Category: Nudge – Sunstein and Thaler

Framing and Nudges

Framing and Nudges

Posted on by jabittan
“Framing works because people tend to be somewhat mindless, passive decision makers,” write Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their book Nudge. “Their Reflective System does not do the work that would be required to check and see whether reframing the question would produce a different answer.”

 

Framing is an important rhetorical tool. We can frame things as gains or losses, reference numbers as percentages or as whole numbers, and compare phenomena to small classes or to larger populations. Framing can include elements of good or evil, morality or sin, responsibility toward ones family or individual greed. Depending on what we want people to do or how we want them to behave, we can adjust the way we frame a situation or decision to influence people in certain ways. Framing is not a 100% effective way to make people do what we want, but it can be a helpful way to nudge people toward certain decisions.

 

Sunstein and Thaler present an example of using framing to nudge people to conserve energy. They write,

 

“Energy conservation is now receiving a lot of attention, so consider the following information campaigns: (a) If you use energy conservation methods, you will save $350 per year; (b) If you do not use energy conservation methods, you will lose $350 per year. It turns out that information campaign (b), framed in terms of losses, is far more effective than information campaign (a). If the government wants to encourage energy conservation, option (b) is a stronger nudge.”

 

It is not the case that everyone who sees a message touting the money saved by conserving energy will do nothing while everyone who sees a message about the money they lose will take action. Some people will be motivated to take action by the message to save $350 per year, and some people won’t be motivated by the $350 loss aversion. However, on average, more people with the loss averse message will decide to take action. People tend to feel losses to a greater extent then they seek gains, so framing energy conservation methods as preventing a loss will motivate more people than framing energy conservation methods as leading to a gain.

 

This small shift in framing alters the perspective of buying energy efficient light bulbs or resealing windows from costly investments to practical strategies for avoiding further losses. Framing in this example is a simple nudge that isn’t a form of mind control, but plays into existing human biases and encourages people to make decisions that are better for them individually and for society collectively. I would argue that framing is a necessary and unavoidable choice. Messages are necessarily context dependent, and trying not to include any particular framing can make a message useless – at that point you might as well not have a message at all. Given that framing is necessary and that there are preferable outcomes, choice architects should think about framing and employ frames in a way to encourage the best possible decisions for the most people possible.
The Value of Objects - Joe Abittan

The Value of Objects

Posted on by jabittan
My dad collected Hot Wheels toy cars. He had thousands of cars, all in their packaging, with limited editions and rare valuable cars all collected and organized together. It was a hobby, and an example of how much value an individual can attach to objects that don’t mean anything to other people.

 

On my wife’s side of the family, near-hoarding behavior is not uncommon. With my dad’s collection and my wife’s family’s saving everything just in case, we have both seen the excesses of placing too much value in objects. We try hard to think critically about the things we have in our lives, and try to avoid having too many things and giving them too much value. But still, it is hard to part with things, even when they are gifts that we never really wanted and even when we know that we don’t need it or could replace it easily.

 

In the book Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler write the following about the value of objects. “People do not assign specific values to objects. When they have to give something up, they are hurt more than they are pleased if they acquire the very same thing.”

 

People are not actually that good at thinking about value. We will go out of our way for free stuff, we will hoard things to avoid feelings of loss, and we will collect items that don’t have the same economic value as the emotional value we attach to them once they are in our possession. This impulse helps drive our economy, but it can also drive us as individuals into madness.

 

I think that it is important to understand the quote from Sunstein and Thaler. When we recognize that we are not very good at thinking about value objectively, we can recognize irrational ways that we become attached to mere objects. We can start to shift the way we think about the material things in our lives and to really consider if they provide us value. We might find that our Hot Wheels collection really does provide us value, but at the same time, we may recognize that the decorative thing that someone gave us years ago doesn’t provide value. We can look at items that sit around taking up space, requiring cleaning, and cluttering our lives and feel more freedom with parting from those items. Understanding our irrational tendency towards objects and value can help us rethink what we keep, what we fill our lives with, and can help us get beyond the loss aversion we feel when we think about selling something or tossing it out.
Nudges for Unrealistic Optimism

Nudges for Unrealistic Optimism

Posted on by jabittan
Our society makes fun of the unrealistic optimist all the time, but the reality is that most of us are unreasonably optimistic in many aspects of our life. We might not all believe that we are going to receive a financial windfall this month, that our favorite sports team will go from losing almost all their games last year to the championship this year, or that everyone in our family will suddenly be happy, but we still manage to be more optimistic about most things than is reasonable.

