By Archit Jain
The human mind is hardly the paragon of infallibility that classical economists believed it to be and is prone to a chock-full of weaknesses, irrationalities, and idiosyncrasies. This causes people to make sub-optimal decisionsalso in everyday situations that matter.
Manipulating for a good cause
[su_pullquote]A simple nudge offered an innovative solution to improve voter turnout and incentivised citizens to participate in the democratic process.[/su_pullquote]
Australia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the USA are some of the countries that have behavioural economics teams which aid their governments in improving the efficacy of public policies by exploiting such insights from psychology. In the state elections in New Jersey and California in 2005 and 2006 respectively, a phone campaign experiment was used to convey two separate messages to encourage people to voteone which said that voter turnout was likely to be low (control group) and another that said that voter turnout was expected to be high (treatment group). People receiving the latter communication became 7% more likely to voteafter all, how would you feel if you were told that nearly everyone in your apartment complex was expected to vote, but you were planning not to? A simple nudge offered an innovative solution to improve voter turnout and incentivised citizens to participate in the democratic process.
Places like San Francisco use repel paint to discourage public urination. | Source: Global Pakistan DailyIn Singapore, providing the average electricity usage of the locality on the back of monthly bills nudged people to think about their own consumption, motivating them to drive it towards the average level. In the UK, people who had declared their taxable income became 5.1% more likely to pay taxes on time when sent the following text: Nine out of ten people in the UK pay their tax on time. You are currently in the very small minority of people who have not paid us yet. Weekly SMS reminders have helped ensure that HIV patients in Kenya take their medication on time. To prevent public urination, several countries have coated walls with paint that repels any liquid substance, splashing it back on the offender.
Nudges that failed to activate
It is heartening that the NITI Aayog has created a Nudge Unit, in collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which aims to improve outcomes of public policies through behavioural interventions. For example, the practice of open defecation lingers in rural India despite the construction of public toiletsperhaps because communities divided by caste refuse to share these facilities, or because the women feel uncomfortable or due to some other reason.
To nudge people to use these toilets, what kind of messages should government advertisements contain? Messages proclaiming the virtues of modern toilets or messages warning against the disadvantages of open defecation? Behavioural scientists have the answerit should be the latter because the concept of loss aversion says that people prefer loss avoidance to gain acquisition.
To provide as a guideline
A common misconception is that these nudges are rather first-world in their nature and may not find impact in a country as poor and diverse as India.
In a country where language changes every four miles, what says that all people will have the same cognitive biases that can be countered using the same policies?
But the truth is that several nudges extrapolate from ideas already prevalent in India.
Putting up fictionalised photographs at unmanned crossings might reduce train accidents. | Source: Final Mile ConsultingFor example, colour-coded footprints guide users of the Delhi Metro to the correct station. How about using green footsteps to guide people to trash bins? (This idea reduced littering by 46% in Copenhagen) Or how about putting up fictionalised photographs of a person getting run over by a train at all unmanned crossings? (Final Mile, a Mumbai-based firm, predicts that this would substantially reduce incidents of railways-related deaths.) There are numerous other examples of small nudges that can dramatically alter behaviourpainting religious imagery on walls to prevent public urination, providing WiFi garbage bins which offer free WiFi for disposing rubbish efficiently, making opt-in the default option in on-the-job saving schemes so that retirees have ample funds in old age, and so on.
[su_pullquote]These are challenging questions that require creative thinking, but the benefits of breakthroughs can be immense.[/su_pullquote]
The objective of the Nudge Unit will be to bring together individuals who will expand on these ideas and develop some more. Is there a way to nudge people to not break lane rules so that traffic jams occur less frequently? To nudge students to attend classes more regularly so that learning outcomes improve? To nudge tuberculosis patients to complete the course of drugs prescribed by hospitals, so that new variants of the disease dont spread? These are challenging questions that require creative thinking, but the benefits of breakthroughs can be immense.
To conclude for charity
The NITI Aayog should wholeheartedly proceed with this exercise, but with one caveat.
Nudging people to achieve policy objectives should, at no point, become a source of un-freedom.
Participation in all activities should be purely voluntary and the Aayog should never fall prey to the paternalistic view that planners know better than citizens about what is good for them. After all, those who are nudging the people are also humans with their own set of cognitive quirks.
Sooner or later, well have to ask the question: Who nudges the nudgers?