Nudge Quotes

“A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“The combination of loss aversion with mindless choosing implies that if an option is designated as the “default,” it will attract a large market share. Default options thus act as powerful nudges.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“people have a strong tendency to go along with the status quo or default option.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“you want to nudge people into socially desirable behavior, do not, by any means, let them know that their current actions are better than the social norm.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. There the authorities have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men usually do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess, but if they see a target, attention and therefore accuracy are much increased.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“The first misconception is that it is possible to avoid influencing people’s choices.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“Libertarian paternalism is a relatively weak, soft, and nonintrusive type of paternalism because choices are not blocked, fenced off, or significantly burdened.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“Just as no building lacks an architecture, so no choice lacks a context.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“The more choices you give people, the more help with decision making you need to provide.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: The Final Edition

“The moral is that people are paying less attention to you than you believe.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“An especially good way to gain weight is to have dinner with other people. On average, those who eat with one other person eat about 35 percent more than they do when they are alone; members of a group of four eat about 75 percent more; those in groups of seven or more eat 96 percent more.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“People are unrealistically optimistic even when the stakes are high. About 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, and this is a statistic most people have heard. But around the time of the ceremony, almost all couples believe that there is approximately a zero percent chance that their marriage will end in divorce—even those who have already been divorced!10 (Second marriage, Samuel Johnson once quipped, “is the triumph of hope over experience.”)”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“Benefits Now—Costs Later We have seen that predictable problems arise when people must make decisions that test their capacity for self-control. Many choices in life, such as whether to wear a blue shirt or a white one, lack important self-control elements. Self-control issues are most likely to arise when choices and their consequences are separated in time. At one extreme are what might be called investment goods, such as exercise, flossing, and dieting. For these goods the costs are borne immediately, but the benefits are delayed. For investment goods, most people err on the side of doing too little. Although there are some exercise nuts and flossing freaks, it seems safe to say that not many people are resolving on New Year’s Eve to floss less next year and to stop using the exercise bike so much. At the other extreme are what might be called sinful goods: smoking, alcohol, and jumbo chocolate doughnuts are in this category. We get the pleasure now and suffer the consequences later. Again we can use the New Year’s resolution test: how many people vow to smoke more cigarettes, drink more martinis, or have more chocolate donuts in the morning next year? Both investment goods and sinful goods are prime candidates for nudges. Most (nonanorexic) people do not need any special encouragement to eat another brownie, but they could use some help exercising more.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“So to put it simply, forcing people to choose is not always wise, and remaining neutral is not always possible.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“MBA students are not the only ones overconfident about their abilities. The “above average” effect is pervasive. Ninety percent of all drivers think they are above average behind the wheel,”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“Loss aversion helps produce inertia, meaning a strong desire to stick with your current holdings.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive feature of human life; it characterizes most people in most social categories. When they overestimate their personal immunity from harm, people may fail to take sensible preventive steps. If people are running risks because of unrealistic optimism, they might be able to benefit from a nudge. In fact, we have already mentioned one possibility: if people are reminded of a bad event, they may not continue to be so optimistic.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“In economics (and in ordinary life), a basic principle is that you can never be made worse off by having more options, because you can always turn them down. Before Thaler removed the nuts the group had the choice of whether to eat the nuts or not—now they didn’t. In the land of Econs, it is against the law to be happy about this!”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“Roughly speaking, losing something makes you twice as miserable as gaining the same thing makes you happy. In more technical language, people are “loss averse.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“The winning formulation was to say, “Nine out of ten people in the UK pay their tax on time. You are currently in the very small minority of people who have not paid us yet.” Notice this short message conveys (truthfully) both that most people pay on time and that you are in the minority of those who don’t. A follow-up experiment found that the message could be further strengthened by making it local, as in “Nine out of ten taxpayers in Manchester pay on time.” The impact of these letters was substantial, increasing the number of people paying within the first twenty-three days by as much as five percentage points.24 That may not sound like a large”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: The Final Edition

“One of the causes of status quo bias is a lack of attention. Many people adopt what we will call the “yeah, whatever” heuristic.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“a nudge is any factor that significantly alters the behavior of Humans,”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“In complex situations, the Just Maximize Choices mantra is not enough to create good policy.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“It turns out that if you ask people, the day before the election, whether they intend to vote, you can increase the probability of their voting by as much as 25 percent!”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“First, incentives are not properly aligned. If you engage in environmentally costly behavior next year, through your consumption choices, you will probably pay nothing for the environmental harms that you inflict.”
― Richard H Thaler, Nudge: The Final Edition

“our understanding of human behavior can be improved by appreciating how people systematically go wrong.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed. If private companies or public officials think that one policy produces better outcomes, they can greatly influence the outcome by choosing it as the default.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness