the nudge narrative

A nudge, as explained by Robert Thaler, the Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist, is “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.” (Wikipedia).

Nudging builds on the fact that people do not always make rational and informed choices. In fact, most of the choices we make are done automatically and intuitively (Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011). This impulsive behaviour is difficult to change by arguments. What appears to work, are small changes in the physical environment. A subtle hint can have a significant behavioral effect.

THE BEGINNING OF A NUDGE FOR ME.
In a country like India, and more so in a less developed place like Haryana, with less than desirable hygiene and sanitation practices and infrastructure,, people would sometimes dispose their garbage in front of other people’s homes. We would often find garbage strewn next to our gate every morning (the act was usually done in the night when no one could pin the culprit down). The proper designated place to dispose the garbage was at the end of the lane that we lived on. After months of frustration, at first, by putting up signs requesting people politely not to throw rubbish & then graduating to increased levels of anger, resulting in threatening people that they would be handed over to the police or even worse be cursed with bad karma, my parents had had enough. Their final solution? They dotted the boundary walls of our house with pictures of Gods and Goddesses 
The garbage nuisance stopped immediately ! I guess, it is a fact that in India, Gods do wield immense power! The fear of offending Gods was a subtle nudge that caused a shift in a hitherto stubborn behavior. Soon after, the entire neighborhood adopted this practice. Garbage stopped appearing in front of people’s houses and the unknown culprits (!) started walking to where they were legally required to responsibly dispose the garbage.

Soon, I became aware of the various ‘nudges’ my mom would use to get us to behave a particular way. Instead of storing our bikes in the space behind of the house, as used to be the practice, they appeared in the hallway that we crossed to go out reminding & encouraging us to bike. 
Those were the days of letter writing. No emails. And phone calls were expensive. Mom used to put a stack of 24 Inland letters (as they were called) on my table. 12 of them for me to write to my maternal grandparents’ and 12 to write to my paternal grandparents. Part of the nudge worked (I wrote regularly to my maternal grand mom). Part of the nudge didn’t – I used all the 12 letters that were meant for my paternal grandparents to write to my maternal grand mom instead. Maybe the nudge would have worked better, had she pre-addressed the letters?

 
The Nudge Continued to Intrigue
The interest in behavior – the irrational & the supposedly rational, the inter relationship between environment and person and how one can be modified by affecting the other, led me to pursue my education in Psychology and then in Medical & Psychiatric Social Work, with specialization in Behavior Change. 

This was a time of many ‘live’ experiments in nudges to affect behavior change.
I spent a year working with people affected with chemical dependency as a counsellor & social worker. One of the interventions involved the strategic use of buddies. People who were buddied up together to do an activity of combined choice (sports, exercise, meditation, arts & crafts) stuck with the activity for longer than those who weren’t buddied together. And showed a lower relapse rate than those who were on the path of recovery by themselves. Having a buddy – and a shared activity to reinforce the connection – served as a nudge in relapse prevention.  

I spent another year as the counsellor in an Old Age home. To encourage the residents to get walk more we had lined the longer route to the cafeteria with plants and with pictures of various deities that they prayed to and left the shorter route untouched. People took the longer route to their destination and walked much more than otherwise. These simple (almost rudimentary) nudges affected a behavior change much more than any talk therapy did. 

The newly admitted residents were depressed and reeling under a deep sense of rejection & ‘not mattering’ (In India, parents expect to either live with their children or be taken care of by them in some way, and, being sent away to an Old Age home – and that too a facility that was meant for destitutes was a blow to their sense of being).  Asking them to volunteer for duties – either cooking in the kitchen, or watering the plants, or teaching children at the neighboring school, gave them a sense of responsibility – and a nudge that helped restore their sense of dignity. 

While doing my internship with in the area of mental health, at a leading facility, many of the interventions for people dealing with mental health issues involved ‘nudges’ embedded in their physical environment to drive positive behavior change.
 
Nudge. Some more?
In my 20 years of work as a Strategist, this idea of making positive tweaks in a person’s environment to enable (not force) a behavior change in the direction desired, continued to surface through my work.

• Ariel, in 1998 was the first and only brand of detergent, that did not feature a woman in its advt. The adv. showed a man washing clothes, while his wife is at work. A positive nudge in breaking gender stereotypes.
• A key part of Pampers strategy was linking it to a night of undisturbed sleep. Putting Pampers next to bath time products and bundling them together in supermarkets. An equity driving nudge in store.
• Using Testers & Male Shopping Assistants for Olay Skin care in India. A nudge that helped drive active consideration & close sale in store.
• Whisper. A monthly delivery opt in option at E-commerce, when you buy the pack online the first time. Thereafter, a pack arrives at your doorstep every 26 days. No one loves shopping for sanitary pads, so this was a nudge that helped the consumers and the brand. That, plus the fact that if you know you cycle, you can pre order the pads and have them delivered to you monthly.  A simple nudge in the direction of efficiency.
• SKII. Making the buying experience shareworthy. A nudge that drove word of mouth.
• Coca Cola Chinese New Year campaign (CNY). For our audience, ‘preparation’ is a lonely experience and lasts longer than the ephermeral CNY reunion dinner itself. They wished they could share the preparation journey with someone so they could anticipate the thrill of the upcoming celebration. This lead us to the Connections Strategy of transforming the often lonely Job of Preparation into a shared Joy of Connection. The focus of our efforts shifted to the ‘preparation’ phase – seeding the association of Coke with Happiness outsidethe noise of the celebration. And booking your tickets to go back home – a big phenomenon during CNY-  being the first nudge that Coca Cola helped amplify, celebrate, share.

Small changes in the environment can affect people’s choices and decisions significantly. When thinking of the behaviour change you want to effect, think of the environmental changes you can create to enable & accelerate that change in behaviour. That nudge could be the idea that galvanizes people into action. 

*Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, first president of Turkey, wanted to modernize the Turkish people’s dressing. He wanted people to stop wearing the veil, but knew that a ban would result in strong resistance. So he tried a softer approach, which was to make it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil. People soon stopped wearing it. The prostitutes wearing the veil was the nudge - a psychological solution that solved the problem at hand. This example is sourced from the TED talk by Rory Sutherland.