Ryan Tindal
Director - Skilled Carer
Nudging
Humans are easily nudged by other humans. We want to conform.
"Small and apparently insignificant details can have major impacts on people’s behaviour. A good rule of thumb is to assume that everything matters. In many cases, the power of these small details comes from focusing people’s attention in a particular direction." - Nudge Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein
Choice architecture is an effort to move people in a direction that will help to make that person's life better. We all hold authority over others in our influence, whether we want or chose that authority or not. Peer pressure can be both good and bad, whether you are held accountable by a running group or convinced to stay for one more after work drink. Most of us have a desire to fit in and be accepted. The way you structure your life and the contemplation you give this biological factor have huge implications on which fork in the road you take at each junction.
The biological evolutionary need to fit in or belong is often linked to social cohesion and survival advantages within a community. Throughout human evolution, individuals who formed cooperative groups and alliances were more likely to thrive and pass on their genes. Belonging to a group provided various benefits, such as:
1. Protection: Being part of a group offered increased protection from external threats, whether they were predators or rival groups.
2. Resource Sharing: Cooperative groups could share resources more efficiently, increasing the likelihood of survival in challenging environments.
3. Reproduction: Social bonds facilitated mating opportunities and the raising of offspring in a communal setting, improving the chances of successful reproduction.
4. Learning and Innovation: Group living allowed for the exchange of knowledge and skills, fostering collective learning and innovation, which could enhance survival strategies.
In essence, individuals who had a strong drive to connect and cooperate with others were more likely to thrive and pass on their genes to subsequent generations, leading to the evolution of social behaviours and a desire to fit in. This innate need for social connection and belonging is deeply ingrained in our biology. The science is important to know, below I will link it with our habits and how to 'nudge' those habits in the right direction, for us and the people around us.
Instant gratification
For some of us, the habits we have formed have compounded over time. You can have all the self-control in the world but when you put yourself in a position where you're set up to fail... it will always lead to failure.
I've always been a highly motivated and driven person when I have a focused goal. Walking past the fridge or cupboard always provided the battle of self-control. 99 times out of 100 I could open the door to the fridge and either choose something healthy or shut it and continue on. As humans we're driven by emotion and our bodies and minds seek a state change on occasions of vulnerability. It is the seeking of a changed state that makes us pick up that Tim Tam or head for the beer or glass of wine at the end of a stressful day. By increasing the friction in that undesirable choice, it makes that decision more difficult. By nudging myself, I choose to not keep any treats, chocolates or lollies in the house. If I want that state change, I have to put shoes on, get in the car, go down the street and make a purchase. That provides many opportunities to either change my mind or realise straight away that it is too difficult. The friction to make a poor and undesirable choice enhances my health and my ability to compound positively.
"The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken" - Samuel Johnson.
There are many feelings that served our ancestor's interests, but no longer serve our current best interests. The desire to punish people who treat you unfairly or showed you disrespect was useful to maintain your place in the pecking order and demonstrated strength, rather than weakness, to our rivals and potential mates. This was true and helpful in a time where the animal kingdom determined our survival and when laws (as we now know them) didn't seem to exist. Nowadays, feeling 'justifiably' enraged somehow empowers us, but is extremely toxic to our lives and those around us. We pass these ancestorial habits onto the next generation as our children in the backseat of the car watch us swear and act like animals to one another on the way to school drop off, all at the slightest inconvenience or because we aren't shown kindness by other pilots. However, when the driver gets out of their car, another feeling/instinct takes over as the six-foot four bodybuilder exits his vehicle.
Habits are dumb, they're spontaneous and reactionary. We don't crave that cookie for its nutritional benefit, we crave it for the change in state that our feeling's seek. Our ancestors craved the sweetness of fruit. Our brain still craves the sweetness of candy or the carbohydrate dense baked good. We are up against a world cultivated by behavioural psychologists. Psychologists who work for multimillion, even multibillion dollar organisations like Coca-Cola, Mars, Sportsbet, Johnnie Walker, Marlboro, Cotton On, McDonalds, Instagram, Snapchat, Apple, the list is endless and ever-growing. These companies and advertisers have invested hundreds of millions of dollars and decades of studies, analysis and research refining a product to find its bliss point and perfect achilles' heel to hit its target market. The advertising leaches into our mind in our most vulnerable moments and even nudges us to those vulnerable moments in order to suck the precious gold from our pockets and the attention of our being. All of us are smart enough to realise these products are expensive, provide poor health outcomes, steal our attention and leave us feeling emotionally worse than before we consumed them.
Yet we have moments where we crave them.
You are up against the odds. Every single day. No matter what level of self-control you have, if you don't implement strategies that enable your success then you will continue to be a victim of habit and emotional vulnerability.
Increase friction for bad choices
Delete apps of your phone. if you want to use it, it needs to be through a browser or reloading the app onto the phone.
Don't keep 'treats' in the house. If you want them, you must put shoes on, get in the car and walk around the supermarket and make the choice. This gives you control and opportunity to make a healthy choice. Your impulse may even subside and have you leave the store empty handed, giving you a great feeling of accomplishment and success.
Don't store your card details on your phone. Making those spontaneous purchases fight through another layer of friction of typing in card details, even finding your purse or wallet.
