Nudge

Overview

Nudge is essentially a book about choice. It is a worldwide best seller, and like some of my other book reviews there are going to be far better reviews than mine available with a quick google search. Honestly, I found the book a bit dry although filled with useful information. For people trying to create advertisements, influence decisions on products, or steer people in a specific direction, this book will be critical. It feels like this is a roll-up of the newest research and best practices in this space. I certainly found the book "worth the read", but did not have any immediate ways to make the advice actionable.

Favorite Points

I'm including a couple of the key points from the book below. If any of these resonate with you, it might be worth reading more.

1. If you aren't familiar with many of the common biases, this book provides a good overview. A few examples of common biases discussed in detail are anchoring, availability, representativeness, status quo, and loss aversion.
2. A good part of the book discusses the concept of Choice Design. This was an interesting concept I hadn't heard about before. The idea is you can design choices in such a way that you can purposely affect the outcomes of people making those decisions. On the surface, this seems obvious. The authors, however, explain that this is far from straightforward and you can be anywhere from deliberate to devious as you set up these choices.
3. Before reading this book I never realized how powerful a "default" option can be. It was shocking just how often people will go with a reasonable default and essentially make the choice to allow the default to progress even if they would have chosen differently if the default were presented as another choice. Fascinating!

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