Where do I throw away the pizza box? How do I drive without being tempted to check my smartphone? Is there a way to study for an exam without going into a classic last-minute panic? We Homo Sapiens are lazy creatures. Once we develop a habit, it's hard to get us to change it, even when this would be good for us. Many of our actions are the result of routines or choices that we may have made a long time ago and that we no longer question: the route we take every morning to get from home to school, for example. Sometimes, it's a way to save time, but it can also mean that we make mistakes or ignore equally valid alternatives. In actual fact, this often happens. This is why there are tricks, or cognitive prompts, to use a more technical expression, which help us make the best choice. When we stay in a hotel and find a sign that says: “9 out of 10 people who sleep in this room reuse the same towels after the first day. So can you,” that is a message which encourages us to consume less water by getting us to identify with the group. When an app tells us that we have taken more steps than our friends during the day, that is a fact which makes it more fun to develop a healthy lifestyle habit: namely, taking at least 10,000 steps every day. When we go to eat in a work cafeteria and the napkin dispenser is in the shape of a tree, so that for every napkin we take it seems that the tree is shedding its green coat, that is a visual stimulus that encourages us to use fewer napkins. There is a word that sums up these examples in a simple concept: nudge. The nudge, or gentle push, is a tool that every behavioral designer can and should use when wishing to encourage certain actions. The initiator of this approach is the American economist Richard Thaler, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics, and coauthor, with Cass Sunstein, of the bestseller Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. Through the use of behavioral leverage, a nudge makes us notice the information that is available when we make a decision. This is with the idea of helping us make better decisions. An aid to make better decisions, also for the environment A nudge is an encouragement or, indeed, a gentle push: it cannot be an obligation because this would violate our freedom. In the same way that we underline a sentence in a book that seems important to us, so the behavioral designer underlines elements of the context in which we make our decisions, to help us improve them. When it comes to climate change, it is a very useful approach in helping people in those micro-actions that may seem insignificant but which, when spread over a very large population, are capable of producing significant impacts. Choice architecture These are small choice architecture interventions that make it easier to carry out an action which, out of laziness, we sometimes forget to apply, even if we know it is the right thing to do. When we have apps on our smartphone or activate notifications, we want to furnish the information available to find out what we need as quickly as possible and save time. A nudge furnishes the context in which we make decisions, by trying to make the information that encourages the most sustainable option more evident. A gentle nudge, therefore, uses psychology to try to get us to take actions that improve our lifestyle and encourage us to pay more attention to sustainability.
