Sludge
The Basic Idea
Consider the process you go through when you subscribe to a service. It might be subscribing to a weekly food box service, to a gym, or to Masterclass video lessons. The process is easy: enter your information and a payment method, and voila! You are subscribed and the first product or session might even be free. Now, contrast this with the difficult process you have to go through if you want to cancel a subscription. Often, cancelling a subscription requires at the very least a phone call, during which you have to explain why you want to cancel, while the operator tries to convince you against it. The difficulty is no mistake; it is an intentional design technique known as sludge.
Sludge is essentially the opposite of a nudge. While nudges try to push people to make better decisions by making certain choices easier than others, sludges make a process more difficult with the goal of creating friction, which makes the consumer less likely to continue the process. Sludge, however, is not always put in place to get more money out of people, or to disadvantage the consumer in some way – sometimes, they can be used to encourage people to be thoughtful about their behavior. For example, privacy protection requirements can seem annoying, but this friction causes us to think twice about what data we are sharing online and can encourage us to be more careful with it.1
Sludge can take two forms. It can discourage behavior that is in a person’s best interest such as claiming a rebate or tax credit, and it can encourage self-defeating behavior such as investing in a deal that is too good to be true. Let’s continue to encourage everyone to nudge for good, but let’s also urge those in both the public and private sectors to engage in sludge cleanup campaigns. Less sludge will make the world a better place.
– Richard Thaler, in his article“Nudge, not sludge.”2
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.
