The Cafeteria

Imagine that a friend of yours, Carolyn, is the director of food services for a large city school system. She is in charge of hundreds of schools, and hundreds of thousands of kids eat in her cafeterias every day. Carolyn has formal training in nutrition (a master’s degree from the state university), and she is a creative type who likes to think about things in nontraditional ways.

One evening, over a good bottle of wine, she and her friend Adam, a statistically oriented management consultant who has worked with supermarket chains, hatched an interesting idea. Without changing any menus, they would run some experiments in her schools to determine whether the way the food is displayed and arranged might influence the choices kids make. Carolyn gave the directors of dozens of school cafeterias specific instructions on how to display the food choices. In some schools the desserts were placed first, in others last, and in still others in a separate line. The locations of various food items varied from one school to another. In some schools the french fries were at eye level, but in other schools it was the carrot sticks that were made more salient.

From his experience in designing supermarket floor plans, Adam suspected that the results would be significant. He was right. Simply by rearranging the cafeteria, Carolyn was able to noticeably increase or decrease the consumption of many food items. From this experience she learned a big lesson: small changes in context can greatly influence schoolchildren, just as they can greatly influence adults. The influence can be exercised for better or for worse. For example, Carolyn knows that she can increase consumption of healthy foods and decrease consumption of unhealthy ones.

With hundreds of schools to work with, and a team of graduate-student volunteers recruited to collect and analyze the data, Carolyn now understands that she has considerable power to influence what kids eat. She is pondering what to do with her newfound power. Here are some suggestions she has received from her usually sincere but occasionally mischievous friends and coworkers:

1. Arrange the food to make the students best off, all things considered.
2. Choose the food order at random.
3. Try to arrange the food to get the kids to pick the same foods they would choose on their own.
4. Maximize the sales of the items from the suppliers who are willing to offer the largest bribes.
5. Maximize profits, period.

Option 1 has obvious appeal, yet it does seem a bit intrusive, even paternalistic. But the alternatives are worse! Option 2, arranging the food at random, could be considered fair-minded and principled, and it is in one sense neutral. But a random order makes no sense in a cafeteria. On efficiency grounds, the salad dressing should be placed next to the salad, not with the desserts. Also, if the orders are randomized across schools, then the children at some schools will have less healthy diets than those at other schools. Is this desirable? Should Carolyn choose that kind of neutrality, if she can easily make most students better off, in part by improving their health?

Option 3 might seem to be an honorable attempt to avoid intrusion: try to mimic what the children would choose for themselves. Maybe that is really the neutral choice, and maybe Carolyn should neutrally follow people’s wishes (at least where she is dealing with older students). But a little thought reveals that this is a difficult option to implement. Carolyn’s experiment with Adam proves that what kids choose depends on the order in which the items are displayed. What, then, are the “true preferences” of the children? What does it mean to say that Carolyn should try to figure out what the students would choose “on their own”? In a cafeteria, it is impossible to avoid some way of organizing food. And many of the same considerations would apply if she were serving adults rather than children.

Option 4 might appeal to a corrupt person in Carolyn’s job, and manipulating the order of the food items would put yet another weapon in the arsenal of available methods to exploit power. But Carolyn is honorable and honest, so she does not give this option any thought. (Not everyone would be this principled, alas.) Like Options 2 and 3, Option 5 has some appeal, especially if Carolyn thinks the best cafeteria is the one that makes the most money. But should she really try to maximize profits if the result is to make children less healthy, especially when she works for the school district?

Carolyn is what we call a choice architect. A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions. Although Carolyn is a figment of our imagination, many real people turn out to be choice architects, most without realizing it. Some of them even run cafeterias. If you are a doctor and describe the alternative treatments available to a patient, you are a choice architect. If you create the forms or the website that new employees use to choose among various employee benefits, you are a choice architect. If you design the ballot voters use to choose candidates, you are a choice architect. If you organize a drugstore or a grocery, you are a choice architect (and you confront many of the questions that Carolyn did). If you are a parent describing possible educational options to your son or daughter, you are a choice architect. If you are a salesperson, you are a choice architect (but you already knew that).

There are many parallels between choice architecture and more traditional forms of architecture. A crucial parallel is that there is no such thing as a “neutral” design. Consider the job of designing a new office building. The architect is given some requirements. There must be room for a lobby, 120 offices, thirteen conference rooms of various sizes, a room large enough to have everyone meet together, and so forth. The building must sit on a specified site. Hundreds of other constraints will be imposed—some legal, some aesthetic, some practical. In the end, the architect must come up with an actual building with doors, stairs, windows, and hallways. As good architects know, seemingly arbitrary decisions, such as where to locate the bathrooms, will have subtle influences on how the people who use the building interact. Every trip to the bathroom creates an opportunity to run into colleagues (for better or for worse). A good building is not merely attractive; it also “works.”

