Fishburn Hedges

11.06.2010

Standing on the escalator in the tube on my way home from work the other night and looking at the ‘stand on the right’ sign instructing me to do just that got me to thinking, would we be more likely to walk if the signs said ‘walk on the left’ instead?

Ultimately the message is the same, but this would offer positive reinforcement for the walking option instead of the standing option. If my hunch is right, the benefits are clear – fitter commuters and less congestion in the walkways – and ultimately a more pleasant experience for all. Right?

I took to Google to see if I could find any examples of this theory being put into practice, but all I could find were the usual grumbles about people standing on the left. I also found this explanation of why we overtake on the left on the escalator, which has always seemed odd to me, given the rules of the road. Some signs seem to say ‘walk on the left, stand on the right’, which I suppose is going halfway there, but by giving both options you lose the positive reinforcement.

The closest example is one of my favourite ‘behaviour change’ campaigns of recent years – The Fun Theory created for Volkswagen in Sweden. This introduced a fun element to encourage the public to make the better choice. Piano stairs and bottlebank arcade are probably the best known examples, but they also ran a contest to find other examples, with this suggestion of a speed camera lottery taking first prize – the genius twist in this idea is that it takes something that many people actively dislike and gives them a reason to actively like it instead.

Of course, what I’m talking about here is the idea of ‘choice architecture’, as described by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in Nudge, the theory du jour in the world of behaviour change – at least as far as the Conservatives are concerned.

Many of the examples I’ve seen of nudges seem to me to about making that behaviour choice conscious. What I think is really interesting for our industry is to think about some of the more subtle environmental influences; things that seem to be part of the furniture of our daily lives that we don’t actively engage with but which nonetheless have a role to play in influencing our behaviour.