We've been Nudged

Martin Evans: 06 January 2009 in About books

When (soon to be President) Obama was seen clutching a copy of Sunstein and Thaler's Nudge, its place as one of the top 'ideas books' of 2008 was sealed. For years psychologists have been showing us how design factors can cause us to make less than rational decisions. Now the economists - the arch exponents of rational choice - are telling us so too.

What's more, they're making compelling arguments why there's no such thing as a neutral strategy. The documents we design will bias people's choices, whether we like it or not.

What caused Nudge to grab the politicians' attention though was that it also offered an attractive strategy in response. You're bound to nudge people in one direction or another: so nudge them towards their own best interests while leaving them free to choose any option open to them.

For those of us promoting clearer and simpler information to help people make complex decisions, Nudge poses a big challenge. What if our perfectly clear document is still biasing people's choices? Should we care? Is that a matter for designers at all? It's a question we grappled with at the Simplification Centre: you can read our discussion paper here.

Our conclusion? We can't ignore what behavioural economics is telling us. In benchmarking documents the Simplification Centre has to be aware of the biases which document design can exert on users' decisions. We should judge our members' documents in the light of our members' own stated aims. By doing that we'll be giving them a nudge towards making their aims explicit and we'll be judging how well their documents deliver them.