Assorted links

1) A classroom nudge for college professors. Include one lie in each lecture and ask students to point out the error. They’ll pay attention to the material more closely.

Hat tip: David de Souza

2) Enviromedia, friend of the Nudge blog and the creator of greenwashingindex.com, a tool for ferreting out misleading green ads, has unveiled a new web site, greendetectives.net, to help people decode the language of climate change. The United Nation’s climate change conference is this month in Copenhagen.

3) Philadelphia now requires that lenders and homeowners meet in person prior to foreclosure. Will these meetings lessen foreclosure rates?

Hat tip: Christopher Daggett

4) Tips for remembering your reusable grocery bag.

Hat tip: Katie Astofer

5) Because it’s just too good to resist. From a 1952 Life magazine.

Hat tip: Thought Gadgets

Assorted links

1) Atlanta is testing out an incentivized recycling program where residents can earn and exchange points for “rewards, gift cards, groceries, and products” with participating retailers. (Hat tip: Mike Erskine)

2a) Rewarding first-graders for eating fruits and vegetables with small prizes.

2b) “‘If you want to know if an urban environment supports cycling, you can forget about all the detailed ‘bikeability indexes’—just measure the proportion of cyclists who are female,’ says Jan Garrard, a senior lecturer at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, and author of several studies on biking and gender differences.” From Scientific American.

(Hat tips: Christopher Daggett)

3) A scale that tells the world how much you weigh via Twitter. (Hat tip: Justin Holz)

4) Photos of calorie counting nudges at Freakonomics.

Musical stairs

Thanks to all the Nudge blog readers who pointed us to this terrific video from Sweden that asks: How can choice architects get people to use the stairs instead of the escalator?

For others curious about the background: The videos are part of something called the Fun Theory project (sponsored by Volkswagen it appears) that, according to its web site, is dedicated to coming up with fun ways to do things we otherwise wouldn’t, usually because of sheer laziness. Like throwing away the trash.

Assorted links

1) Many readers pointed to a story on a study about the effect of posting calories in fast food restaurants. Customers noticed the signs and thought they influenced their orders. But they actually ordered food with more calories. Reader Paul Zurawski wonders if customers would have eaten healthier if they had been asked to sign a receipt acknowledging their choices and calorie counts.

2) The top ten annoying alarm clocks. Clocky is No. 1. Hat tip: Daniel Lee.

3) Google’s PowerMeter now works with a handheld device that starts at about $200. What this means is that you would not need a utility company to install a smart meter in your building. Hat tip: Christopher Daggett.

4) The San Francisco airport has begun selling carbon offsets at the electronic check-in kiosks. Philip Frankenfeld has many catchy slogans for this nudge including “Pay dime. Help clime” and “You are now free to roam around the carbon”.

Addendum 5) A vase that lets you know when your flower needs watering. As water evaporates, the vase tilts. Hat tip: John Gibbard.

Nudge grants in action: Social norms and cutting carbon

Long time Nudge blog readers may remember the London borough of Barnet, which received money last year for nudge grants. One of those grants went toward a pilot project that taps into social norms to reduce residents’ carbon footprints by asking them to walk more, lower the heat, and take other simple steps that can protect the planet.

A traditional persuasive strategy would be based on stressing how this could benefit the environment. But the council is going further in testing out techniques of influence.

The residents are asked to make pledges in a face-to-face conversation with one of the canvassers who have been going door-to-door in this area.

They are only asked to make some limited pledges – to choose three out of nine options on the pledge card they are shown.

And posters on lampposts proclaim the number of households in that street who have agreed to participate.

The BBC just produced a 38-minute program, Persuading Us to Be Good, about this project and other nudge friendly ideas in the U.K. (Richard Thaler is featured in the program.) As Barnet Council leader Mike Freer says, “We’ve got to stop nagging. If nagging worked we’d all be skinny, we’d all be recycling and we’d all be walking to work.” Listen to it 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.

A pre-earth day nudge: “Paper, plastic, or personal?”

Using canvas shopping bags at the grocery story instead of the usual paper or plastic ones is one small way to help save the planet. Many companies have adopted strategies for encouraging people to bring their own bags from home by giving small rebates, charging small fees for plastic bags, or placing displays for reusable bags near the checkout counter.

Reader Will Katz sends along another approach stores may want to consider using. Instead of asking customers if they want to use “Paper or plastic?” Katz suggests that clerks tweak the question by asking “Paper, plastic, or personal?” He says there are lots of advantages.

-It costs nothing to implement.
-It plants the seed of an idea in shoppers’ minds and reinforces it every time they shop.
-It keeps the alliteration, making it more memorable.
-As more people got in the habit, bag usage would extend to other stores or shopping situations.
-If the supermarket provided canvas bags for sale at the checkout area, implementation would be immediate.

And if supermarkets didn’t provide canvas bags in the checkout aisle (say, because the markup on candy is a lot better), reminding the customer about reusable bags would still be a worthy service.

More on exactly how SmartSwitch works from the Stanford duo

Readers have been very interested in Peter Russo and Brendan Wypich’s SmartSwitch. There have been a number of requests for the guys to explain more about the tactile feedback piece of the technology. Straight from the source, here’s the technical explanation of how it works:

A low-power microprocessor embedded in the SmartSwitch receives and interprets data from the network. (The “network” may consist of sensors, other switches, a home energy-monitoring system, the central office of the power company, etc.) Based on that data, the microprocessor controls the position of a linear servomotor, which presses a brake pad down onto the sliding mechanism of the switch. The harder the brake presses, the more difficult it becomes to physically slide the switch.

Refinements to the mechanism will be made in the next version of the SmartSwitch. For example, while the linear servomotor — an off-the-shelf device typically used by remote-control model hobbyists — is great for prototyping, it’s likely too big, noisy, and expensive to be used in an actual product. We’re also exploring ways to alter the gesture — rather than the force — required to flip the switch.

The two also say that, depending on how SmartSwitch is configured, there are lots of potential applications.

-If configured to respond to a household-specific energy consumption goal (say, to use less than 200 kWh of electricity per month), the switch can become harder to turn on if it looks like the goal isn’t going to be met.

-If configured to respond to a neighborhood’s energy consumption, the switch can become harder to turn on if your household usage is above the neighborhood average.

-If connected to a light sensor, the switch can become harder to turn on if the ambient light level is already high.

-If configured to respond to grid-wide electricity demand, the switch can become harder to turn on during times of peak usage.

We plan to explore these (and other) applications when we roll the SmartSwitch out to users through a pilot study. We also imagine that point-of-use tactile feedback could be used in other controls — such as thermostats — that potentially offer even more substantial energy savings.

We’ll keep you updated on SmartSwitch’s progress.

Two Stanford students rethink the light switch

Peter Russo and Brendan Wypich have found a way to combine the Ambient Orb, the EcoPedal, and the competitive utility bill into one amazing nudge. As second year master’s students in the Stanford Design Program, the two have designed what they are calling a SmartSwitch, which lets people know how much energy they are using, not through colors, but through tactile feedback. It was recently named a semi-finalist in the Greener Gadgets Design Competition. We asked the two to describe their technology in a guest post for the Nudge blog. If you like the idea, you can vote for SmartSwitch here.

Continue reading the post here.