Choiceology's Guide to Nudges

Speaker 1: Can I help you?

Speaker 2: Hi, yes. We're volunteers from Your Vote Matters. It's a local nonprofit, nonpartisan group, and we're just checking in with people to see if they intend to vote in next week's election.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm planning to vote.

Speaker 2: Great. OK. I've got a couple questions for you if you have some time. Have you thought about what time you might head to the polls?

Speaker 1: Not yet. Before work, I guess.

Speaker 2: OK. And do you know how you'll get there?

Speaker 1: I'll probably drive. Parking's bad near the polling station, though. And I'll have to drop my daughter off at school first. Actually, maybe I'll just go during my lunch hour instead.

Speaker 2: OK. That sounds good. Just a couple more questions. Is there anything that might prevent you from voting? You mentioned parking. What about …

Katy Milkman: Maybe you've been visited by "get out the vote" groups ahead of a big election. Often, they'll just remind you that an election is coming up or let you know where your polling place is located, but did you notice the extra questions the canvasser posed in that conversation? It wasn't just, "Will you vote?" But also, "When will you vote? How will you get there?" In a past episode of Choiceology called "Hold That Thought," Harvard professor Todd Rogers talked about how prompts like these could encourage people to stick to their intentions.

He explained that these kinds of prompts increase commitment, reduce forgetting, and reduce the likelihood that an unanticipated obstacle will trip us up. In a study with nearly 300,000 participants run during the 2008 presidential election, Todd Rogers found that adding a short list of planning questions, like the one you just heard, increases voter turnout. In fact, these added questions more than doubled the impact of just asking people if they plan to vote. No incentives or rules were required for this result, just a little tweak that behavioral scientists call a nudge. Nudges are all around us.

If you've ever purchased anything on Amazon, used a smartphone or navigated an airport terminal, you've been nudged. A nudge is a design element—say, on a form or a road or a menu or a webpage—that helps guide you towards a choice that you might have made anyway, if you'd had unlimited time or unlimited cognitive bandwidth or had completely mastered self-control. But what's neat about nudges is that they don't change your knowledge or the economic calculus of a choice. They instead use an understanding of your psychology to steer you towards choices that will benefit you, and they do it without requiring education or restricting your options in any way.

In 2021, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein published Nudge: The Final Edition. The original edition was published in 2008. We thought now might be a good time to examine the influence this book has had over the years. We'll talk about its impact on the way that governments, companies, charities, schools, and others frame the decisions that we're faced with every day. And we'll also talk about the way Nudge has influenced this podcast. We're switching up the format of the show a bit. We're calling this episode "Choiceology's Guide to Nudges." You'll hear about many different types of nudges, clips from past episodes, and a feature-length interview with Nobel laureate Richard Thaler. You'll also hear my chat with cognitive scientist Maya Shankar, who built a whole office in the White House to apply principles from the book Nudge to public policy.

I'm Dr. Katy Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you the latest and greatest insights from the world of behavioral science in each episode, and we share interviews with the researchers making cutting edge discoveries in the field. And we do it all to help you make better judgements and avoid costly mistakes.

According to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, a nudge is a tool that aims to change people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, an intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. This means that mandates, fines, taxes, and bans aren't nudges. A nudge is subtle and optional, but when applied to a large population or over a long period, it can be really consequential. The person who designs a nudge is called a choice architect, and that's because just as someone who designs a building shapes the way you move through it and use a physical space, a choice architect shapes the way you experience choices: online, in a store, or on a government form. And ideally, they shape those choices for the better.

Let's look at a couple of examples. If you go back to the Choiceology episode "The Simple Choice," you'll hear about how setting the optimal choice as the default option is a great example of a nudge. When you get a new computer, default settings may nudge you to use a certain background or navigate with a certain browser, though you still have the option of customizing the system or using different software from what came bundled with the computer. Defaults are what you end up with if you take the path of least resistance and do absolutely nothing. They tend to be incredibly sticky for that reason. We all prefer the easy option. Good choice architects set defaults carefully so that even if you don't lift a finger to customize your settings or opt out, you'll still get what most people would want. From that episode, here's UCLA professor Shlomo Benartzi talking about defaults and retirement savings plans.

