Nudge

Every day we make decisions about everything from personal investments and our children’s schools to the meals we eat and the causes we support, and we often choose poorly. Being human, we are all susceptible to biases that can lead us to blunder, and those mistakes make us poorer and less healthy.

In this 2008 talk, Richard Thaler, Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and co-author of Nudge with Cass Sunstein, presents the book’s central idea: by knowing how people think, we can design choice environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families and their society.

For interface designers, this choice architecture shows up in defaults, framing and the number of options on offer, ideas covered by patterns such as Good Defaults and Status Quo Bias.