In the early 1990s, the renovations manager at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport decided to decorate each bathroom urinal with a realistic image of a fly, placed just above the drain. For decades, urinal designers had sought a way to curb the unpleasant spillage around urinals, and it turned out that by giving men something to aim at — in this case, a humble insect — spillage dramatically reduced.
This airport innovation went on to become one of the most well-known examples of a nudge: a subtle prompt that can alter human behavior. The formal concept of nudging was first popularized by economist Richard H. Thaler and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein, who co-authored the best-selling 2008 book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness." The book defines a nudge as something that "alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives." The authors framed nudging as a bipartisan technocratic fix that could solve tricky policy problems while preserving individual freedom. Governments didn't need to tell people what to do; they needed to nudge them.