Shlomo Benartzi: So there's a very influential paper in the retirement domain, work that Brigitte Madrian did with Dennis Shea, and they looked at the company where employees were struggling to save for retirement. So about half the employees would bother to go to the HR office—this was before the digital age—fill the paperwork and join the retirement plan. And half the employees would do nothing, mostly because they were just busy with the kids, they didn't think they have the money to save, variety of reasons. But there was some obstacles to getting it done. The company changed the default so that everyone automatically saves for retirement, but they can opt out. Turns out that only 10% of the people opted out, so you boosted participation from 50 to 90%. And there's some surveys done asking, actually, people who've been both automatically enrolled and people who actually opted out about the satisfaction with the plan. And generally, they're actually quite happy.

Katy Milkman: We see this type of positive outcome in other domains as well. Some countries have adopted a default enrollment for organ donations, where people are presumed to be donors if they don't indicate a preference, but it's very easy to opt out. Those countries have a much higher number of registered organ donors than countries that require people to sign even a single form to opt in. Of course, defaults are just one type of nudge. There are lots of subtle and not so subtle signals that nudge your behavior all the time. That text message you get from your pharmacy reminding you it's time to refill your prescription. The rumble strip on the highway exit reminding you to slow down or to stay in your lane. In one of my favorite examples, interactive musical steps installed next to an escalator encouraged people to use the stairs and get a bit more exercise. This is a great example of making the best choice a fun one. You can hear more about making it fun as a nudge in our episode "A Spoonful of Sugar." Here's University of Chicago professor Ayelet Fishbach.

Ayelet Fishbach: We were thinking of how to make studying math fun for students and how to make it fun by introducing something that has very little to do with math. We basically brought color pencils, some snacks, and we played music in the classroom. Teacher's intuition was that this is going to distract them from studying math. What we found is that when we introduced all of these positive rewards, students were attempting more math problems. They were working harder.

Katy Milkman: Of course, some nudges are used to subtly manipulate us into spending more of our money or our time on products or entertainment. But my first guest argues that to count as a nudge, it's necessary to use these kinds of tactics to assist people in making the best decisions for them. Richard Thaler is a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago and the co-author, with Cass Sunstein, of Nudge: The Final Edition. Hi, Richard, thank you so much for being here.

Richard Thaler: Pleasure to be here, Katy.

Katy Milkman: So I want to start by talking about choice architecture, and I'm hoping you could actually just give a simple explainer of the idea of choice architecture. What is it, and who is a choice architect?

Richard Thaler: So we're all choice architects. So choice architecture is just the context in which we choose. Think of a restaurant. I think it's the easiest example. You go to a restaurant; there's a menu. Somebody's decided how to organize the menu—whether there are categories, whether pasta is a separate category like in Italian restaurants, whether soups are their own category, what order the things are within categories. That's choice architecture. And what we know as students of decision-making is that to a first approximation, everything matters. So what you will eat will depend in part on whether soups are a different category from other starters. And that's true of everything in life.

Katy Milkman: So what are some examples of good and bad choice architecture in the wild that you think particularly help this come to life for people?

Richard Thaler: Well, my mantra is "make it easy." So my favorite kind of choice architecture is GPS. I am the most hopeless navigator. GPS is a godsend. So what do I like about it? It's ideal nudging. You pick the destination. So I press Home. Then it suggests a route that's easy to follow, and if you take a detour, it adjusts, right? People think our goal is to be the nanny state or to tell you what to do. No. Our goal is to have every part of life be as easy as navigating to a new place in Philadelphia, or even a new place in some city that you've never been in before. So that's ideal choice architecture.

Bad choice architecture, oh my god. Let me tell you what I happen to be doing today is reviewing my healthcare options because this is open enrollment period at my university. There is a booklet that they send you, and there are four main options, and the characteristics of each are described on about 12 dimensions that are on vertical axis and then various rows. And they're on two pages, and you can't tell on the second page what the category is anymore.

Katy Milkman: Oh no.

Richard Thaler: I figure, all right. I solved this. I'm going to print it. But my printer is of course set the default double-sided printing. And of course, these two pages happened to be on opposite sides, so my printing strategy failed, and I had to then print the second page again so I could now compare them.

