Nudge Book Review

1818 Words8 Pages
Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness Yale University Press. 293 pp. $27.95. Imagine going to the grocery store with your five year old son. You get to the snack isle and tell him that he may choose one snack for the week. While looking for snacks for the rest of the family, your son walks back and tosses his selection in the cart. You look in the cart, expecting to find a snack that is high in sugar and calories, and see that he has chosen a very healthy pack of strawberry-flavored granola bars. How can this be? Your son always chooses the unhealthy snacks. Is it that your son has decided, on this day, that he is going to make a lifestyle change and begin eating healthier? Although many parents might like to believe this is true, it is more likely that other outside factors are playing a role in helping your son make this healthier decision. It could be that your son had a little help, without knowing it, in making this decision. What if the decision by your son to get the healthier snack was due to the fact that the healthier snacks were arranged on the shelf to be more eye-level to your son and easier to pick out from the rest? Richard H. Thaler, a University of Chicago economist, and Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, examine this idea of outside factors helping us make decisions in their book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Thaler and Sunstein use two main themes throughout the book to address these ideas. The first is that no decision setting is neutral and the responsibility for organizing these settings goes to choice architects. Whether it is a grocery store deciding where certain products should go on the shelf or your doctor providing a list of different treatments, the way situations are framed may cause a biased decision from the

More about Nudge Book Review

Open Document