NudgeNight

Nudging is effective because humans tend to behave irrationally and unmindful in everyday decisions, and often it is just the matter of a slight stimulus to start acting (differently). For example, it is senseful to plan meetings for 40 minutes instead of 60 minutes, as the time is being used more efficiently in a stricter time frame, although the meetings are shorter.

The oldest example of a nudge can be found in a story about the prussian king Frederick the Great. At his time potatoes were not particularly popular, in order to change that, he let his soldiers guard the potato fields. Due to the sudden increase of the potatoes value, it is said that the citizens started being interested in the field crops and consumed them often and with pleasure.

Many nudges are definitely advantageous – actually, many consumers are putting their hopes in such an assistance in order to sustainably change their habits of eating and consuming. However, nudges are not unproblematic from the perspective of the persons affected, as their are often driven by economic interest of the producers or employers. This fact is neither new nor should be judged negatively. The influencing of (potential) customers is as old as the markets themselves. Marketing and Advertisements always seeked to make the own products and services as attractive as possible to the consumers. Using findings of the behavioral psychology is not new as well. The knowledge of nudging is already being used for a long time in commercial fields like user experience design, marketing or the distribution of products and services. But since a few years, this knowledge is used more systematically and comprehensively in the economic world.