Katy Milkman: Foiled by more choice architecture. Do you have a favorite study that illustrates the power of choice architecture?

Richard Thaler: Certainly the most successful and widely used example of choice architecture is the adoption of what's called automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans. They're so ubiquitous now it's hard to remember that they are new. 1986. And in the old days, people had to fill out a form in order to join, and as many as half of employees would fail to join even when their employer was matching their contributions dollar for dollar, which is like throwing away money. And the obvious, in hindsight, and even in foresight, strategy was to change the default and say, "You're now eligible for the pension plan unless you fill out a form saying you don't want it. Then we're going to enroll you into a default saving rate and a default investment plan."

Now, having said that, let me highlight an important point that we stress in the new and final edition of Nudge, which is that having people get into an option by default does not always lead to the same outcome as if they pick it themselves. So for example, in that pension example, in the first paper to study it, written by Brigitte Madrian, the people who were defaulted into a plan, they were defaulted into a 3% saving rate and 100% invested in a money market account. The previous year, which was used as the comparison, the people who did join on their own, most of them chose a 6% saving rate. So enrollments went up to 90%, but saving rates, many of them fell. So we have to be careful about what we think we get when we choose something as the default.

Katy Milkman: I love that lesson. Could you talk a little bit about what nudging is and how it relates to choice architecture?

Richard Thaler: So if we have choice architecture, and it's good choice architecture, then we define it as helping people get to their preferred outcome. So again, the GPS example is great nudging; suggests a route that you can reject, but you pick the route. And you're going to get lost less often if you follow it. The most famous example of a nudge, probably, is that they etched the image of house flies in the urinals in the Amsterdam airport and reported … no one has been able to replicate this, but they reported that spillage was reduced by 80%. So the lesson here is if you give a man a target, he will aim. A nudge is anything that attracts our attention and changes our behavior without changing monetary incentives or restricting choices.

Katy Milkman: And do you have favorite examples of nudges besides the …

Richard Thaler: Besides the urinal, what else?

Katy Milkman: Besides the urinal that have been big?

Richard Thaler: What else would …

Katy Milkman: I mean, well, the Behavioral Insights Team in the U.K. government and some of the work they've done.

Richard Thaler: So David Cameron, when he was elected prime minister, created the first behavioral insight team, almost immediately dubbed the "Nudge Unit," and one of the things they were asked to do, and I was part of this, is they were asked to help somebody whose job it was to collect from people who owed money on their taxes. And we said, "OK, what do you do now?" "Well, we send them a letter." "And what if they don't pay?" "Well, we send them a meaner letter." And so we said, "OK, can we see the letter?" So most of the letter is pretty straightforward: This is how much you owe. Here's where to send it. But we thought, "Well, it might be possible to write a more effective letter," and so they ran experiments. And the big overriding lesson of all the behavioral insight teams is you learn by testing because you don't always know the answer.

So we had some ideas but the winning message was something like, "90% of the people in Manchester pay their taxes on time. You are in the minority of those who don't. And the money goes for things like X, Y, and Z." So this general format, it's based on an idea by Bob Cialdini, our beloved friend and author of the book Influence. The basic idea is if you tell people "Most people are doing something," most of the time, people want to do what other people do. If you're the only one littering, you feel bad about it. If you're the only one who's not cleaning up after your dog, then you want to switch. And so that brought in millions of pounds earlier than it would have, and it's free. Writing a good letter doesn't cost any more than a bad letter.

Katy Milkman: I'm going to return to my interview with Richard Thaler in a moment, but the nudge that he's talking about here relates to our past episode on social norms called "Everybody's Doing It." In that episode, Todd Rogers spoke about how hotels were leveraging the power of social norms to save energy and water.

