Nudging: Create a physical environment that seduces people to be physically active

• Evidence: A case-study on stair-use and the importance of constructed environmental factors
  • People are more seduced to take the escalator rather than the stairs, even in settings where they are going to the fitness.
• This research studied the effect of placing a health-sign in community settings (open to public like stations and malls) 3 settings with similar designs - the mall of Hasselt, the station of Hasselt, the station of Harelbeke - and observations of how many people were taking the stairs
  1. Baseline
  2. First intervention
  3. (first) post-intervention
  4. Second intervention
  5. Second post-intervention
• Setting 1 -> People came from the right
  • Without sign: 2%
  • With sign: 8%
    
• Setting 2 -> Slight majority came from the right
  • Without sign: 35%
  • With sign: 44%
    
• Setting 3 -> People were less rushed
  • Without sign: 9%
  • With sign: 27%
    
• Results
  • Simple, inexpensive health-sign has some impact on stair-use in different community settings, in different regions
  • Reintroduction of sign has increased effect + delayed retention
  • Different baselines point to importance of contextual factors -> Take the (constructed) environment into account!
    

Fundamental Attribution Error:

• The tendency to attribute the behaviour of other people to internal factors (such as personality characteristics), rather than to external factors (such as environmental influences).
• If we are the person doing the negative behaviour, we tend to look for external factors.
  • “He/she is physically inactive, because he/she is lazy.”

Defining nudging

• Subtle changes in the environment (choice of architecture) that make the healthy choice easy, attractive, social and timely (EAST), with little to no (financial) incentives for healthy choices, without prohibiting unhealthy choices or increasing their cost (nannying)
• It’s all relative in the choice architecture
  • Desired behaviour should be more EAST than undesired rival behaviour(s).
  • Another strategy is to make the rival behaviour less EAST

examples

Nudging is controversial in terms of ethics

• Libertarian paternalism underlying nudging/behavioural engineering:
  • By the right, in the US, it is considered as not transparent enough
  • By the left wing, it is considered as an excuse for not engaging in ‘proper’ policy
• These dangers are real, but:
  • There is no neutral choice/design! You are always being nudged!
  • Some (cheap) nudges can help enforce policies.