 

Most people believe they are better than average drivers, even though by definition half the people in a population must be above and half the people below average. Most of us probably think we will get a promotion or raise sometime sooner rather than later, and most of us probably think we will live to be 100 and won’t get cancer, go bald, or be in a serious car crash (after all, we are all above average drivers right?).

 

Our overconfidence is often necessary for daily life. If you are in sales, you need to be unrealistically optimistic that you are going to get a big sale, or you won’t continue to pick up the phone for cold calls. We would all prefer the surgeon who is more on the overconfident side than the surgeon who doubts their ability and asks us if we finalized our will before going into the operating room. And even just for going to the store, doing a favor for a neighbor, or paying for sports tickets, overconfidence is a feature, not a bug, of our thinking. But still, there are times where overconfidence can be a problem.

 

2020 is an excellent example. If we all think I’m not going to catch COVID, then we are less likely to take precautions and are more likely to actually catch the disease. This is where helpful nudges can come into play.

 

In Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler write, “If people are running risks because of unrealistic optimism, they might be able to benefit from a nudge. In fact, we have already mentioned one possibility: if people are reminded of a bad event, they may not continue to be so optimistic.”

 

Reminding people of others who have caught COVID might help encourage people to take appropriate safety precautions. Reminding a person trying to trade stocks of previous poor decisions might encourage them to make better investment choices then trying their hand at day trading. A quick pop-up from a website blocker might encourage someone not to risk checking social media while they are supposed to be working, saving them from the one time their supervisor walks by while they are scrolling through someone’s profile. Overconfidence may be necessary for us, but it can lead to risky behavior and can have serious downfalls. If slight nudges can help push people away from catastrophic consequences from unrealistic optimism, then they should be employed.
Post Hoc Conclusions

Post Hoc Conclusions

Posted on by jabittan
Our minds see a lot of patterns that don’t exist. We make observations of randomness and find patterns that we assume to be based on a causal link when in reality no causal structure exists between our observations. This can happen in 3 point shooting in basketball, in observations of bomb locations in WWII London, and in music streaming services. We are primed to see patterns and causes, and we can construct them even when we shouldn’t. One contributing factor for incorrect pattern observation is that we tend to make post hoc conclusions, making observations after the fact without predicting what we might expect to see before hand.

 

Using the WWII example, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in the book Nudge show how people developed misconstructions of German bombing patterns in London during the war. The German bombing wasn’t precise, and there was no real pattern to the bombing raids and where bombs actually exploded across the city. Nevertheless, people mistakenly viewed a pattern in the random distribution of bombs. The authors describe the mistaken pattern identification by writing, “We often see patterns because we construct our informational tests only after looking at the evidence.”

 

People could map where bombs fell, and then create explanations for what targets the Germans were aiming at, for why the Germans would target a certain part of the city, and what strategic purpose the bombing was trying to accomplish. But these reasons are all post hoc constructions meant to satisfy a non-existent pattern that someone expected to find. We also see this in basketball, when a shooter makes a few baskets and is believed to have the hot hand or be on fire. In music streaming services, algorithms are actually tweaked to be less random, because listeners who hear two consecutive songs or more by the same band will assume the streaming isn’t randomizing the music, even though random chance will sometimes pick a string of songs from the same band or even from the same album.

 

The examples I mentioned in the previous paragraph are harmless cognitive errors stemming from poorly constructed post hoc explanations of phenomena.  However, post hoc conclusions based on non-existent patterns are important to consider because they can have real consequences in our lives and societies. If we are in a position to make important decisions for our families, our companies, or our communities, we should recognize that we possess the ability to be wildly wrong about observed patterns. It is important that we use better statistical techniques or listen to the experts who can honestly employ them to help us make decisions. We should not panic about meaningless stock market fluctuations and we should not incarcerate people based on poor crime statistic understandings. We should instead remember that our brains will look for patterns and find them even if they don’t actually exist. We should state assumptions before we make observations, rather than making post hoc conclusions on poor justifications for the patterns we want to see.
Nudges Versus Regulation

Nudges Versus Regulation

Posted on by jabittan
“Libertarian paternalism, we think, is a promising foundation for bipartisanship.” Write Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their book Nudge. The authors are in favor of a governance structure that does not eliminate choice and possibility for people in the world. They are in favor of a system that allows flexibility for the people who have the time and capacity to consider all of their options before making a choice, and they prefer subtle and almost invisible forces to shape public opinion and behaviors. Throughout the book they argue that heavy handed regulation can be harmful to the long-term success and progress in some areas because people may push back against laws and regulations that limit freedom.  Nudges, in their view, can be an avenue toward real bipartisanship and cooperation because they can make real world changes without heavy handed government action.

