The Three Degrees of Behavioural Nudging

Nudges are a method of influencing people. Whether in business, policy, or your personal sphere, understanding the concept of behavioural nudges can help you influence those around you.
Using the example of discouraging smoking, Robert Baldwin, a Course Convenor on the Regulation Strategy online certificate course from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), talks through the three degrees of nudges.

As the world faces unprecedented challenges, we’ll require behaviour modifications in personal, organisational, and national spheres. In society, rules and regulations play a pivotal role in how we respond to challenges. Knowledge of human behaviour offers a critical avenue to effectively implement the changes that can lead to a better world. 

Transcript

In this video, we’re looking at nudges as methods of influencing behaviour. As you’ll know, the idea of nudge is that you can get people to behave more sensibly by controlling the architecture of choice, by structuring the way that you present decisions to them. What I’m going to argue to you now is that I think you can distinguish between three different categories of a nudge, or what I would call three degrees of nudge, and I’ll demonstrate the difference between these three degrees by looking at three examples of measures designed to limit smoking.

A first-degree nudge approach to smoking might be a simple warning on a cigarette packet that says: “Warning: Cigarettes can be addictive”. This is what I would call a first-degree nudge, because what it does is it provides a simple piece of relevant information to the decision maker that says, “Okay, if you, the individual, are thinking about smoking, just remember that these things can be addictive.” But in that sense, the supply of this information enhances the autonomy and rationality of the individual decision maker.

It helps us, the individual potential smokers, make a good decision. It leaves it up to us. I don’t think many people would object to first-degree nudges, or suggest that they’re highly contentious.

Second-degree nudges tend to go a step further. They tend to rely on some emotional, or rational, or volitional limitation.

The sorts of limitations that behavioural science tells us humans suffer from. So, as individuals, we think fast, we tend to suffer from laziness and inertia, et cetera, et cetera. And second-degree nudges can build on these, if you like, deficiencies of human nature in order to achieve a result. So an example of a second-degree nudge, relating to smoking, would be a rule that says you’re not allowed to smoke in your office, but you can smoke in the smoking area, which is designated and cited 200 metres across the car park, under a shed roof. So the idea here is that if it’s 11 o’clock in the morning, I’m at my desk on the second floor and I fancy a cigarette, I have to make the effort to walk downstairs, to walk 200 metres across the car park, and have a cigarette in the smoking shed. Now, my problem is that being human, I suffer from inertia and laziness.

So I will probably sit there at 11 o’clock and think, ‘Okay, well, I’ll have a cigarette in my lunch break.’ And, as a result, smoking fewer cigarettes during the day. And the nudges are relying on this.

Now, it is clear that I can decode the nudge. I can be aware of the nudge, but it still works. I still succumb to this inertia even though I’m aware of it.

Although, if I feel really strongly about it, I could just simply make the walk whenever I determine to have a cigarette.

An example of a third-degree nudge aimed at smoking would be an appalling shock photograph of a dead body or a cancerous mouth that is published on a cigarette packet, or maybe a huge billboard next to traffic lights.

The idea of a third-degree nudge here is that people’s preferences are shifted. That is, smoking just no longer seems as attractive as it used to once you associate it with this dead body. And the point is that there’s difference from the second-degree nudge because it’s very difficult to go back to the position ex-ante. That is, I can no longer say to myself, “Well, I’ll just ignore this nasty photograph and I’ll still think of smoking as attractive.” I can’t do that. I can’t get that toothpaste back in the tube. I think that’s the big difference between a second-degree and a third-degree nudge. So that’s a third-degree nudge, and that is building on a shifting of preference, that is the result of our distaste for certain things. And that, again, is a human weakness, a distortion of reasoning we tend to suffer from.