Choice Architecture and Nudge Theory: Doomscrolling, Eating Healthy, and Making Others Climb Mountains

At some point in our lives, we all have to make a decision. We make the choice to pick steak over salad for our dinner date. We make the choice to buy a different brand of shampoo at the supermarket. We make the choice to read a particular kind of newspaper, support a particular political party, to pick one kind of health insurance and retirement plan… 

But what about people who make decisions for other people?

A parent has to make the decision to restrict social media for the well-being of their child. A doctor has to make the decision to pick and push a treatment that would be ideal for their patient’s health and financial situation. A school board has to make the decision to create rewards for certain programs that they’d like their students to participate in. 

Everywhere we go, we are in highly structured and acutely engineered environments that are designed to help us make our choices - supermarkets, clothing stores, hospitals, school cafeterias, and many, many more. In all of these situations, we have the chooser (for lack of a better word), and the choice-designer - formally known as the choice architect in applied behavioral economics.

Food: the choice we all want to make

We can understand the implications of choice architecture through a very simple example: the arrangement of food in a school cafeteria. Let’s say you’re in charge of arranging food for school lunches in the cafeteria space. The first, and most important question that you should ask is: does the arrangement even matter?

Short answer: yes. One of the biggest misconceptions people have is that it is possible to have absolutely zero influence on people’s choices - and it’s completely false. 

Arrangements, colors, patterns, shapes, ease and discomfort, availability, and optics - all of these things affect human choices, regardless of whether they are controlled or not.

So, the next question you should ask is: what kind of arrangement should I have? Well, that depends on what kind of food you’d like the kids to have. Now comes a question of ethics - should you influence someone’s eating choices? We already know that having a neutral arrangement is impossible - so what does it matter if we, with all good intentions, push a certain kind of food for the benefit of the kids? Would it be so wrong to surreptitiously keep apples, carrots, or salads at the start of the rows? What if we kept water bottles next to the serving stations, more easily accessible than the soda vending machines in the corners?

We see that through this arrangement, we are creating an environment where certain choices - those of healthy food and water - are incentivized over others - those of junk food and soda - that are de-incentivized in a few different ways. 

Firstly, healthy food is kept near the entrance, at the beginning of the queues - this means that kids are more likely to choose them because they are hungry and their plates are still empty. 

Secondly, water is kept close to the tables - kids are more likely to go to the station closest to them when they get thirsty instead of walking all the way to the exit and getting a soda.

 Additionally, soda is kept near the exits - when they are already fulfilled, and less likely to seek instant sugar than before. 

This placement of foods exploits the hunger levels of students as they walk into the hall by placing direct access to healthier food in a place where it’s the first thing that is visible. This not only increases the appeal of the healthy section, but also makes it more difficult to access junk food - in the throes of hunger, students will have to avoid all the good food at the front and walk all the way to the exits to get to the junk food. 

Doomscrolling: The Modern Epidemic

Let us look at another example - that of reels on Instagram. Reels are short-form content, usually between 15 and 90 seconds. Instagram’s algorithm is specifically designed to analyze the content you most enjoy watching and keep adding the same content into your everyday social media routine - if you like videos of people cooking with tiny, wool spoons, pots and pans, or playing with dollhouses, or memes - that is exactly the kind of content that will be in your reel-marathon every single day. This leads us to the much-feared and universal phenomenon of doomscrolling.

Each reel can be considered a ‘nudge’ - in English, a nudge is known as a soft push, A series of small, non-coercive actions that make the choice easier and more appealing by the second.

Every reel you watch is a little nudge towards the choice of continuing to stay on your phone, scrolling through social media. Over time, the series of small nudges amount to a good couple of hours of Instagram or TikTok.

More time spent on the app means that the algorithm at work gets to know you on a personal level. 

 Your political leanings, your favorite celebrities, your prejudices, your guilty pleasures - and box your identity into a series of categories that can now be used to suggest more and more viable content for you to consume!  

Looking back on the first example of the cafeteria, we see that the placement of foods can also be considered a nudge - a nudge towards the ‘good’ food, and a nudge away from the ‘bad’ food. Nudges use human psychology, such as framing and social proof - to essentially attach a moral judgment to a choice - serving to make it more or less attractive. 

So Nudges Determine What I Think Is Good? 

In a lot of ways, yes. Think about visiting university websites - the front pages are filled with happy, blonde college students or crowds of kids selectively picked to showcase the diverse student body all running around large, open fields. Sometimes the front pages are filled with quotes from students talking about the great academic experience - all examples of social proof. 

Alternatively, advertisements for new drugs on television talk about all the benefits of new weight loss drugs - they often begin with a morose narration of the obesity epidemic in the country (thereby framing obesity as ‘bad’ or ‘undesirable’) and then switch the cheerful men and women who magically became healthy after buying the drug (thereby framing the drug as ‘desirable’ by making it synonymous with health). 

These nudges are choice architecture in action - big tech wants you to keep consuming content, so they use nudges to help you do it. Pharmaceutical companies want you to buy their new cough medicine - so, they promise better taste and a way to get rid of your cold faster. 

This helps us understand the difference between choice architecture and nudge theory: while choice architecture is a strategy - a series of ideas that people use in the science of studying and influencing choice, nudge theory is a tactic - it encompasses exactly how this influencing is done, whether for better or for worse. Nudges are a specific kind of influence - soft, gentle, and non-coercive - done in a way that people are still free to choose something else if they please - it is simply slightly more difficult.

People DO NOT make choices rationally and calmly. They are guided by emotion, prejudice, and several thousands of factors outside of their control. 

One of the popular arguments is that no one would consciously choose to eat fast food on a daily basis - but that poverty-ridden households are forced to consume this cheap, high-fat, low-nutrient food in order to survive. Fast food chains push their cheaper products to the poor, thereby worsening their health over time - possibly leading to higher obesity-linked disease rates in these demographics. 

Another argument is that of the lottery - the average American household spends about $400 on lottery tickets per year - a sum that would be better spent on other activities, or even saved. An anonymous report suggests that Indians spend about 50,000 crore on lottery tickets every year, in an industry that is growing every year. So why would we spend so much money on tickets that have a (literally) one-in-a-million or billion chance of actually winning us something? The answer, behavioural economists suggest, is that lottery tickets are marketed to certain economic demographics as an escape from their dreary lives of servitude - anyone would be willing to spend a little money (and a lot over time) in order to buy a golden ticket to immense riches. (The statistics show that even if they were to win this money, they would end up losing most of it through bad investments and financial choices.) 

Climbing Mountains: An Analogy for Horrible Choices 

Investing in hack schemes, gambling, drinking, smoking, overeating, and doomscrolling - all of these are examples of bad choices. And believe it or not, most people would not make these choices if they were completely self-aware and calm (what Thaler and Sunstein refer to as ‘a surplus of cognitive ability’). We all have built-in mechanisms that are designed to make sure we do not engage in self-destructive behavior - so why do we still make these choices? 

Making a horrible choice is like climbing a mountain - you have to fight your brain when it tells you that what you’re doing is wrong, and still make the same choice, with full knowledge of what it’s doing to you (most of the time). Malicious companies use pushes instead of nudges to essentially coerce and manipulate you into making these choices - which tells us that choice architecture can be used to do very, very bad things. The right kind of psychological tools and tactics can make you climb mountains, only for the prize of a horrible choice. 

This is why we all need to study choice architecture - whether we like it or not, every single one of our choices is pre-determined for us - based on numbers, pie charts , and fiscal year reports of big corporations, and the size of the growing pockets of the people that head them.