 

The authors present the standard view of American politics where the Republican Party is presented as the party of small government while Democrats are the party of big government action. Republicans are all about freedom of choice and individual responsibility while Democrats are the party of government planning and the use of public institutions to improve people’s lives. I think this view is wrong. I think people are primarily self-interested, and gravitate toward the party that better reflects their identity, personality, and self-interests, and through motivated reasoning find high-minded excuses for supporting the party that generally aligns with the overarching political preferences that the standard view of American politics presents. But does this mean that Sunstein and Thaler are wrong about the ability of nudges to bring together Republicans and Democrats for action on public policy?

 

They write, “In many domains, including environmental protection, family law, and school choice, we will be arguing that better governance requires less in the way of government coercion and constraint, and more in the way of freedom to choose.”

 

When we consider whether Sunstein and Thaler are correct, we have to ask what is meant by better governance. Better governance might be reaching actual goals and actually improving people’s lives. It might mean creating a system that people are happier to interact with. Better governance may also mean a system that is more equitable, creates more social cohesion and trust, or that operates quicker. Each of these concepts is different, yet related, and we demonstrate that how we chose to measure better governance can shape the approaches we take. A focus on greater equity might come at the cost of quicker hiring and firing processes. Creating a system that leaves individuals who interact with governance happier may mean a system that is bigger and more expensive, but might not mean that it actually solves people’s problems. What we mean by better governance can conflict with what someone else means by better governance, so it is important to be clear about goals and expectations.

 

And that gets to the question – do nudges actually do any of these things? In terms of addressing environmental protection, I don’t think nudges are adequate. I think we are at a point where catastrophic environmental damage and climate change are unavoidable unless we have massive societal and technological changes. Simple nudges that tax oil and gas while offering rebates or incentives for purchasing electric cars won’t change the landscape quick enough to help mitigate climate change and create a sustainable world moving forward. I think we are at a point where we need real action to produce meaningful changes that lead to better governance in environmental policy. It might be time for outright bans on sales of gasoline and diesel engines, billion dollar prizes for green technology, and other heavy handed government interferences in markets and people’s daily lives.

 

However, within family policy, nudges do seem like they can be meaningful. Tyler Cowen recently shared research correlating child car safety laws with the number of children a family has. The argument being that car seats and seat-belt requirements may make it more difficult to have multiple young children who take a long time to get situated in a car before driving, reducing incentives for parents to have more kids. Family decisions, it seems, can be highly influenced by seemingly inconsequential factors. If this is accurate, then nudges, such as child care rebates, really might reduce the costs of childbearing, and might encourage larger families, shaping the actual outcome of people’s lives and securing a young tax base to support social service programs. Nudges might be an effective approach to encouraging more family formation.

 

To continue analyzing policy in areas where Sunstein and Thaler’s quote suggests nudges would be helpful, my argument on school choice would be that it is effectively 100% signaling and self-interest. Religious parents probably don’t care too much about what their children actually learn in school or where they go. They do care about how much their school choice argument and energy demonstrate their religious devotion. Wealthy parents care about the signaling power of elite schools and universities, and similarly care about how much their children will be able to signal and benefit from a private school education that is out of reach for the majority of families who send their children to public schools. Race, socio-economic status, and other identity markers seem to be core to the self-interest of most school choice freedom advocates in my opinion. From my point of view, better governance would enhance social cohesion, encourage more opportunities for those individuals who otherwise would be left out, and help us manage diversity collectively. If school choice is overwhelmingly dominated by signaling and self-interest, then I see little reason why nudges would be the best approach to shaping policy. Nudges that increase costs of signaling end up creating stronger signals for those who can afford to still send their children to private institutions, therefore increasing their value and creating more division and contention within the debate.

 

Nudges seem to have real power in shaping public policy and can likely bring together Republicans and Democrats in some instances, but if governance is not about public policy, but is instead about identity, self-interest, and signaling, then I don’t think nudges can truly do much to improve governance or bring together Democrats and Republicans. Similarly, for massively consequential policy areas, I don’t think we can leave our future and success up to nudges. They may take too long and not be forceful enough to really shape public behavior and attitude, especially if they face entrenched opposition.
Nudges Are Unavoidable - Joe Abittan

Nudges Are Unavoidable

Posted on by jabittan
American capitalism makes a mistake in assuming that people have all the information they need to make a rational choice. As anyone who has ever purchased a car knows, consumers do not always have all the valuable information they need to make a good decision in an exchange, and often, one party has far more information than another. We can become experts at selecting avocados pretty easily, but it is fairly unlikely that we will become experts at selecting the best used car. We become avocado experts because we can buy them weekly and get reliable and immediate feedback when we get home and cut into them. A used car, however, is not something we buy on a regular basis, and we might make it months or years before we have a catastrophic break down.

 

Because we are not experts in everything and because there are some decisions we have to make where we don’t get reliable and timely feedback and can’t practice enough to truly know what to look for, we are subject to forces large and small that influence our decision-making. Buying a used car because you like the sales person, because the price feels right, and because of brand loyalty are examples of cognitive errors or biases where subtle nudges by the dealership or brand can influence us. Whether a salesman intends it or not, there are many factors that nudge our behavior, and they can’t be eliminated.

 

In Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler write, “In many situations, some organization or agent must make a choice that will affect the behavior of some other people. There is, in those situations, no way of avoiding nudging in some direction, and whether intended or not, these nudges will affect what people chose.”

 

The car dealership example is a somewhat nefarious and depressing view of nudges. However, the reality of Sunstein and Thaler’s quote can also be a powerful force to help improve people’s lives and not just overcharge them for a lemon. Carfax is a company that helps nudge people in the right direction, by getting them to consider the vehicle’s collision history before making a decision based on how shiny the car looks. Other nudges can be helpful for people, and if we accept that nudges are unavoidable, then we can actively step in to help design decision situations in a way that will allow people to make good decisions. An example I can think of would be visual aids to help people understand how much they can afford for a monthly car payment, mortgage, or rent. Most housing agencies suggest that people shouldn’t spend more than 33% of their monthly income on rent/mortgage. A calculator tool with a green smiley face, and a red frown face could help nudge people away from mortgages or rents that they really can’t afford, helping people make difficult and more reasonable housing decisions. Small actions can help people better understand their decisions and can serve as guides that help people do what is actually in their best interest as they themselves would understand it.
Paternalistic Nudges - Joe Abittan

Paternalistic Nudges

Posted on by jabittan
In their book Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler argue in favor of libertarian paternalism. Their argument is that our world is complex and interconnected, and it is impossible for people to truly make decisions on their own. Not only is it impossible for people to simply make their own decisions, it is impossible for other people to avoid influencing the decisions of others. Whether we decide to influence a decision in a particular way, or whether we decide to try to avoid any influence on another’s decision, we still shape how decisions are presented, understood, and contextualized. Given this reality, the best alternative is to try to help people make consistently better decisions than they would without aid and assistance.

 

The authors describe libertarian paternalism by writing:

 

“The approach we recommend does count as paternalistic, because private and public choice architects are not merely trying to track or to implement people’s anticipated choices. Rather, they are self-consciously attempting to move people in directions that will make their lives better. They nudge.”

 

The nudge is the key aspect of libertarian paternalism. Forcing people into a single choice, forcing them to accept your advice and perspective, and aggressively trying to change people’s behaviors and opinions doesn’t fit within the libertarian paternalism framework advocated by Sunstein and Thaler. Instead, a more subtle form of guidance toward good decisions is employed. People retain maximal choices if desired, and their opinions, decisions, and behaviors are somewhat constrained but almost nothing is completely off the table.

 

“A nudge,” Sunstein and Thaler write, “as we will use the term, 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.”

 

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow demonstrated that people make predictable errors and have predictable biases. If we can understand these thinking errors and biases, then we can identify situations in which these biases and cognitive errors are likely to lead people to making suboptimal decisions. To go a step further, as Sunstein and Thaler would suggest, if we are a choice architect, we should design and structure choices in a way that leads people away from predictable cognitive biases and errors. We should design choices in a way that takes those thinking mistakes into consideration and improves the way people understand their choices and options.

