State & Local

Ten Ways Cities are Nudging for Better, Healthier Citizens

Data-Smart City Solutions: Eating more healthily, saving more, or recycling are all things that most people would agree they’d like to do more of. Yet, even with the best intentions, people often won’t actually change their behavior. Whether it be inconvenience, lack of time, or simply not knowing where to start, we often don’t do the things that we know we should.

However, nudges from governments, non-profits, and private companies can help reverse that inertia and produce more desirable behaviors from residents. Nudges are choice-preserving interventions that leverage insights from behavioral science to combat people’s cognitive biases or habits and encourage healthier behaviors. These interventions change people’s choice architecture—the physical, social, and psychological context that influences decision making—to promote preferred behaviors. Nudging may take many forms, but some common categories are communications that encourage certain actions, default rules that make healthy behaviors the norm, and simplifications of processes to make desirable actions easier. One popular example of a nudge comes from Google, which reorganized its fridge to promote healthier eating. Simply by putting bottled water at eye level and soda at the bottom of its fridge, Google increased water intake by 47 percent and reduced soda consumption by 7 percent.

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