The way something works lies at the heart of good design. As Steve Jobs put it, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” This is true for physical architecture and for choice architecture alike. A vivid illustration comes from an early teaching experience of one of the authors. The classroom had a large double door at the front, in full view of the students, equipped with handsome, vertically mounted cylindrical wooden handles about three feet long. To leave the room, you needed to push the door. But when students approached, they faced two competing instincts: one says to push to exit, the other says that when you see big handles meant to be grabbed, you pull. The handle signal usually won. Almost every student began by pulling—even after the professor pointed out the mistake in class, and even the professor himself would occasionally find himself pulling those same handles.

These doors are bad architecture because they violate a psychological principle called stimulus response compatibility. The idea is that the signal you receive (the stimulus) should be consistent with the desired action. When there is inconsistency, performance suffers and people blunder. Imagine the chaos of a red octagonal street sign that read “go.” The famous Stroop test demonstrates the same conflict. In a modern version, people see words flashed on a screen and press a button for red words and another for green words. The task is easy until the word green appears in red ink, or red in green. Then the Automatic System reads the word’s meaning faster than the Reflective System can process its color, causing slowdowns and errors. Within the human mind, the Automatic System is city hall, and incompatible signals lead it astray.

Fortunately, design can harness basic human psychology instead of fighting it. The same principle applies to choice architecture, and our primary mantra is a simple one: if you want to encourage some action or activity, Make It Easy. This insight falls into what psychologist Kurt Lewin called “channel factors”—small influences that can either facilitate or inhibit behaviors. Think of a channel like the path a river takes after snowmelt; tiny changes in the landscape can determine its entire course. For people, equally tiny factors can create surprisingly strong obstacles to behaviors they genuinely intend to pursue. Often, removing a small barrier does far more to promote good behavior than trying to shove people in a particular direction.

A powerful illustration came from a study at Yale University, where Howard Leventhal, Robert Singer, and Susan Jones gave seniors persuasive education about the risks of tetanus and the importance of getting an inoculation. Most students were convinced and said they planned to get the shot, but only 3 percent actually did. Another group received the same lecture, plus a copy of a campus map with the health center circled, and were asked to look at their weekly schedules, make a plan for when to go, and decide on a route. With these tiny nudges, 28 percent showed up and got the shot—more than nine times as many. The students were seniors who already knew where the health center was; they weren’t given an actual appointment. Still, the small channel factor of a map and a planning prompt made the behavior dramatically easier to translate into action. (A similar principle has been used in get-out-the-vote efforts.)

Everyday objects are full of opportunities to apply—or ignore—this principle. Consider the basic four-burner stove sitting in many kitchens. Often the burners are arranged symmetrically, while the control knobs sit in a neat linear row below. The result is a frequent mismatch: it’s easy to confuse which knob controls the front burner and which the back one, and many pots have been burned as a result. Better designs simply stagger the burners or arrange the knobs in a layout that maps directly to the burners, making the correct choice automatic. Some design improvements require little extra expense. A flat push plate can be cheaper than an ornate pull handle, and clearer stove controls may need only a different arrangement.

Across all these examples, small and apparently insignificant details can have major impacts on behavior. A wonderful case comes from the men’s toilets at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. At one point, the authorities etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. Men often do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a mess, but when they see a target, attention and accuracy increase dramatically. The intuitiveness of aiming at a fly reportedly reduced “spillage” by 80 percent. Since this example first gained attention, similar fly etchings have appeared in airports around the world. The lesson is that focusing people’s attention in a particular direction, even with a trivial cue, can shape behavior. (The availability heuristic might explain why the story spreads so readily.)

The insight that everything matters can be both paralyzing and empowering. Good architects realize that although they can’t build the perfect building, they can make some design choices that will have beneficial effects. The location of the coffee machines, for example, may influence workplace interaction. Policymakers can often do the equivalent of painting a fly—for example, by telling people clearly and conspicuously, on their credit card bills, that they might be subject to late fees and overuse fees. If you paint lines on the sidewalk where people wait to enter a supermarket during a pandemic, you can promote social distancing. And just as a building architect must eventually produce the plans for a building, a choice architect like Carolyn must choose a particular arrangement of the food options at lunch, and by so doing she can influence what people eat. She can nudge.