances with their “winnings.”
Sometimes massive social changes, in markets and politics alike, start with a small and even serendipitous social nudge. A prominent person might state an opinion or engage in an action, which gives a kind of signal, a green light or a permission slip, to others, who do the same.
The issue might involve a product, a book, an idea, a political candidate, or a cause. And occasionally, a trickle becomes a flood, especially when social media is involved.
Telling people that a new norm is emerging—say, in the domain of sustainability—can create a self-fulfilling prophecy.1 Many do not want to be on the wrong side of history, and if they learn that people are increasingly doing something, they might think that what seemed difficult or even impossible is achievable, maybe even inevitable.
Why, exactly, do people sometimes ignore the evidence of their own senses?
The first involves the information that seems to be conveyed by other people’s answers; the second involves peer pressure and the desire not to face the disapproval of the group.
Remarkably, brain-imaging work has suggested that when people conform in Asch-like settings, they actually see the situation as everyone else does.
When polled individually, subjects did not agree with one another, and their answers varied significantly from one trial to another.
But Sherif found big conformity effects when people were asked to act in small groups and to make their estimates in public. Here the individual judgments converged and a group norm, establishing the consensus distance, quickly developed. Over time, the norm remained stable within particular groups, thus leading to a situation in which different groups made, and were strongly committed to, quite different judgments.
Decades after Sherif’s work, social scientists uncovered the confidence heuristic: people tend to think that confident speakers must be correct.
an arbitrary “tradition,” in the form of some judgment about the distance, can become entrenched over time, which means that many people end up following it notwithstanding its original arbitrariness.
We can also see why many groups fall prey to what is known as “collective conservatism”: the tendency of groups to stick to established patterns even as new needs arise.
Do you ever wonder how some performer, dance, or catchphrase suddenly becomes popular? Often it is a powerful combination of random chance and social influence. This is illustrated by a brilliant experiment involving music downloads conducted by Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts.
The songs that did well or poorly in the control group, where people did not see other people’s judgments, could perform very differently in the “social influence worlds.”
What Salganik and his coauthors found was an “informational cascade,” which occurs when people receive information from the choices of others.
“Chance variation in a small number of early movers” can have major effects in tipping large populations—and in getting both Republicans and Democrats to embrace a cluster of views that actually have nothing to do with each other.
In many domains people are tempted to think, after the fact, that the success of a musician, actor, author, or politician was inevitable in light of his or her skills and characteristics. Beware of that temptation. Small interventions and even coincidences, at a key stage, can produce large variations in the outcome.
For choice architects who want to use social influences, a challenge is to work with, rather than against, people’s sense of who they are.
Explicitly targeting the unresponsive audience, the state enlisted popular Dallas Cowboys football players to participate in television ads in which they collected litter, smashed beer cans in their bare hands, and growled, “Don’t mess with Texas!”
if nudges use social influences and social norms, they are most likely to be promising if people are asked to learn from and act like people who are like them—and whom they trust.
For those who want to enlist social influences, an important challenge, as well as a real opportunity, is pluralistic ignorance—that is, ignorance, on the part of all or most, about what other people think. We may follow a practice or a tradition not because we like it or even think it defensible, but merely because we think that most other people like it. Many social practices persist for this reason, which means a small shock, or nudge, can dislodge them.
Dramatic changes, rejecting long-standing practices, are often produced by a nudge that starts a kind of cascade or bandwagon effect, because it gives people a sense of what others actually think, and thus authorizes them to say what they actually think too.
If choice architects want to shift behavior and to do so with a nudge, they might be able to achieve this by simply informing people about what others are thinking and doing.
Celebrities and so-called influencers might believe that they are best positioned to inspire regular people like us to change our ways. But in fact, people seem simply to respond best to norms set by others in similar settings and circumstances.
First, many gays and lesbians who had not disclosed their sexual orientation, and who had never sought even to ask for same-sex marriage, came out of the closet. Every time someone shared, “I am gay,” or “I am a lesbian,” or “I am bisexual,” a small nudge was put in place.
Second, social influences were crucial. With respect to same-sex marriage, cities, states, and nations witnessed both informational and reputational cascades.
In the relevant period, the emerging norm was unambiguously in favor of same-sex marriage. That created a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
people are most likely to need nudges when decisions require scarce attention, when decisions are difficult, when people do not get prompt feedback, and when they have trouble translating aspects of the situation into terms that they can easily understand.
for all their virtues, markets often give companies a strong incentive to cater to (and profit from) our frailties, rather than to try to eradicate them or to minimize their effects.
Remembering is only half the battle if plans also have to be coordinated.
Although commercial pilots have flown hundreds or possibly thousands of times, they always go through a formal ritual before every takeoff, which is to go over a checklist of things that have to be ready before the plane leaves the gate.
One interesting key to the success of such programs is to authorize everyone in the room to remind absentminded offenders.
Self-control issues are most likely to arise when choices and their consequences are separated in time. At one extreme are what might be called investment goods, such as exercising, flossing, and healthy eating (meaning, healthy foods, and not too much of them). For these goods the costs are borne immediately, but the benefits are delayed.
At the other extreme are what might be called temptation goods: smoking, drinking a lot of alcohol, binge-watching old episodes of Friends, and eating jumbo chocolate doughnuts are in this category. We get the pleasure now and suffer the consequences later.
Even hard problems become easier with practice; solving them can even become automatic.
Unfortunately, some of life’s most important decisions do not come with many opportunities to practice.
Even practice does not make perfect if people lack good opportunities for learning. Learning is most likely if people get immediate, clear feedback after each try.
It is particularly hard for people to make good decisions when they have trouble translating the choices they face into the experiences they will have.
When people have a hard time predicting how their choices will end up affecting their lives, they have less to gain from having numerous options and perhaps even from choosing for themselves.
But here is the key point. No one could make any money telling people not to buy snake oil!
With respect to health, romance, and money, it is not at all hard to exploit people’s lack of information.
There is a general lesson here. Much of the time, more money can made by catering to human frailties than by helping people to avoid them.
Flat plates shout “push me” and big handles yell “pull me,” so architects should not expect people to push things that are meant to be grabbed! This is a failure of design to accommodate basic principles of human nature.