Todd Rogers: One really interesting social norms application is in towel reuse, where Noah Goldstein at UCLA and collaborators did a set of studies in hotels where they told people that most people in this hotel or in their hotel room reuse their towels. And so you may know that when you go in a hotel, if you use the towel and you throw it on the ground, you come back, and magically, the housekeeping staff have come in and given you fresh towels. And it turns out that uses a lot of energy and water, wastes a lot of water. And so hotels have an incentive both financially and environmentally to reduce the wasting of these towels and to increase reuse of them. And giving the social norm information "87% of people in this hotel reuse their towels" gets people to be more likely to reuse their towels than just saying, "Please reuse your towels." It's a nice one because it also has been pretty widely adopted.

Katy Milkman: In that study, the authors measured an eight-percentage-point increase in towel reuse, all from a simple card in the room that read, essentially, "Please reuse your towels because most other people do." Now, an eight-percentage-point increase in the number of people reusing their towels may not seem like a lot, and it won't solve the world's problems. That said, relative to the negligible cost of the nudge and considering how much water and energy and detergent could be saved by thousands of hotels around the world, this simple tweak had an impressive impact. You can begin to see how the behavioral science insights in Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler's book have generated so much excitement. OK, back to the interview.

Why do you think it is that the book Nudge has changed the world? Which I'm expecting you to accept that premise. I'm very confident that it has certainly changed my world. And why you think it's had such a big impact.

Richard Thaler: I think we gave people something to think about and some tools they can use. We were talking about menus as an example of choice architecture. I went into a restaurant, a new restaurant in my neighborhood in Chicago, and got into a discussion with one of the co-owners. And the menu was lousy choice architecture. And so you can open a restaurant and not realize that part of your job is helping diners choose a meal that they're going to enjoy—not too much, not too little, the right number of plates, especially in these small plate kind of places. It's like the old joke of somebody who learned that they were speaking prose and hadn't realized it. So we're all doing choice architecture, but if you become conscious of it, then all of a sudden everything turns into choice architecture.

Katy Milkman: I like that. So it's like, once you read the book, it takes over the way you think and you can't help it, and that's part of the reason that you see the world differently.

Richard Thaler: That's our goal, is to get people, get inside their head.

Katy Milkman: Richard, this has been so much fun. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk today. Thank you for squeezing us in.

Richard Thaler: Always fun, Katy, and I wouldn't have done it if I didn't think it was going to be fun.

Katy Milkman: Richard Thaler is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He's the author of several books including Nudge: The Final Edition and Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. You can find links in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.

As Richard mentioned, choice architecture is everywhere. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but it's amazing to see how good choice architecture can make a real difference in people's lives. In a past episode of Choiceology called "A Successful Failure," Harvard professor Cass Sunstein, the co-author of Nudge, joined me to talk about how simplification was one of the most effective forms of choice architecture.

Cass Sunstein: Let's take an old-fashioned idea about people, which is that they run costs and benefits, and they think, "Is it worth it? Should I do the thing?" And if the thing is complicated, the rational judgment might be, "No, I'm not going to do that thing because it's too hard or because it'll make me sad." And that might mean that they won't sign up for something that might be economic benefits or a health program. It would really be great, but they're rationally deciding it's just too much bother. So we know that to get financial aid, if you're a high school senior, you have to fill out a form. And for a long time, the form was crazy complicated. At the time that it was crazy complicated, including requiring high school, all juniors and seniors, to find out their parents' tax information; at that time, a lot of people just didn't get financial aid to which they were entitled, not because of present bias or unrealistic optimism, just because the form was not feasible to navigate.

And the study showed that if you simplify the form, you can have the same effects as, in terms of increase in college enrollment, as you can have by increasing the subsidy by thousands of dollars. So pause over that. Two ways to increase people's ability to go to college if they're poor: One is simplify the form. The other is give them, each one, several thousand dollars more money. Now, the form simplification is a lot more cost effective.

Katy Milkman: Public policy is an area that has been influenced greatly by the work of academics like Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. In fact, my next guest made a life-changing decision after reading the book Nudge. Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist who served as a senior advisor in the federal government where she founded the White House's Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, also known as a "Nudge Unit." She also served as the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations and leads Google's behavioral economics group. Oh, and she's the creator, host, and executive producer of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans, which Apple named 2021's podcast of the year.

Hi, Maya, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

Maya Shankar: Oh, it's always so much fun to talk to you, Katy. Thanks for having me.

Katy Milkman: Could you tell me the story of how you ended up building a nudge unit in the White House?

