Nudges
The Basic Idea
In 2012, the then-mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg announced an amendment to the city’s Health Code that would ban any soft drink larger than 16 ounces. The measure came out of a concern for public health but people were infuriated, railing against a “nanny state” that had overstepped its boundaries.1 The amendment was repealed in 2015 after courts ruled that the city had exceeded its regulatory authority. Years later, however, researchers tested an intervention at McDonald’s stores, to see if they could get people to choose less sugary drink options simply by changing the order in which they appeared on the menu. Turns out they could: after 12 weeks, Coca-Cola consumption was down 8%, Coke Zero was up 30%, and nobody was mad.2
This intervention is an example of nudge theory, one of the most influential frameworks to come out of behavioral economics. As decades of research in this field have demonstrated, people are often irrational in their decision-making—but they also make errors in systematic, predictable ways.3 Nudges are interventions that capitalize on these biases, but they do so in a non-coercive way, without restricting people’s options or forcing their hand.
We are not for bigger government, just better governance.
- Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge (2008)
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
