rotmanmagazine.ca / 37discounts on the ticket price provided there’s a bit of effort in-
volved in claiming the money back. The fact is, most of us will
never get around to it, even though that’s what helped to per-
suade us to make the purchase in the first place.
Businesses can also take out friction in ways that consum-
ers can find very helpful. For example, pharmacies can make life
much easier for patients on repeat prescriptions by automati-
cally sending, by post, a new batch of medication just before the
old prescription runs out. This can save both patient and doctor
quite a lot of hassle in getting and collecting a new prescription,
saving tens of millions of dollars in the process.
Of course, there is little point in passing a law, introducing
a benefit, or running a public information campaign intended to
influence behaviour if no one knows about it — or if the infor-
mation is so dense and complex that it is not clear what is being
asked of people. As such, the most fundamental application of
‘make it easy’ is to make sure that your information and messag-
ing are simple to understand.
When you last received a letter from the government, was
it clear what it was asking you to do? If you were asked to pay
a bill, was it obvious how to pay, or were there three different
addresses, several phone numbers and the ‘how to pay’ details
buried somewhere on the back? Our work in BIT has taught us
to be almost obsessive about removing such frictions. Even the
tiniest extra hassle can make a significant difference.
Sometimes, however, the answer may be to add more fric-
tion — at least when you are trying to encourage people not to do
something, or to pause for thought before doing something that
they might later regret. That’s because many of the decisions we
make in life make use of our automatic or ‘System 1’ parts of our
brain, as Daniel Kahneman has shown. In some situations, the
role of the ‘nudger’ may be simply to put a bump in the road to
jolt the person’s ‘System 2’, or active reflection, back on.
Examples of such ‘bumps in the road’ include introducing
mandatory cooling-off periods for financial products; having a
required delay between a store offering cheap up-front credit
and the person’s ability to use the card (even if just 30 minutes);
and requiring that certain products, such as cigarettes, are only
sold over the counter. A little friction, it turns out, is not always a
bad thing.In closing
The world is full of examples of frictions removed or added to
shape our behaviour. Policymakers and business leaders alike
should never forget to ask the question, ‘Could we make this eas-
ier?’ Go ahead: Make it easy; take out the friction. Or, depending
on your goal, add some.Dr. David Halpern is a British psychologist and head of the UK
Government’s Behavioural Insights Team. He is the author
of Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big
Difference (Penguin Random House UK, 2015), from which this
article was adapted with permission.