How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

MAKE IT EASY TO CHOOSE (AKA “NUDGE”)
We know by now that people’s brains like to take shortcuts. If they don’t have to
spend time thinking about an answer, they generally won’t. So when there’s a

---

readily understandable and halfway reasonable option on the table, people are
likely to choose it—or at least be swayed by it. As we saw in 
Chapter 12
, this
phenomenon is known by behavioral scientists as 
default bias.
When you’re the
one making decisions, you want to be careful that you’re not just choosing an
option because it’s easy. But now we get to turn the advice around: if you’re sure
that you have a good idea to propose to your colleagues, you want to make it as
effortless as possible to follow your lead.
This concept gained widespread attention thanks to Richard Thaler and Cass
Sunstein’s book 
Nudge
, where they showed how people could be nudged toward
healthier, more sensible behavior once it was made easy to choose that course of
action.
2
One famous example they cite relates to consent rates for organ
donation. In countries where the default option is to donate your organs after
death—that is, you have to make a conscious decision to opt out, rather than a
conscious decision to opt in—donation rates are over 90 percent. In countries
where it’s not, rates are typically well below 30 percent.
3
And as Thaler and Sunstein pointed out, nudging in this way doesn’t mean
depriving people of the right to choose. There are times when it’s important to
give people space to take ownership of their choices, especially when you’re
keen for them to feel a deep commitment to a complex idea (see more on getting
people involved below). But where you know your suggestion is going to save
people time, or there’s an obvious smart choice, you can give a powerful boost
to your persuasiveness if you recognize the value of making it simple to choose
to do the thing you’d like people to do.
Here are three ways to apply this advice when you’re seeking to influence
others: remove the barrier, make the first concrete suggestion (perhaps giving a
range), and provide visual hints.