Yea or nay: Vote on a proposed parking lot nudge

Reader Richard Whittington passes along an interesting idea he has for revising parking lot choice architecture. The basic proposal is to narrow the parking spaces closer to store entrances. Whittington explains two benefits.

Make parking spaces that are closer to store entrances narrower for the first 20 spaces, then get progressively wider up to the standard width 40 spaces from the entrance. People would park further out from the entrance because it would be harder to exit the vehicle close in and they would not care to have an older banged up vehicle bang up their nice vehicle. It would get people to walk more for better health. Handicapped spaces would continue to be the same large size but would have to monitored much more closely by parking violation dept. This would increase revenue to the city or county. Two, I think, good results from this small action.

There are many ways to tweak this idea for different types of stores and communities. There are also many behavioral consequences, pro and con, to consider. The Nudge blog thinks the heart of the matter is whether a parking lot painted in this way would alienate customers. Let us know what you think by voting in our online poll below.

Confusing choice architecture: Don’t text, but check out our tweets

Talk about mixed messages.

At least 22 states that ban texting while driving offer some type of service that allows motorists to get information about traffic tie-ups, road conditions or emergencies via Twitter.

Sadly, the Nudge blog’s home state of Illinois is one of them. Full story here.

The National University of Singapore nudges

Marcus Tay Guan Hock, Sustainability Executive at the National University of Singapore, writes in to say that Nudge “gives me hope as an environmentalist,” and explains how the school used principles of choice architecture to redesign its recycling program.

Here at the National University of Singapore (NUS), we designed our recycling bins to tackle the issue of contamination, applying what you called “Expect Error” from users.

When users throw the wrong things in the recycling bins, it wastes the efforts of those who recycled properly. For example, paper bins are often contaminated with food waste, rendering all of the paper unrecyclable.

This situation is rather serious in Singapore. A Straits Times Article on June 15, “What rubbish,” indicates non-recyclable waste found in all 80 recycling bins surveyed.

At NUS, we did the following two things. They have worked wonders.

At the point of disposal, we help people decide if the item can be recycled using proper and clear labels. These labels are designed so that before users can throw trash into the bin, they will see the labels which instruct them what can and cannot be thrown.

We give people an option not to throw garbage into the recycling bin if the garbage cannot be recycled by pairing every set of recycling bins with a trash bin as well. Because some people are not yet environmentally conscious, they just want to get rid of the rubbish in their hands, whether it can be recycled or not.

What would it take to get you to take the stairs more? How about music and a view?

The stairs between the upper floors of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business are made to be used. They are placed smack in the middle of blocks of faculty offices. They zigzag back and forth up open columns, allowing people to see easily between floors. They have plenty of light, are carpeted, and blend into the design of the building.  By placing the stairs in a common area (the elevators are a longer walk away) and making them inviting, the architect created a nudge to encourage a smudge of healthier behavior in the work place.

Creating more accessible staircases through public policy and physical architecture is one way to promote an active lifestyle, say Dr. Ishak Mansi of Louisiana State University, and his wife, Nardine Mansi, an architect, in the Southern Medical Journal. A small 2.8 percent increase in stair use would cut 300 grams of weight from a typical person, they say.

So how does one design a building where people actually use the stairs? There are three key features.

1) Fewer turns between the stairs and the closest entrance.
2) Stairs with large surface areas (not too narrow and steep).
3) Create a view, either up, down, or across, from the stairwell. No one wants to walk up a tiny, white box.

The Booth School of Business staircases meet all of these requirements (perhaps it’s no surprise the building won a major design award last year). For those who can’t build new stairwells, there are a few other nudges to try. Displaying motivational signs in the lobby and throughout the building, and playing music in the stairwell can increase stair use. Together, these two nudges can increase usage by as much as 9 percent. Hanging artwork on the stairwell walls, closing elevators occasionally, and offering incentives like fruit are also known to work.

The journal article is gated, but a short news summary is here.

The dentist bib as choice architecture

Talya Miron-Shatz, a psychology post-doctorate at Princeton with Daniel Kahneman, recently received a crown and a root canal in the same sitting from two different dentists. Since the two procedures were separate from one another, neither dentist seemed to know the local anesthetic that the other was providing to Talya. With poor communication, Talya almost received a double dose of Novocaine (or something similar). There has to be a better way to prevent these kind of errors, she thought.

And here’s my two cents for human engineering. Dental patients wear a bib around their neck. How about if the (dental) office purchased a Sharpie, and had each doctor write down how many injections he/she gave the patient, and their exact location. Better still, how about if this was pre-marked on the bib?

Read the full post as Psychology Today.

The choice architecture of Time magazine’s online poll of influentials

Time Magazine’s list of 203 finalists for the 100 most influential people in the world is out for 2009 and thanks to Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein are on it. Almost making the final list is a great honor for them, but in Sunstein’s household, he’s just playing catch-up (his wife Samantha Power made the final list in 2004).

