Nudge: How to Use Social Psychology to Create Social Change

Catalog description

How can we make people eat healthier food, protect the environment, save money for retirement, or behave ethically? How can we reduce negative behaviors such as police violence and discrimination of underrepresented groups? Using an interdisciplinary approach, this course will introduce how to “nudge”—how to change people’s behavior through psychological insights, without forbidding options or changing economic incentives. In particular, we will learn about cognitive and emotional biases in decision-making; then we will focus on “nudging remedies” for these systematic biases in various domains, such as health and wealth; finally, we will actively tackle some problems in an in-class nudging workshop.