Page 47 - FCW, August 2020

“We’re changing how the choice is presented. Interventions with the nudge should work with technology and make it easy. This isn’t supposed to be adding anything. They’re supposed to be quick, easy changes \[that have\] disproportional impact.”
— LAURA LEETS, MITRE
Nudging at work in other areas
The nonprofit behavioral design lab ideas42 helps cities set up low- cost interventions that deliver improvements to all sorts of processes through its CityNudge Accelerator. For instance, the firm worked with the New York City Fire Department to assess whether it could increase the diversity of applicants who take a qualifying exam to join the department by waiving certain fees. The change resulted in a 37% increase in applications overall, along with an 84% increase in Black applicants and an 83% increase in women applicants.
“In every field where you have people who have to make decisions and take actions in order for policy goals to be reached, you have the chance for those decisions and actions to be biased in some way and therefore the need to reinforce them with a particular intervention,” said Josh
Martin, managing director at ideas42. The company is currently looking for ways to encourage hard-to-reach populations to act on their intentions to vote. “It’s not that people don’t want to vote or that they don’t know when the election is, it’s just that when the moment comes, they don’t have a plan to actually get there,” Martin said. “So the idea of actually putting together the set of actions to get out to the polling place in that moment on that day can be really difficult if you haven’t thought
it through in advance.”
At the national level, the Federal
Retirement Thrift Investment Board uses nudging to encourage government employees to save more money for retirement through the Thrift Savings Plan. Four outreach efforts resulted in about 43,000 people contributing a total of about $34 million to such accounts.
In 2014, the Obama administration
launched a nudge unit in the form of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team and said its projects have “made government programs easier to access and more user-friendly, and have boosted program efficiency and integrity.” The program has since been eliminated under the Trump administration.
However, Skipworth said the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely make nudging more appealing for many government agencies. “I suspect that coming out of this pandemic time period, where resources will be less, we’ll be trying to contact constituents or customers in the most inexpensive way possible,” he said. “I think that nudge is going to be something that other agencies are going to want to do to get the word out for whatever their message is because we’re just not going to have the resources.” n
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