Maya Shankar: Yes. So long story short, I was a postdoc studying decision-making and human biases, and I was reading the book Nudge. And I realized, "Wow, I'm spending so much of my day in this highly theoretical space," running fMRI studies on people and trying to publish papers. And my brain just lit up when I started to understand, wow, there's so many powerful applications of the research that I'm reading about, the research that I'm conducting. It also coincided with the time in my life when I realized that maybe I didn't have the right temperament for academia. You have the right temperament for academia, Katy. I don't. And so, I was trying to figure out what the next steps look like. And then I was talking to a mutual friend of ours, Laurie Santos, and she was sharing with me how the federal government was using insights from behavioral economics to help more low-income kids get access to free or reduced-price lunches at school. So they were basically just using the power of the default, so they changed the program from an opt-in program to an opt-out program. Cass Sunstein, a co-author of the book Nudge, was leading the way for this effort. And basically as a result of that policy change, 12 and a half million more kids were now getting access to lunch every day at school.

It was such an elegant and also emotionally stirring example of how removing what we might perceive as a small friction could have these totally outsized, wonderful impacts on society to make the educational experience more equitable. And so, I think it was the combination of these two factors: reading Nudge and then also feeling like I wanted to work as more of a practitioner in the space of behavioral science that led me to send a cold email to Cass Sunstein and ask him if there might be an opportunity for me to work in the federal government. And fortunately for me, he's willing to write back to total strangers. And so he wrote back to me, connected me with officials in the Science and Technology Policy Office, and within a few days I was interviewing and pitching them on the idea of bringing in a behavioral scientist, namely me.

Katy Milkman: I think the work you did and your time at the White House is so exciting and important. And I was hoping you could tell our listeners about one or two of your favorite projects that you conducted during that time that produced measurable benefits for U.S. citizens.

Maya Shankar: Yeah. It was such a fascinating experience. Two of my favorite studies, one was with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Basically, the challenge we were facing was that we were offering these educational and employment benefits to veterans to help facilitate their transition from military life to civilian life. And that can be a very fraught transition, right? Loaded with lots of psychological stress, and also just trying to figure out, "What comes next for me? What job do I want? Do I want to pursue higher education?" And so the government does a great job of making sure that we give folks a stepping stone. The problem, and this is obviously a very classic problem, which is what the nudge space is designed to help solve, is that there was an intention-action gap. So lots of veterans wanted to apply but maybe hadn't taken the step, or veterans weren't aware of the value of the program.

And so we had to up our marketing efforts, but we had a very small budget. And so the VA told us, "OK, Maya and team, can you please try to figure out some innovative ways, given our fixed budget, of using behavioral science to boost participation rates in the program?" We ended up changing just one word in the email that went out to veterans. Instead of telling vets that they were eligible for the program, we simply reminded them that they had earned it through their years of service. And that one-word change led to a 9% increase in access to the program. And it's based off of a behavioral science principle called the endowment effect, which says that we value things more when we own them or, in this case, have earned them. What we found is that once veterans embody this mindset of "This is my benefit to lose," they were much more interested in taking the relevant steps to access the program.

And so that was a wonderful proof-of-concept case study of sorts, where we were able to show that the government was not only able to adopt fresh insights from behavioral science, but also to empirically validate those insights and make sure that it was in fact having the intended effect on vets.

Katy Milkman: So Maya, where do things stand now? Where were they when you got involved in building a nudge unit, and what's going on now with nudges and governments around the world?

Maya Shankar: Well, it's so energizing and so exciting to see how many of these nudge units are sprouting up in city, state, local governments all over the world. At the time, when I first joined the White House, there was no precedent for this kind of team within the government, and I was brought in with no mandate and no budget to build a team. So I really had to try and inspire my government agency colleagues and the leadership in the White House to buy into this concept. And one thing that was so helpful to me was to be able to point to the U.K.'s Behavioral Insights Team. I got to meet with the whole team there, understand which parts we could maybe bring across the pond and have the U.S. government adopt, and which things I might have to adapt. I continue to be so grateful that there was this really successful proof point that I could point to along the way to say, "Hey, U.S. government, the U.K. really did this so well" and managed to create a team that was really focused on good government, right? It is really bipartisan at its core. It's just about making sure that the programs and policies that we bring into existence are actually serving the people that they're intended to serve.