Decrease friction for good choices
Take your gym clothes in the car to work with you so you can go straight there and aren't tempted by the comfort of the home environment.
Stock your kitchen with accessible fruit and healthy snacking options.
Remove your phone from your bedroom so you aren't tempted to grab it upon waking or while reading in bed.
Pair Habits
Drink a coffee while reading in bed daily
leave the floss next to your tooth brush
General rule: Make a less desirable habit enjoyable, gamify your experience.
Implement rules
Having to wait a certain amount of time before making that spontaneous purchase. 24 hours is a good example. Most of the time you will not even want it anymore.
Don't commit to plans on the phone or spontaneously in conversation. Think and get back to the offer. Most of the time the offer will not even resurface.
Read every day for 10mins, extend that time frame as the habit becomes entrenched and your attention grabs.
Create a supportive environment
We become like the 5 people we spend the most time around. Position your social structure around strong, supportive and smart people.
Remove (tactfully) toxic people from your network.
The academic effort of college students is influenced by their peers. A first-year student is likely to have big consequences from the influence of their roommate, more so, than the college of their choosing. Teenage girls who see other teenage girls are having children are more likely to become pregnant themselves "Quarterly Journal of Economics "111, no.2 (1996): 277-317. An analysis of out-of-wedlock childbearing in the United States. Janet L. Yellen.
Set and track your goals
Goals keep us accountable. They do so to ourselves and others, particularly when they are visual.
Consistency
This is the key to entrenching a behaviour. Start with small and achievable goals and gradually increase the duration or frequency.
Celebrate the small wins along the way. Show yourself or others kindness when you or they lapse and encourage keeping the faith and structure. Create unwavering resilience.
The Betting Strategy
John Romalis and Dean Karlan are two economists that adopted an arrangement for weight loss while studying economics. Each agreed to lose 30lbs (13.5kgs) over nine months. If either failed, he had to pay the other $10,000. A lot of money for a student. Both met their target. Keeping the weight off was the next challenge. The rules were that either could call a weigh in with one day's notice. This helped keep them accountable. If either was over the target weight, he would have to pay the other an agreed upon sum. Without the bet in place to encourage them they would have eaten too much even though they both had the same desire to lose weight. This clever strategy allowed them to accomplish their goals.
Motivation by negative reward involves withdrawing a reward and some examples are:
Not helping a person by driving them around if they are using substances.
Not listening with interest to difficulties that someone is experiencing when they are intoxicated.
Taking away privileges if someone is not going to school or looking for work.
Emotions and Meditation
Our emotions control our behaviour through our mind. If we entrench the wrong pathways when we feel emotional discomfort, we wake up one day and have poor habits dealing with confronting and uncomfortable feelings that continue to push us down the wrong path.
Psychologists as well as Buddhists (through meditation) teach us to sit with our feelings. They encourage us not to cling to the good feelings and not to run away from the bad ones, rather to experience them, observe them and sit with them until they dissipate. Our emotions drive us, yet most of us are under skilled in how we interpret and handle them.
When you feel you have handled a situation poorly upon reflection, ask yourself some questions:
Was it because of your emotions? Did they control you?
How did you react and why did you react?
What underlying feelings or experiences caused this overreaction or less than perfect reaction?
These questions help to find the root of the problem, not just cover it with band-aid solutions. That's how to reflect in a meaningful way. We have all experienced sadness, anxiety, annoyance, relief, joy and jealousy. But, experiencing them from a different vantage point changes our relationship with these feelings and we can eventually cease to be their slave.
You can practice and experience this yourself. If you're feeling very sad; sit down, close your eyes and study the sadness. Accept its presence and just absorb how it actually makes you feel.
What parts of the body are you feeling the sadness in?
The observation of this sadness combined with a kind of acceptance can make it less unpleasant. It can promote confidence and understanding that the emotion is fleeting and leads us to gain the courage to let it pass.
So which emotion is a truer experience; The feeling of initial unpleasantness or the numbness and neutral feelings after the unpleasantness subsides. Is the sadness an illusion? This principal applies to all negative feelings: fear, jealousy or self-loathing. Imagine you found negative feelings turned out to be illusions and learnt that you could dispel them by just contemplating them from a different perspective. Success in all aspects of your life would be at your fingertips...
The Opportunity presents itself
When people announce an intention to eat less and exercise more next year, they genuinely want that change to occur. The friction occurs when coming up with and implementing strategies that nudge us in the desired direction to do so. This is an opportunity and describes the person being open to being nudged, they are often even grateful and see you as a leader when you challenge them to adhere. It is uncomfortable to strongly encourage someone to do something they, in the moment, don't want to do and are fighting. This is such a paradox in how we view helping others and the dignity of risk. Reflect on what values and principles you hold in order to navigate this ideological minefield.
These things are true for all of human vices: sugary treats, caffeine, shopping, alcohol, drugs, gossip, even our seemingly positive habits; gym, obsessing over macronutrient intake or work. We seek the change in state. Enable yourself the success by trying some strategies and putting those who need our guidance in positions to succeed.
The dignity of risk is everyone's choice. What about the dignity of education and success, is it not our responsibility and obligation to our best selves and to those around us. For the benefit of humanity, our communities and society.
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