In fact, Eric Johnson concludes his book by advising us to apply the golden rule: “ Design for others as you would like them to design for you”. My interest lies more in helping people improve their own choices, but the findings of both books are highly relevant for that. What is optimal is not the same for every individual, but I generally define it as the choice that is most aligned with the person’s values.īoth of these books are geared mostly towards “curators” of other people’s choices: for example, the staff of a school cafeteria who gets to decide where to place the fruit, or the employers who present retirement savings plans to their employees. They argue that consumers and citizens should be nudged to help them make the kinds of choices that they would most likely also naturally prefer, if they were making “optimal” (or rational) choices for themselves. This is the idea that it is both possible and desirable (in particular for public institutions, but really for any well-meaning choice architect) to affect people’s behavior for the “better”, while also respecting their freedom of choice. With Nudge: The Final Edition (2021, a revised version of their 2008 bestseller), Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein advocate what they call “libertarian paternalism”. We don’t appreciate those factors enough, and we’re often unaware of just how much they influence our choices every day. The designers of decisions need to consider all the elements involved in presenting a choice: how many options to offer, in which order to present those options, whether to organize them into categories, how much information to provide, whether to make one of them a “default”, etc. Two recent books shine a light on choice architecture, and on how it affects our decisions:Įric Johnson’s The Elements of Choice (2021) offers a guide to creating effective choice architectures. Similarly, people eat less when the default serving size is smaller. Or, people are more likely to enroll in retirement savings plans if the employer makes that plan the default option – which is the option that happens when you do nothing.

For example, children eat more fruit when fruit is placed in more prominent positions in a school cafeteria.

The way a choice is presented to us has a much bigger influence on our behavior than we may realize. Picture credit: Ben Deavin What is choice architecture, and how can we use it to improve our own decisions?Ĭhoice architecture is the art and science of how to present choices to decision makers.

Eric johnson the elements of choice