Nudge Daily Manifesto

Nudge Daily was started out of a desire to help people equip themselves to make the choices they actually want to make.

For so many people, making the right decision is far from easy. They know what it is they want to do — eat healthier foods, manage their finances responsibly, stay physically active, etc. — but actually doing it always proves too hard.

The reasons for this are numerous and include things like not having enough time, not having the willpower, being too distracted to make effective decisions and many other very real hindrances that conspire against the life they want to lead and leave them feeling resigned to a life where they can never feel proud of themselves because they feel as though they’re always letting themselves down.

Multiply this by a few billion and you start to get very real consequences.

If one person decides it’s too hard to eat less, use fewer appliances and manage their finances responsibly, that’s really no big deal (except for that one person) but as soon as you start to see this pattern of behaviour across entire societies, you get big problems. Suddenly all those over-eaters are putting serious strains on healthcare systems as a result of increased rates of obesity, diabetes and heart-disease. Excessive use of appliances is generating excessive carbon emissions and those who are unable to properly manage their finances suddenly find themselves at the mercy of lenders and unscrupulous employers.

Effective decision making. At the end of the day, it basically all comes back to this.

And this is where Nudge Daily comes in.

As the name suggests, Nudge Daily was inspired by the ideas of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, who popularised the concept of a ‘nudge’ in their book — Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness — as being a subtle change in a person’s environment that is made with the intention of nudging their behaviour towards some desired outcome.

By leveraging the work of behavioural psychologists like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who have identified the many ways in which our decision-making tends to deviate from what a purely rational person would do and instead tends to conform more to what we all know we actually do — i.e. eat a whole tub of ice-cream in one sitting because it’s delicious, even though we also know we’ll regret it later — Thaler and Sunstein developed a theory around how we can make better decisions now that we know our brains are lazy and impulsive and essentially function like a kid whose parents have left them home-alone for an evening.

In essence, the idea is to use our sensible, grown-up brains to create an environment where, even if we let our Home-Alone-Child-Brain’s loose, we know that when our adult brain arrives back from dinner, things won’t be too messed up.

Government’s have taken to the idea with gusto and businesses are starting to catch on too, however, when I did a quick search of the internet to find places where you could get some really good ideas for nudges that the everyday person can implement in their own lives to help them live the lives they want to — there really wasn’t any one good place where this could be found.

Hence, Nudge Daily. A place where people can come to find tools that will help them make the decisions they want to make as well as share those tools with others so that in our own small ways, we can make the world a better place.