Behaviour

THE MAN WHO ‘ NUDGED’ US INTO CHANGING WINS NOBEL PRIZE.

A If you want to understand why the University of Chicago’s Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize in economics this year, look no further than the urinal fly. In the early 1990s, the story goes, the cleaning manager at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport was trying to reduce “spillage” around urinals. He settled on etching small, photorealistic images of flies on the urinals, right near the drain. The idea was to give people something to aim at. Richard Thaler calls the urinal fly his “favourite illustration” of a nudge. What’s a nudge? In their 2009 book on the topic, Thaler and co- author Cass Sunstein define it as a choice “that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. Nudges don’t attempt to make it impossible to do the wrong thing, but rather they make it easier to do the right thing. This same principle can be applied to any number of other choices, big and small, that people make in the course of their lives. These insights have all arisen from the field of behavioural economics, which Thaler is considered one of the founders of.