On Time’s web site, readers are able to help editors pick the influentials. Already, it is clear that the online rankings are quirky, and that’s not just because readers have ranked Thaler and Sunstein dead last as of Sunday March 29. A number of readers on Freakonomics have pointed out how awkward some of the choice architecture of the site is. Say you want to vote on who belongs on the list. Time provides a slider on a 1-100 scale that visitors can use to score influence. But you might be easily confused. Should influential people get higher or lower numbers. Seems like you’d want to give higher number to influential people; but the winner of any best/worst list always comes in at No. 1.

Reader Tom notes that Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke has an average score of 5. “People are interpreting the top 100 scale to mean 1 is the highest and 100 is the lowest,” he writes. E agrees that the slider is poorly conceived. “I started by sliding toward 1 to say the person has less influence (like 1%) and toward 100 for more influence…Now I think it’s ranking that the slider indicates, not ‘influence’ as the text indicates…. So I just gave up, not understanding the paradigm.”

Initially, Time gave no guidance about how to interpret the scale. Since the site went online, Time has added a description to the scale that makes clear 100 is “most influential.”

Meanwhile, a lot of people are voting for moot, the founder of the image bulletin board 4chan.org, and the leader with a score of 75. The Korean pop star Rain (he’s Korea’s answer to Justin Timberlake) finished second on the online poll, and is currently ranked No. 3. Online polls are one good way to open up the selection process to people, but they can be vulnerable to manipulation, especially when mobilized groups participate in small, relatively unknown ones. Basically, they are a highly flawed form of choice architecture.

Comedian Stephen Colbert recently outwitted NASA by asking his viewers to write him in as part of an online poll to name a room on the international space station. One U.S. congressional member is backing Colbert’s win, telling the Chicago Tribune, “Funding for space exploration is something where getting the public’s interest is challenging, and having Colbert would bring interest to NASA’s program. Over a quarter of a million people or so came online to chime in on the naming question…It just shows what happens when you reach outside the normal circles.”

Colbert is doing pretty well again in Time’s poll, holding steady at No. 4.

Slang for “choice architect”

Courtesy of Philip Frankenfeld. Add your own…

1. Nudgeletarians
2. Noodges
3. Noodgeniks
4. Vectordictorians
5. Chess Theorists
6. Suasarians (Moral suasion)
7. Carrot and Stickleteers
8. Homo Vectoris
9. Boxitects
10. Funnelists (akin to finalists)
11. Carrotodomists
12. LibPats (libertarian paternalists)
13. SofPats
14. ComPats
15. Gridologists
16. Matrix d’s

What choice architects can learn from a new medical checklist

A new study on another medical checklist is out, this one conducted on noncardiac surgery in eight hospitals in eight cities around the world to ensure a diverse range of clients. As with the now-famous previous checklist – call it Checklist I – this one produced decreases in death and infection rates. What is most interesting about this checklist – call it Checklist II – is that is undercuts one of the supposed insights of Checklist I, namely that shorter was better.

Checklist II is long. Very long. Totaling 19 items. (Recall that Checklist I uses only six.) Does this mean checklist designers need not worry about keeping the number of items to remember to a minimum? Though it would tempting to draw this conclusion, it would be as foolhardy as pronouncing the absolute virtues of brevity based solely on the findings from Checklist I. What is more likely is that checklist length matters less than the overall environment in which each step is taken; the mechanisms in place for enforcing each step are what matter most. This enforcement is all the more necessary since human memory is not reliable enough to count on recalling every step. Indeed, the authors of the Checklist II study point out that, in spite of the medical improvements, “omission of individual steps was still frequent.”

Designers of Checklist II broke the 19 steps into three subcategories, administering the steps at different points in the surgical process. The number of steps and points of administration make the identification of key steps difficult. But the authors explain the overall choice architecture this way:

Use of the checklist involved both changes in systems and changes in the behavior of individual surgical teams. To implement the checklist, all sites had to introduce a formal pause in care during surgery for preoperative team introductions and briefings and postoperative debriefings, team practices that have previously been shown to be associated with improved safety processes and attitudes and with a rate of complications and death reduced by as much as 80%. The philosophy of ensuring the correct identity of the patient and site through preoperative site marking, oral confirmation in the operating room, and other measures proved to be new to most of the study hospitals.

After devising the steps, determining the appropriate points in the surgical process to implement them was the key challenge. For example, the designers encouraged administering antibiotics in operating rooms instead of preoperative wards, “where delays are frequent.”

The paper’s authors are unsettled about the potential of a Hawthorne effect – in which an improvement in performance is the result of doctors’ knowledge of being observed – in the overall results. At the risk of carelessness, for now, this concern is perhaps best left to the academics. Building in an observant whose presence leads to changes in behavior is a perfectly acceptable option for someone who is not so worried about the exact contribution of each casual mechanism. As social scientists know, even trying to isolate the effect of observation can be futile, for in some cases observation is one way to enforce particular social norms, making the combination of the two what influences behavioral change. So while the Hawthorne effect has confounded social scientists for years, everyday choice architects may need not worry so much. After all, the Hawthorne effect itself is just another nudge.

A reader spots a convenience store nudge

Paul Sweeney writes in about a retail store sales manager:

A friend of mine stopped selling lighters and only stocked matches. When asked why he said, “It stops the riff raff from coming in,” which of course means less need to stock low, low cost beers in the front of shop, opening up new stock, and increasing the safety in the shop.