Recently I heard a story from NPR regarding the practice of nudging. This is the practice of encouraging consumers to take certain products or services over others by manipulating subtle things about their surrounding and ease of access. The NPR story specifically mentions healthy food at food banks, such as wholegrain pasta and oatmeal. For oatmeal, they were able to enhance the distribution of oatmeal merely by putting pictures of it and signs saying “Fills you up!”. Little things like this can make a big difference in decisionmaking. The food bank in question stated that this boosted the highlighted items by 46%.
This story made me think about other examples of what might be nudging. Perhaps candidate’s yard signs near polling places, or even political bumper stickers could be viewed as nudges toward endorsing a certain view or another, as opposed to making a full argument. Putting snacks and gum near check out lines at supermarkets are also good nudges to get people to purchase them with snap judgements.
Nudging is extremely prevalent in the gaming world, especially the microtransaction driven mobile gaming freemium world. The game is ususally playable without the microtransactions, but slowly and slowly becomes less and less fun over time without spending money. Pokemon GO operates on this model for example. Even full non-mobile games on PC and console often launch with paid downloadable content, designed to try to nudge people into spending more money on the game.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/11/07/499325457/food-pantries-try-nutritional-nudging-to-encourage-good-food-choices