Nudges for a healthy lifestyle – Part II

In the article “Nudges for a healthy lifestyle – Part I”, we talked about the nudges created by governments around the world related to improving people´s lifestyles.

If you wonder why governments care about lifestyles of their citizens, the reason is mainly money. Unhealthy diet, frequent consumption of addictive substances (mainly alcohol or tobacco), and lack of physical movement are all widespread and may lead to “non-communicable diseases”, such as diabetes or cardiovascular diseases. The governments have two possibilities – either encourage the change in lifestyles and decrease the occurrence of such diseases or pay for the cure. Obviously, prevention is a cheaper choice and in case of lifestyle issues, also feasible.

Moreover, if governments understand human behaviour, their attempts to change it will probably be more successful. That is why Behavioural Economics can be helpful in this domain.

Part I of this article was dedicated to the nudges related to food consumption. Part II will discuss nudges concerning tobacco and alcohol consumption and physical movement.

 

As for physical movement, there has been a very simple nudge trial conducted in the City of Melbourne in Australia. To encourage people to take the stairs instead of elevators in a train station building, the City of Melbourne had the stairs painted in a colourful and catchy way (see Picture 1). It may not seem like  a very strong nudge; why would anyone struggle on the painted stairs if they can see them also from the elevators? But it seems that the citizens of Melbourne did not think like this – according to a report by the Behavioural Insights Team (that collaborated on this trial), the usage of the stairs increased by 25% during off-peak times and by 140% in  peak times!

Picture 1

Source: Zest Events

 

Moving to tobacco consumption, the nudges used around the world are quite uniform. There are two major manipulations that have been implemented.

1) The first one is plain packaging, whereby the tobacco producers cannot use the package as a marketing space and have to comply with rules for uniform font, size and colour of the text, as well as uniform package colour. The space previously used by companies is now dedicated to health warnings, both in words and in pictures (see Picture 2). The rationale behind such a policy is that it decreases the appeal of tobacco products and at the same time, gives more importance to the health warnings, which should deter people from smoking. It seems like a good idea at first glance, but when one thinks about it more, the following doubts arise. Firstly, there is a large amount of brand loyalty among smokers, so it is not probable that they will stop smoking only because of a change in design. Secondly, there is the optimism bias that goes against the effectiveness of health warnings. People usually overestimate the probability of positive things happening to them and underestimate the probability of the negative ones. Hence, when they see a health warning, they may simply think “it happens, but to the others, not me”.

Picture 2

Source: WHO

2) The second widespread anti-smoking nudge-based policy is the tobacco display ban. In the countries where it has been introduced, tobacco products have to be displayed so as not to be visible to the customers in the shops (with the exception of specialised tobacco shops, of course). Again, such policy goes against marketing possibilities of tobacco producers and the hope is that it will decrease the amount of impulse purchases, which are frequent mostly among the young.

There are several papers trying to evaluate the impact of these two anti-smoking policies, but there is no clear conclusion to be drawn. It seems that smoking is a very complex issue and is cannot be easily solved by using only nudges. Another issue is that in many countries, these policies have been implemented only recently, so it is too early to know their impact. Anyway, even if the nudges are not the solution in this case, maybe they could still complement some other policies to make a real change.

The last lifestyle issue is alcohol consumption and there is a very nice example of the use of nudges in this domain. At the Northern Illinois University, a simple marketing campaign based on social norms (i.e. informing the students about how many drinks other students have when they party) was enough to decrease students´ binge drinking.

(If you want to know more about this particular policy, see the article “A Social Norms Approach to Preventing Binge Drinking at Colleges and Universities”.)

To conclude both articles about the nudges related to healthy lifestyles, I would like to say one thing. Clearly, nudges do not automatically solve all problems. But as long as they are low-cost and do not harm anyone (such as removing the salt shakers from restaurant tables or painting the stairs in a train station), I think they are worth trying, because even a small positive difference is a step forward towards a healthier life.