Читать книгу Sustainable Management for Managers and Engineers - Группа авторов - Страница 12

People are becoming more concerned about the impact of their choices and are increasingly motivated to engage in sustainable behavior. Being environmentally sensitive in consumption, making healthy choices, and changing troublesome habits are critical to individual and societal well-being.

Choice architecture refers to the context or environment in which people make choices. Behavioral science has come to realize that the way in which options are presented can have a significant impact on the option that is chosen, and that small changes in the decision environment may influence the decision-making process.

People make countless choices in daily life, including decisions on how to use money, time, effort and attention. As individuals face a wide range of possible choices, have limited cognitive resources, and need quick decisions, they use heuristics to facilitate routine choices. Heuristics are shortcuts or rules of thumb that simplify and facilitate decisions. They are not bad per se but do not always produce the best outcomes. Frequently, they produce systematic biases in thinking and judgment that generate expected mistakes and postponement of complex decisions. For instance, in terms of formal logic, having more options should always be better than having fewer options. Nevertheless, due to limitations of time, attention and self-control, individuals often feel overloaded when given too many options. They may perceive having more options as worse than having fewer options, when, rationally, adding more options should always be better. Indeed, people do not have time, motivation, or attention to carefully and consciously think about every decision. For instance, research has shown that we make more than 200 daily food-related decisions [WAN 07]. In general, habits and impulses govern our decisions without awareness. Nudging overcomes this problem by recognizing that choice architecture has a huge impact on the decision-making process and that small changes in that process may generate better outcomes. Small changes, such as organizing the way the food is displayed in cafeterias, where healthy food is made more visible, contribute to healthier choices.