Balazs Fonagy
Chief Strategist
Human decision-making is flawed; we frequently make choices that are against our best interests. In this article, we will discuss how to design choices that subconsciously nudge people to make the right decisions for their health.
Heuristics and biases: mental shortcuts that simplify a messy reality but can lead us astray.
Our Automatic System takes mental shortcuts to solve problems because the number of mundane daily decisions we have to make under some level of uncertainty is extremely high. Most of the time these shortcuts lead to acceptable results but they also produce systematic errors of judgment, and irrational decisions. We call these systematic errors cognitive biases. In order to successfully implement nudges, we need to know about possible “thinking traps” and turn them to our advantage.