Fun

Fun

Choice architecture can make an activity both easy and enjoyable.

The idea is well illustrated by a famous passage in Mark Twain’s novel Tom Sawyer. Tom, a mischievous young boy, has been punished by Aunt Polly for some act of misbehavior. The punishment is that he has to whitewash (paint) Polly’s fence along the front sidewalk. Tom, who would rather be off playing with his friends, dreads not only the tedious task at hand but also the ridicule he will face from buddies who pass by and see his plight. When the first such friend, Ben Rogers, approaches with a delicious apple in hand, Tom turns a neat trick. He paints with such care and relish that Ben is soon convinced that whitewashing the fence is in fact a thrilling privilege. He soon gives Tom his apple for the right to take a turn at painting. By the end of the afternoon, the fence has been painted three times by a series of Tom’s friends, each of whom gives up some bit of treasure for the chance to take a turn. Twain writes, “If he hadn’t run out of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in the village.”

Twain said that “work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” Whenever we can make some activity seem like play, pique our curiosity, or build excitement or anticipation, we will find that people are not only willing to undertake that activity; they even may be willing to pay for the opportunity!

This principle is put to good use by the Volkswagen Group in a series of videos it has produced with the advertising agency DDB Stockholm as part of what it calls its Fun Theory. The idea is that people can be encouraged to be more environmentally and health conscientious if the desired behavior is made to seem fun. In the best-known video, viewed more than twenty-three million times, a crew is shown building a gigantic set of piano keys on a stairway adjacent to an escalator that takes passengers up to the street from a Stockholm subway station. When the project is complete, the stairs have been transformed into a musical instrument, and passengers are soon seen hopping, skipping, and dancing up the stairs in pure joy. The ad claims that 66 percent more people used the stairs after they were made fun. We have no idea whether these data are accurate, and furthermore we very much doubt that building working pianos in stairwells is an economically viable strategy, but we do believe in the principle.

Realizing that the musical stairs were more amusing than practical, the Fun Theory folks sponsored a contest to generate other ideas. The winning entry suggested offering both positive and negative reinforcement to encourage safe driving. Specifically, a camera would measure the speed of passing cars. Speeders would be issued fines, but some of the fine revenues would be distributed via lottery to drivers who were observed obeying the speed limit. A short test of the idea offered promising results.

This example illustrates an important behavioral point: many people love lotteries. Governments have used this insight. Most colorfully, New Taipei City in Taiwan initiated a lottery as an inducement for dog owners to clean up after their pets. Owners who deposited dog waste into a special depository were made eligible for a lottery to win gold ingots, thus literally turning dog waste into gold. The top prize was worth about $2,000. The city reports that it halved the fecal pollution in its streets during the initiative.

In mainland China, lotteries have been used for a different purpose: tax compliance. In the program described here, the government printed special receipts for restaurant customers to make cash transactions more visible to tax authorities. Cleverly, each receipt includes a scratch-off lottery ticket, giving customers an incentive to ask for a receipt, which then makes the transaction reportable to the government.

Lotteries may also serve as effective motivators toward better health. A group of scholars including Kevin G. M. Volpp, a physician and social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, ran an experiment to encourage the employees at a health care management company to undertake a health risk assessment. One group of employees was offered a 25 percent chance to win $100 as an inducement to participate. The lottery was an effective motivator, increasing participation by about 20 percent.

When lotteries are used to motivate people, it is important to get the details right. Participants are likely to find a lottery more enticing if they find out whether they would have won. A Dutch state lottery illustrates this principle through a design based on postal codes. If your postal code is announced as the winner, you know that you would have won had you only bought a ticket. The idea is to play on people’s feelings of regret.

Lotteries are just one way to provide positive reinforcement. Their power comes from the fact that the chance of winning the prize is overvalued. Of course, you can simply pay people who do the right thing, but if the payment is small, it could well backfire. (If the total prize money had been divided evenly among all those dog owners who turned in their baggies, we estimate that the price paid would have been about 25 cents per bag. Would anyone bother for that?)

An alternative to lotteries is a frequent-flyer-type reward program, in which the points can be redeemed for something fun. A free goody can be a better inducement than cash because it offers that rarest of commodities: a guilt-free pleasure. This sort of reward system has been successfully used in England to encourage recycling. In the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, a London suburb, citizens could sign up for a rewards program in which they earned points depending on the weight of the material they recycled. The points were good for discounts at merchants in the area. The reported increase in recycling was 35 percent.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern brought humor to New Zealand’s restrictions on mobility. She solemnly informed the public that the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy would be exempt. The joke offered a lighter moment while she explained serious restrictions.