Prepared To Be Nudged

Prepare To Be Nudged


Have you ever had an unexpected foreboding? You know, you are minding your own business and suddenly, from out of the blue, your narrow personal vision of the current world is expanded into an apprehensive wide-eyed search for whatever it is that your instinct is trying to warn you about. Sometimes seemingly small and insignificant things happen that only in retrospect become the “straw that broke the camel’s back” and ushers in the unappreciated flood of apprehension. I’ve been living with such an unsettling foreboding for some time now and something just happened that I think will be proven to be the small and insignificant signal that will shed light upon what is causing instinct to give rise to the foreboding. The “straw that broke the camel’s back” moment occurred when I happened to read a New York Times article entitled, “When Humans Need a Nudge Toward Rationality”, by Jeff Sommer in the February 8th, 2009 edition of that bastion of liberal thought. A humorous example of “Nudging” provides insight into what the two Professor Authors (Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein of the University of Chicago) have documented in their current book on the subject, Nudge. The example goes like this: The image of a housefly was etched into the porcelain near the drain of the urinals which are located in the Men’s room at the Amsterdam Airport. The fly images were added to the urinals to facilitate an experiment in human behavior. After the fly images were added to the urinals, “spillage” on the men’s room floor fell by 80%. The explanation for the reduced “spillage” was that men are competitive creatures and so the fly images peaked their competitive nature by focusing their attention to aim at the flies rather than just haphazardly urinating without too much regard to where their un-aimed stream was going. Isn’t science wonderful? The essence of this experiment and the subject of the book is that when officials, authorities or whomever would like to guide human behavior to a more desired and directed outcome, enlightened nudging of human behavior is a splendid way to do so. How this is done is for the enlightened to create “choice architecture” (their words, not mine) in order to nudge human behavior to a more desirable outcome. The creation of a “choice architecture” is the deliberate imposition of structure in an environment (etching flies in a urinal) to induce people to made better choices. I’ll just pause a moment to let all of this sink in…………(I wonder who gets to make the determination on what constitutes a “better choice?”) Now comes the defining “break the camel’s back” moment. Professor Sunstein has been named by President Obama to be administrator of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or as Professor Thaler light heartily said, “Sunstein would be the Nudger in Chief.” I’ll just pause again for another moment to let that sink in as well…….. I don’t know about you but I think I’ve already read about these kinds of goings on when I read George Orwell’s seminal work, “1984” a number of years ago. I believe my foreboding is caused by the recognition that “Nudging” can be a more clandestine way to bring about thought and other governmental control over people that George Orwell saw fit to conjecture about in his book. The seemingly insignificant event of naming Professor Sunstein to be Nudger in Chief is enough to make any free man or woman apprehensive and afraid.