Katy Milkman: And I just want to say thank you for all the work you did because it is so exciting, as a researcher, to see how in the last 10 years we've gone from a world where there were one or two nudge units to one where now there are hundreds and hundreds, and this is no longer a crazy idea but something that's happening in cities, states, as you said, and countries around the world. And I think we're at 400 and counting the last I heard.

Maya Shankar: I mean, I think the wonderful thing about nudges is that they just make so much damn sense. Right? They're low-cost. They can be easy to implement.

Katy Milkman: I could not agree more. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today, Maya. This was great.

Maya Shankar: Thanks so much for having me, Katy.

Katy Milkman: Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist who served as a senior advisor in the federal government where she founded the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. She's the creator, host, and executive producer of the award-winning podcast A Slight Change of Plans, which I highly recommend. I have links in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.  

Choice architecture is useful in all kinds of financial contexts, including when it comes to nudging yourself, which is a common theme of the Financial Decoder podcast. Whether it's creating prompts to review and rebalance your portfolio periodically or utilizing stop orders with stock trades to help protect your downside, host Mark Riepe's show is full of tips to help you make smarter financial decisions. Check it out at schwab.com/financialdecoder or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I hope this episode has shown you how good choice architecture and nudges can be effective and even fun in helping people make better choices without being overly strict or paternalistic. Nudges have been used successfully to boost enrollment in programs designed to reduce poverty, to increase college attendance, and to increase the adoption of lifesaving medicines and vaccines. I'll admit that I'm a bit nudge-crazy. Most of my own research looks at using nudges to improve people's lives, and we've found that many small changes can make a big difference, like asking someone to plan when and where they'll get a flu vaccine.

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein emphasize the cost effectiveness of nudges, and I just want to double-click there because it's really mind-boggling. You have to spend roughly 50 times as much on tax incentives to promote savings if you want to generate the same benefits as simply asking people to consider, "Do you want to save?" And then requiring an active choice between yes and no. It's no wonder that nudge units are springing up all over the globe, not only in governments but also in companies. And consultancies have blossomed that specialize in designing nudges to help combat whatever obstacles might be preventing your customers, employees, or constituents from making good decisions.

I've learned a few important lessons about nudging, though. First, nudging is no silver bullet. To solve major problems like climate change, to end wars, to address famine, we can't rely on a simple nudge. We often need incentives, bans, and mandates to get things done. But nudges can be icing on the cake to get us a bit further than we'd get otherwise with a fixed budget. And in some cases, nudges can even make a big dent, particularly when we can change defaults. Second, nudges can be used for evil. Richard Thaler calls such nudges "sludge." Look out for a future episode of Choiceology where we'll take a deeper dive into that topic. Third, nudges aren't just for governments and corporations. You can use them at home to help your kids get to bed on time and improve their grades—and even to improve your romantic relationship. And you can use them on yourself to boost your productivity, health, happiness, and financial wellness. Set timely reminders for yourself. Make it fun to achieve your goals. Be sure to stock the pantry only with the kinds of snacks you'd like to eat by default. You may be amazed by the results.

Finally, nudges work best when they're tailored to tackle whatever obstacle stands in your way. If someone really wants to take their medication and keeps forgetting, a daily reminder is likely to work wonders, whereas telling them that all their neighbors take their medications regularly probably won't do much good. But if the reason your dad won't turn down his thermostat in the winter is that it seems weird to worry so much about climate change, then telling him he's guzzling more energy than all his neighbors might be exactly what it takes to nudge him towards a greener way of life. The best choice architects stop to take stock of what stands in the way of a positive decision before designing a nudge that's tailor-made to help.

You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book How to Change, which is all about self-nudging, in fact, or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, at katymilkman.com/newsletter.

Next time, you'll hear about a difficult decision around wildlife conservation that was made easier by thinking about proportions of owl populations rather than absolute numbers. I'm Dr. Katy Milkman. Talk to you soon.

Speaker 10: For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/podcast.