Nudge

Thanksgiving Thursday, when stores in the U.S. are closed and many are spending time off work, has become the de facto start of the holiday shopping season both for those looking to bargains online, and for online retailers to kick off holiday sales deals to meet that demand. But if there is a message from this year’s Thanksgiving sales, it is that consumers are holding steady, but don’t hold your breath for a growth boom. Adobe Analytics said that people in the U.S. spent on Thursday spent $5.6 billion online, which…

Filamentous fungi. Credit: University of Borås What makes people interested in fungi-based food as an alternative to other protein sources such as meat? A new doctoral thesis explains how it is possible to create sustainable systems for food production. Increased understanding of how people choose and a nudge can make a difference. …

The Current12:52The psychology behind the tip screenRead transcribed audioFor many Canadians, picking up your morning coffee now comes with the swivel of an iPad and a list of tip options that can start at 18 or 20 per cent — but perhaps no option to not tip at all. One expert says that approach to design — and those preset amounts — can be designed to play on a customer's desire to appear generous, and nudge them into tipping more. "People will wait in line, they know they're being pressured, there's like 20 people…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Raising daughters can make male company leaders more supportive of women's struggles for equality, new research shows. This also leads to employing more women in their companies and on their boards. A founder has a lot of power over a company—but most companies are founded by men. However, a…

It’s only human nature. If you tell a driver their insurance premium will go down if they drive more safely, then – it turns out – they will probably drive more safely. Scale that up to entire commercial fleets and the costs saving can become extremely significant. However, the trick is to do the tracking in the first place. So it’s fascinating to think that research into how to insure drones led to the creation of UK startup Flock, which uses real-time data to insure car fleets. Ed Leon Klinger and Antton Pena were…

A spacecraft that plowed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away succeeded in shifting its orbit, NASA said in announcing the results of its save-the-world test.The space agency attempted the test two weeks ago to see if in the future a killer rock could be nudged out of Earth's way."This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a briefing at the space agency's headquarters in Washington.The Dart spacecraft carved a…

Can nudging help us shop more sustainably? Credit: BearFotos/Shutterstock At the end of last year (2021), there was lots of excitement about the first comprehensive analysis of past research on techniques designed to change people's behavior (known as "nudging"), confidently showing that they work. This was great news for researchers, but also for governments across the world who have invested in "nudge units" that use such…