Commentary: Nudging

Behavioral Psychology At Work
#1435c
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 26-May-18; 11 minutes

description: (hide)

Imagine that you are in a major city. You're visiting the sites—say you're going to New Yorker, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, or what have you. You have made a study of the subways in that particular city, whatever it is, so you decide to go use it to go from attraction to tourist trap to wallet drainer throughout the day. You notice that thousands of people are walking shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip through the hallway, but the flow of human traffic is very efficient. Long lines of people, two abreast, snake through the hallways, up and down escalators and stairs, but you make all your trains even though you're packed into that station. So despite being crowded, the stress that you thought you were going to have throughout the day, taking the subway to all these attractions, never materializes. You have a great day.

What you may not realize is that your successful day of navigating the subway system may not have been due to your superhuman tourist powers as a navigator. Your transit success may have actually been the product of what is called "nudge theory." Allan Richarz, in a May 22—it's just few days ago—2018 article titled, "The Amazing Psychology of Japanese Train Stations," explains in this paragraph:

Pioneered by behavioral economist Richard Thaler, who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize for his work, and Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein, the theory posits that gentle nudges can subtly influence people towards decisions in their own (or society’s) best interests, such as signing up for private pension schemes or organ donation. In the U.K., there’s a government office devoted to the idea, the Behavioural Insights Team (or “nudge unit”), and their work often shows up in the transit realm.

Nudge theory—if you put these two ideas together—is quite a lot like the Gruen Effect that Joe Baity talked about in his April 28 sermonette, when he talked about how the casinos and malls are all designed to make you stay there and spend money—get you distracted. So, how does the "nudge theory" work? Well the people who run train stations have noticed over the years that at least one-third and in some systems as much as 85%—that is four-fifths—of the delays to their system are caused by passengers not necessarily by mechanical problems or scheduling delays or whatever the issue happens to be. If this third of delays could be wiped away, the trains run on time and everyone is happy. That's what train systems are designed to do. They are supposed to run on time to get people where they need to go at the right time.

So, in an increasing number of major cities, the train station brass has turned to behavioral psychology to nudge people into actions that decrease these delays and problems, leading to efficiency. And of course, everyone is happy, right? For instance, a common nudging practice is to encourage passengers to stand on both sides of the steps of the escalator, so that they ride up side by side, two on each step. When riders do this, it increases capacity on the escalator by thirty percent or more (because not every one of those steps is going to have to people). But when you encourage people to do this, it actually allows thirty percent more people to go up the escalator in the time that it took that thirty percent less to go before.

So how did they get people to do this? How did they get people to stand side by side on an escalator? Well, they do this through what is called cues—like a cue card or something like that. These are cues that people notice. So along with regular station announcements, they put signs on the floors. They put two pairs of footprints on the escalator steps, and they put handprints on both handrails (left and right). Seeing these cues, most people are wired to comply with them. They put their hand on the railing on one side, and somebody puts his hand on the other railing on the other side. Or they see the two pairs of footprints on the steps, and they go fill them with their own feet and somebody comes up beside them and does the same. So people tend to see these cues and follow them without thinking about them.

Another example is that in Japan, which has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, the authorities wanted to discourage potential suicides happening in their stations. People would come, and mostly they would go to the ends of the platforms and wait for a train to come and jump out in front of it. I should mention, too, that this is a really huge problem in Japan because Japan was actually averaging one suicide per day in their train stations, so they needed to do something.

The first thing they tried was chest-high barriers, so that people could not get over them unless they kind of tried to scramble up and over. But they are very expensive. To do chest high barriers on all the platforms throughout the whole Japanese train system, it would take $4.7 billion, and they would not get them done until 2032. It was going to be a huge, huge expense. They have 243 stations in the Japanese system there.

So, what did they decide to do in the meantime? Well, they decided to put up blue LED panels at the ends of the platforms where the most of the suicides occur. Now why blue? Well, blue has a calming effect on mood. If you have somebody who is agitated, who is about ready to kill themselves, and they get hit with this blue light—suddenly they feel all better. You know, things aren't as bad as they used to be, and they turn around and walk away.

You might think that silly, but they have proof that it actually works. Data analyzed over a ten year period shows an 84% decline in the number of suicide attempts at stations where blue lights are installed. A later study revealed no corresponding change in suicide attempts at neighboring stations that lacked the blue lights, so they have to say it must be the blue lights, with that kind of information.

Transit centers also tend to have a problem with teenage hooliganism, and a nudge was invented to reduce their incidence. Some Japanese train stations with this problem employed ultrasonic deterrence—small devices that they could slip up in the ceiling here and there that emit a high frequency—a tone at 17 Khz, which can only be heard by people under 25 because all the rest of us have lost our hearing, basically, in that range by the time we hit our mid-20s. So older people, those who need to get to work and such, they go blithely into these stations and move quickly through them. But youngsters hurry away, even if they have to use the station—they hurry away complaining about the loud, noisy station.

Now, I believe in human conspiracy. Psalm 2 and Psalm 83 say that they happen, but I am no conspiracy theorist. Even so, there are technologies and ideas out there that could be used to sway millions of people to go in a direction they would not otherwise go. For instance, you marry psychology to politics, to websites and news programs, and advertising, they can come up with ways to nudge you into directions that you do do not want to go, but you go because you simply comply, because it's part of human psychology. Nudging and the Gruen effect and other psychological tactics could be used for more nefarious purposes in the future.

Revelation 13 tells us that the false prophet will cause many to follow and worship the beast, and receive the mark of the beast. Could nudging be one of the tools in his toolbox that he uses for those ends? I do not know. My point is not to alarm, nor even to say that nudging is wrong, necessarily. I mean, they use it for good in these train stations to get people moving. Nevertheless, it's there. It's out there. It's being used. It's a tool used by some for good and by others for evil.

We need to know of it and be aware of how it may be used on us. Our job, though, is to do as Jesus instructs in Luke 31:36: "Watch therefore, and pray always that you may be worthy to escape all these things that come to pass and to stand before the son of man." And if we do this properly—if we are truly watching ourselves; watching the way we interact with one another, watching what is true and what is good—then we hopefully will not be deceived by these things. We will see them for what they are, and be able to therefore see the tricks in the deceptions of the end times.

RTR/aws/dcg