[Link] Nudge Theory

Nudge theory was named and popularized by the 2008 book, 'Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness', written by American academics Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein. The book is based strongly on the Nobel prize-winning work of the Israeli-American psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

This article:

• reviews and explains Thaler and Sunstein's 'Nudge' concept, especially 'heuristics' (tendencies for humans to think and decide instinctively and often mistakenly)
• relates 'Nudge' methods to other theories and models, and to Kahneman and Tversky's work
• defines and describes additional methods of 'nudging' people and groups
• extends the appreciation and application of 'Nudge' methodology to broader change-management, motivation, leadership, coaching, counselling, parenting, etc
• offers 'Nudge' methods and related concepts as a 'Nudge' theory 'toolkit' so that the concept can be taught and applied in a wide range of situations involving relationships with people, and enabling people to improve their thinking and decision-making and offers a glossary of Nudge theory and related terms

I'm somewhat surprised that Nudge Theory hasn't been discussed or linked here. It seems to be a recap of many well-known biases and such and a set of well-structured counter-measures or exploits. These latter parts being the interesting thing.

Example:

1 Positioning - Positioning, moving things, prominence, proximity, etc. The physical or visual positioning of something that people engage with, or which influences the way people engage with something else.

2 Limiting - Expiry dates, limited stock, and 'forbidden fruit'. The impression that opportunity could be lost, or something is in limited supply.

Other are "Sympathy", "Accessibility", "Likeability", "Relevance", "Mood-change", "Fear", "Facilitation", "Sensory". All of these have dark-art potential.

more positive examples are

Counter

Anchoring and adjustment = Using known things to estimate unknown things.

By

Give the audience factual comparisons and references that are relevant to them. Publicize statistics and facts about things which distort people's thinking and which are misleading influences.

Counter

Availability Heuristic = Familiarity and perceived commonness or rarity.

By

Offer statistics which give true scale of popularity, frequency or rarity of issues. Correct common faulty assumptions.

And so on for many more biases.