 

As a real world example, if we are structuring a retirement savings plan, we can be relatively sure that people will anchor around a default contribution built into their retirement savings plan. If we want to encourage greater retirement savings (knowing that economic data indicate people rarely save enough), we can set the default to 8% or higher, knowing that people may reduce the default rate, but likely won’t eliminate contributions entirely. Setting a high default is a nudge toward better retirement saving. We could chose not to have a default rate at all, and it is likely that people wouldn’t be sure about what rate to select and might chose a low rate below inflation or simply chose not to enter a rate at all, completely failing to contribute anything to the plan. It is clear that there is a better outcome that we, as choice architects, could help people attain if we understand how their minds work and can apply a subtle nudge.
Do People Make the Best Choices?

Do People Make the Best Choices?

Posted on by jabittan
My wife works with families with children with disabilities and for several years I worked in the healthcare space. A common idea between our two worlds was that the people being assisted are the experts on their own lives, and they know what is best for them. Parents are the experts for their children and patients are the experts in their health. Even if parents to don’t know all the intervention strategies to help a child with disabilities, and even if patients don’t have an MD from Stanford, they are still the expert in their own lives and what they and their families need.

 

But is this really true? In recent years there has been a bit of a customer service pushback in the world of business, more of a recognition that the customer isn’t always right. Additionally, research from the field of cognitive psychology, like much of the research from Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow that I wrote about, demonstrates that people can have huge blind spots in their own lives. People cannot always think rationally, in part because their brains are limited in their capacity to handle lots of information and because their brains can be tempted to take easy shortcuts in decision-making that don’t always take into account the true nature of reality. Add to Kahneman’s research the ideas put forth by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler in The Elephant in the Brain, where the authors argue that our minds intentionally hide information from ourselves for political and personal advantage, and we can see that individual’s can’t be trusted to always make the best decisions.

 

So while no one else may know a child as well as the child’s parents, and while no one knows your body and health as well as you do, your status as the expert of who you are doesn’t necessarily mean you are in the best position to always make choices and decisions that are in your own best interest. Biases, cognitive errors, and simple self-deception can lead you astray.

 

If you accept that you as an individual, and everyone else individually, cannot be trusted to always make the best choices, then it is reasonable to think that someone else can step in to help improve your decision-making in certain predictable instances where cognitive errors and biases can be anticipated. This is a key idea in the book Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. In defending their ideas for libertarian paternalism, the authors write, “The false assumption is that almost all people, almost all of the time, make choices that are in their best interest or at the very least are better than the choices that would be made by someone else. We claim that this assumption is false – indeed, obviously false.”

 

In many ways, our country prefers to operate with markets shaping the main decisions and factors of our lives. We like to believe that we make the best choices for our lives, and that aggregating our choices into markets will allow us to minimize the costs of individual errors. The idea is that we will collectively make the right choices, driving society in the right direction and revealing the best option and decision for each individual without deliberate tinkering in the process. However, we have seen that markets don’t encourage us to save as much as we should and markets can be susceptible to the same cognitive errors and biases that we as individuals all share.  Markets, in other words, can be wrong just like us as individuals.

 

Libertarian paternalism helps overcome the errors of markets by providing nudges to help people make better decisions. Setting up systems and structures that make saving for retirement easier helps correct a market failure. Outsourcing investment strategies, rather than each of us individually making stock trades, helps ensure that shared biases and panics don’t overwhelm the entire stock exchange. The reality is that we as individuals are not rational, but we can develop systems and structures that provide us with nudges to help us act more rationally, overcoming the reality that we don’t always make the choices that are in our best interest.
The Power of Inertia - Joe Abittan

The Power of Inertia

Posted on by jabittan
For Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, inertia plays a critical role in the idea of using nudges to influence people toward making good decisions. Particularly in regard to default choices, inertia matters a lot. People accept defaults, and making any change, whether it is trivial, important, time consuming, or very simple, is stubbornly resisted by many people. Think about how likely you are to change your desktop background, to change your phone’s ringtone, to order something new at your usual Tuesday night restaurant, to fix the broken windshield visor in your car, or to change your weekend morning routine.

 

Once people develop a status quo, once a default has been set, the power of inertia sets in. Sunstein and Thaler in Nudge write, “First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed.”

 

Harnessing the power of inertia can be sinister, but for Sunstein and Thaler, that is not the point. When a company offers you a free three month trial if you use a credit card to sign-up, they are counting on making money off your inertia. However, when a state organ donation program auto-enrolls every who applies for a drivers license, they are counting on inertia to help save lives. Inertia can be leveraged not just to make money off lazy and forgetful people, but to help make life simpler, easier, and even longer for people. In our individual lives we can harness inertia to build a workout routine, to stop buying cookies at the store, and to eat an apple during our 15 minute break every morning. For public officials, inertia can be harnessed when public programs make it easy for people to register to vote, to automatically receive social services, and to pay taxes.

