The Smarter Screen Quotes

“After all, behavioral economists have spent years demonstrating the clear relationship between making something easy to do and getting people to actually do it. My very good friend and longtime collaborator Richard Thaler puts it this way: “My number-one mantra from Nudge [his book, cowritten with Cass Sunstein, on the application of behavioral economic principles to public policy] is, ‘Make it easy.’ When I say make it easy, what I mean is, if you want to get somebody to do something, make it easy. If you want to get people to eat healthier foods, then put healthier foods in the cafeteria, and make them easier to find, and make them taste better. So in every meeting I say, ‘Make it easy.’ It’s kind of obvious, but it’s also easy to miss.”7”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior

“according to a recent paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, patients failing to properly take their medication cost society somewhere between $100 billion and $289 billion every year.36 (It’s estimated that nearly 50 percent of prescriptions for chronic diseases are not used as prescribed.)37 Obesity, meanwhile, adds another $190 billion in direct health care costs. Drunk driving? $114 billion.38 Smoking? Nearly $290 billion.”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior

“There is a larger lesson here: we need to treat attention as a literal resource.”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior

“The lesson is simple: human attention has become the sweet crude oil of the twenty-first century. If you can control the levers of human attention, then you can essentially charge whatever you’d like.”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior

“For instance, Reinecke found that levels of education were statistically related to preferred levels of colorfulness, as people with graduate degrees preferred Web sites with little color.”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior

“We are so used to thinking of our conscious selves as in charge that all the evidence documenting our lack of control—how much we depend on split-second perceptions and aesthetic judgments—is rather scary.”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior

“Fortunes are made from scarcities, and the richest people are those who notice the scarcities first.”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior