De overheid als keuzearchitect? - Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het ...

public policy nudges: the government as choice architect
have to do anything: two weeks later I was approached by somebody
who said he read the column and was going to do this. So now there is
an app for the iPhone that you can click on and signup in any state in
the us. That is yet another way we could make progress.
Second principle: give feedback. People can’t learn unless they get
proper feedback. One example is this. Suppose you are painting the
ceiling at home. You have white paint and you are painting over
white paint. It is very hard to see where you have painted. Some
genius – maybe the same guy from Schiphol airport – created a
paint that goes on pink but then turns white. This means you never
miss a spot because you get feedback. Here is another example of
feedback. This little egg-shaped thing on the picture is called the
ambient orb. It can be installed in people’s homes and it normally
just looks like this. But if you start using a lot of energy, it starts
glowing red. Simply installing these in people’s homes decreased
energy used in peak periods by 40 per cent. And energy is all about
reducing energies at the peak because that’s what determines how
many power plants you have to build. Here is another example that
is studied by the great psychologist Bob Cialdini and his team. They
went around neighborhoods and tried to encourage people to use
less energy. I think this was in a hot climate in places like Arizona,
where they have air conditioners. They presented these door
hangers and encouraged people either to save money or save the
environment or be a good citizen. The effect of this was zero. But
then they had a fourth condition where they said: truthfully your
neighbors are using less power, you should too. That reduced the
energy used by 6 per cent.
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There is a company in the us called ‘O power’. We now get these in
my home in Chicago. When you get your utility bill, they tell you
how much energy you are using compared to your neighbors. They
don’t name your neighbors, so there is no privacy concerns. They just
say: here is your utility bill, it is 300 dollars, your neighbors’ bill was
200 dollars, the average of your neighbors. It turns out that simply
providing this information reduced usage by 2-6 per cent. It costs
nothing. So the question is: why wouldn’t we do things like that?
There is a lot of low hanging fruit. There are a lot of ways to alter behavior
on climate change that cost nothing. We don’t have to invent