By Beatrice Del Frate and Francesco Amighetti
Christmas holidays represent a good moment to spend time with family and friends and to escape from routine. After majestic meals and never-ending celebrations, the onset of the new year is always accompanied by a list of desires, very likely the ones we had the previous year. Probably one of the most common wishes is to finally obtain that so much desired beach-body.
Obviously, immediate solutions might be to have a gym membership or to go to the swimming pool. Nevertheless, if you are starting from a period of prolonged inactivity, it may be better for you to begin with smaller steps…literally! A common suggestion for maintaining resolutions is to decompose bigger goals into smaller sets of sub-goals that are easier to achieve. To maintain the goal of becoming more active in the next year (and hopefully lose weight in the process), it may be helpful to keep in mind that there are also smaller and simpler gestures that can have a huge physical impact in the long run: this is the case of taking stairs whenever there is the chance.
Luckily for us, nudges can help do this without much thinking. Stairs nudging is one of the most famous nudge cases: it is simple to implement and monitor and it has a high degree of effectiveness. Principally, stairs are made more attractive through bright colours and visual signals, and/or through motivational quotes and messages (like the calories burned for each step). Here are some creative and smart examples.
Catching the underground?
Redesigning of stairs in metro station is one of the most common and fun ways to implement this kind of nudge, usually done by city associations or temporary sponsors.
For example, in Lyon, in 2016, Pep’s association monitored a 350% increase in the number of stairs users simply by making metro station stairs more captivating. They used a colourful floral design and a simple but clear message: “Your good health is at the end of this staircase”. Furthermore, what they experienced is that people reported a higher intention to take the stairs again if confronted with the same choice in the future.
During the same year in Hamburg the stairs of the metro station have been painted like an athletics red track, in order to publicize the Hamburg 2024 Marathon and consequently to incentivize the use of the stairs by travellers. Unfortunately, in this case no data have been collected, but given results from previous studies, it is likely to have been effective.
Or catching a flight?
A very recent study conducted by Dr. J. Bellettiere and colleagues, published in December 2017, tested the effectiveness of stair nudges in a different context: San Diego International Airport.
For 22 days, the team introduced five signs with different messages at the starting point of the stairs and the escalators. The messages were the following: “Please reserve the escalator for those who need it.”, “Don’t lose time, lose weight. Use the Stairs.”, “Don’t waste Time, trim your Waistline. Use the Stairs.”, “You’ll get more stares if you use the stairs.”, and “If you want to feel younger, act younger. Step it up! Use the stairs.”. The messages were alternated for ten days, and between each a “no sign day” was added as control. Moreover, the subjects were stopped and asked to fill in a survey about their physical habits.
The results showed that the signs doubled the number of people that decided to take the stairs (despite carrying luggage!). These included not only regular exercisers but also non-regular exercisers and – most importantly – non-exercisers.
These results taken together emphasize the efficacy of motivational signs in nudging people by reminding them their core values and goals.
Sources:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nudge-stairs-experiment-urban-design-lyon-subway-nicolas-fieulaine/
http://www.filedier.nl/ov/via-de-atletiekbaan-naar-de-metro/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10935-017-0491-6
B.BIAS 