 

Companies who count of people forgetting to cancel a subscription after a free trial and companies who expect that people won’t spend time shopping for alternatives once they sign up for monthly services give the power of inertia a bad reputation. They make it hard for public agencies and elected officials to credibly discuss programs designed to take advantage of or at least acknowledge people’s inability to escape inertia. But this should be a serious discussion in public policy. It is important to think about whether people will make changes in their lives to adopt measures that will help them be more safe, live healthier, and cooperate better. When we see a clear preference in how we want people to interact, we should discuss ways to help people behave as we wish they would, if we can recognize a particular decision is what people would chose for themselves if they were to make the effort of choosing anything at all. We don’t have to eliminate choices or bar people from behave otherwise, but we can use nudges, defaults, and the power of inertia to help people make and stick with better choices.
The Necessity of Paternalistic of Choice Architects

The Necessity of Paternalistic Choice Architects

Posted on by jabittan
One of my favorite experiments to think about is a fabled study about people and jam. In an experiment, people at a store were able to sample jam. In one situation, there were only a few jams to sample, and in the other situation there was a huge selection of jams. Shoppers could try them all before making a purchase. The natural expectation (at least for me) is to assume that those who get to try more jams will be more happy with their final selection. After all, they have more jams to try and are more likely to find a jam that best suited their taste preferences. The results, however, suggest that people who only had a few jams to sample more happy with their final jam choice than the people with a bunch of jams to try.

 

This experiment reveals something interesting about how our mind works. Unlimited freedom and choice means that we are never truly satisfied with the decisions we make. We will always have a lingering doubt, and we will live with the regret of possibly making the wrong choice. The more options we have, the more likely we will feel as though we may have made the wrong decision. We might feel compelled to go beyond the standard default choice, selecting against a strawberry to go with huckleberry, even though we know we would have been perfectly content getting our regular strawberry jam.

 

The results of the jam experiment have important implications for choice architects. A choice architect is anyone who is in a position to organize, design, shape, administer, or deliver a choice to another person. Parents are choice architects when they give their children different options for toys, sports, or how to generally spend their time and attention. Your human resources benefits manager is a choice architect when they determine which health care plan types will be offered to employees. Very few of our decisions are truly free from a choice architect of one sort.

 

These choice architects have important decisions to make. In the book Nudge, authors Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler make an argument for libertarian paternalism, the idea that choice architects can nudge people into making the decisions that will be best for them. They write, “The paternalistic aspect lies in the claim that it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people’s behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better.” It can seem naïve and elitist to believe that  one person can make such decisions for another person, but in reality, it is imperative that people believe and act as if it is possible, and the jam experience helps show why this is necessary.

 

None of us know exactly how much each person needs to save for retirement, which health insurance plan will truly be the best possible plan for ourselves or someone else, or which jam is really going to be the one for someone else. But we can generally identify the right direction in each choice for most people. We know people typically don’t save as much for retirement as they should, so defaulting them into a retirement savings plan at 8% is better than defaulting them into no retirement savings plan or a plan that sets aside 3% of their paycheck. Young and healthy people may not believe they need health insurance, but we can auto enroll them into a standard high deductible plan if they don’t actively make a choice for themselves, ensuring they have some type of coverage in the case of a car crash or ski accident. We know most people eat jam with toast or maybe on pancakes, so most people probably aren’t that interested in purchasing a jalapeno jam during their typical weekend grocery store trip. The strawberry can stay at eye level while the jalapeno jam can stay on the top shelf and maybe get a temporary end-cap spot for the holidays.

 

The jam study also shows that people don’t want to be presented with too many options. They will have trouble making a choice and won’t be satisfied with their final decision. Narrowing the range of choices can help people better manage their decisions, and can help ensure they don’t select a plan that is wildly off course for their best interest. This is a basic first step for a choice architect, and reveals the value that choice architects can provide with only a minimal level of paternalistic interference. Choice architects can take things a step further, as Sunstein and Thaler encourage throughout Nudge, but taking a step backward, eliminating the paternalism in choice architecture, doesn’t encourage flourishing by maximizing freedom of choice, it creates paralysis, doubt, and too many options for a person to reasonably consider, especially when dealing with topics more complex than jam.