Designing effective choice architectures (Nudges) for behavioural shifts

Changing individual behaviors is key to tackling some of today’s most pressing societal challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic or climate change, as well as managing employees in today’s distributed organizations. Creating choice architectures (that define the physical, social, and psychological context in which decisions are made) has become extremely critical to inculcate personally and socially relevant behaviors at an individual level. Nudges have the power to transform organizations via the individuals, influencing, and being influenced by each other in an intrinsic social process. 

What makes a ‘nudge’, a ‘nudge’?

 

Thaler and Sunstein defined a nudge as: “… any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives”. It is critical that a nudge influences people towards behaviours that could positively impact their own lives and create better teams or societies.

 

Over the past few years, multiple narratives have got formalized on the ethics of nudges, focusing on transparency as a cornerstone. However, there is a visible inverse relationship between impact of a nudge, and level of transparency, creating two categories of nudges being leveraged for behaviour change.

A transparent nudge, defined as a nudge provided in such a way that the intention behind it, as well as the means by which behavioural change is pursued, could reasonably be expected to be transparent to the agent being nudged as a result of the intervention. E.g. Prompted choice for organ donation, default options in a digital app.

A non-transparent nudge, on the other hand, works in a way that the individual in the situation cannot reconstruct either the intention or the means by which behavioural change is pursued. E.g. The shrinking of plate sizes aimed eat reducing calorie intake; adding irrelevant options to choice sets.

(Hansen & Jespersen, 2013)

 

The design of ‘nudges’

 

Creation of choice architecture environments borrows heavily from the field of behavioural economics, which in itself has been influenced by principles of sociology, social psychology and cognitive neurosciences. The human decision making process is a complex phenomenon, the intersection point of various rationalities. 

For example, if the purpose of a nudge is to change people's behaviour so that they can eat healthier, the most effective nudge would understand:

• The bounded rationality of individuals in their instrumental actions (beliefs and thoughts);

• Their social rationality and how social norms play a role in how we eat;

• Their expressive rationality and how tastes, likes and dislikes affect what we eat and how we eat it.

 

(Hortal, 2020)

These choice architectures attempt to address the irrationalities that seep into human decision making due to heuristics and biases, and the pull of daily habits. Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes, conscious or unconscious, that ignore part of the information. Because using heuristics saves effort, the classical view has been that heuristic decisions imply greater errors than “rational” decisions as defined by logic or statistical models. 

When Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his Prospect theory, he introduced a descriptive model that introduced us to human fallacies of loss aversion (the weight that people attach to losses is roughly twice that which they attach to gains) and non-linear weighting of probability (demonstrating that people give higher weightage to smaller probabilities, and lower weightage to smaller probabilities). 

E.g. Propensity for smaller risks, and gains in financial decisions, impacting goal setting and risk-reward equations.

(Tversky & Kahneman, 1987)

Other psychological barriers exist in the form of Ignorance, Inertia, Akrasia, Queasiness/Discomfort, Comparison with existing reference points and individual vs. social benefits (the classic prisoner’s dilemma).(Ruzaik, 2008)

What is the process to be followed?

 

The human insight When individuals behave, they do so to arrive at the desired end with their action, but they also act due to specific reasons: they have reasons based on preferences for doing what they are doing that go beyond the effect of the action itself. Understanding those reasons (our expressive and social rationality) should be a part of any research conducted on causal principles for our behaviour and design of nudges. (Hortal, 2020)

 

Effective nudge campaigns begin with a deep understanding of the problem at hand, the behaviour that needs to be changed, the users, how they behave as well as understanding of the barriers to change. 

The intersectionality insight As human-kind faces a 'natural' crises, with respect to climate, water, soil and waste, it is imperative that choice architectures are created in a manner to nudge people towards choices that contribute to the crucial sustainability agenda.

 

About the author:

 

Gitanjali Saksena is Co-founder and Director, LagomWorks. She is certified in Advanced Design Thinking from Stanford University, USA, and Data Science and Machine Learning from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India. Gitanjali is an ICF Certified Professional Certified Coach.