Make It Easy

Perhaps the most basic principle of good choice architecture is our mantra: Make It Easy. If you want to encourage some behavior, figure out why people aren’t doing it already, and eliminate the barriers that are standing in their way. If you want people to obtain a driver’s license or get vaccinated, make it simple for them, above all by increasing convenience.

Of course, this principle has an obvious corollary: if you want to discourage some behavior, make it harder by creating barriers. If you want to make it harder for people to vote, forbid voting by mail and early voting, and reduce the number of polling stations (and place them far away from public transportation stops). While you’re at it, try to make people spend hours in line before they can vote. If you don’t want people to immigrate to your country, make them fill out a lot of forms and wait for months for good news in the mail (not by email), and punish them for answering even a single question incorrectly. If you want to discourage poor people from getting economic benefits, require them to navigate a baffling website and to answer a large number of questions (including some that few people can easily understand).

All around the world, governments are keenly interested in reducing cigarette smoking, but they have not banned cigarettes. Instead, they have taken steps to make smoking increasingly difficult. In our youth, every bar and restaurant had a cigarette vending machine to accommodate smokers who ran out during the meal. First, those machines were removed, then smokers were segregated into smoking sections, then smoking in restaurants was banned altogether. Naturally, tobacco companies opposed these regulations. Back when television commercials for cigarettes were permitted, the creators used every tool in the nudge arsenal to make smoking more attractive, especially to young people, who could be induced to become lifetime addicts. Models in cigarette ads were attractive and sexy. Somehow, they never appeared to be foul-smelling or ill.

Our point is that nudges, and behavioral science more generally, can be and have been used for good and for evil. People can be defaulted into programs that do not help them. Sludge is one way choice architecture can obstruct people’s goals. The term that has come to be used to capture some of that dark side is sludge. We believe that the term was originally used by Cait Lamberton and Benjamin Castleman in a 2016 article in the Huffington Post. Independently, and using that prestigious academic outlet called Twitter, Thaler later expressed outrage at a particular business practice we will discuss below and called it sludge. The term has taken off and now is often used with the hashtag symbol.

What exactly is sludge? Not surprisingly, it turns out that Twitter is not the ideal medium to produce a carefully defined academic term, especially when it was (obviously) chosen in part because of the rhyme. Academics have vigorously debated the best formulation. Nevertheless, the term has stuck, and we will use it here in part because it is fun, without getting too bogged down on definitions. If you want to dig into this topic, Sunstein has an entire (short) book devoted to the subject. (Take a guess at its title?)

We use the term to mean this: any aspect of choice architecture consisting of friction that makes it harder for people to obtain an outcome that will make them better off (by their own lights). If you cannot get financial aid without filling out a twenty-page form, you have been subjected to sludge. If you cannot obtain a student visa without having four rounds of interviews, you are facing sludge. If you cannot get a COVID-19 test or vaccination without navigating a baffling website, dealing with a lot of online forms and paperwork, and driving a long distance to some hospital where you have to wait for two hours, sludge is in your way.

Some choice architects intentionally impose sludge, inserting friction into a process in order to achieve goals of their own. Making it hard to cancel a membership or a subscription is an example. Making it hard for poor people to vote, qualify for job training, or get contraceptives is another. The term dark patterns refers to an assortment of online practices that are specifically designed to manipulate people (in order to take their money). Some dark patterns count as sludge; they impose a lot of friction if people want to avoid certain charges.

Other types of sludge are an unintended by-product of an administrative process, designed to ensure that people actually qualify for or are entitled to something they want. The software our publishers provided when we were proofreading the galleys of this book was so sludge-ridden that Sunstein gave up and typed up a list of changes. We couldn’t help but wonder whether this bit of sludge was designed to reduce the number of last-minute changes we introduced, such as this one. In the United States the technical term for such provisions is program integrity, and sludge can be a by-product of efforts to ensure it. Suppose that you have to submit an assortment of forms and wait months for approval in order to get a visa or to open a new business. Or suppose that to get emergency health care, you have to fill out a bunch of forms that you cannot understand. Or suppose that to work for the U.S. Department of State, you have to compile a lot of information about your travel over the past twenty years and about your friends in foreign countries.

Some forms of sludge, particularly common in government settings, have come to be called red tape. A more formal term for red tape is administrative burdens, which Sunstein adores but Thaler thinks is itself a form of sludge. But as is known to anyone who has ever worked in a large private organization—from corporations to universities—governments do not have a monopoly on red tape. Many companies, and many nonprofits (including universities), impose a lot of sludge, including on their own employees.

Governments and the Cost of Sludge

One of the most important jobs of government is to write and enforce the rules that citizens are expected to obey. But it is a fact of life that rules have to be both implemented and enforced, and those activities can be costly. In the Netflix expense-policy example, Reed Hastings sought a balance between “do anything you want” and “spend needless hours of your time and others’ asking and getting permission.” This balance is a type of cost-benefit analysis. Sludge should be included on the cost side of the ledger.

Consider an analogy: Suppose a government decides to build a new bridge over a river, but only if the revenues from the tolls would exceed the cost of the bridge (properly discounted, of course). A good analysis of this decision will recognize that collecting the toll is costly. At one time collecting tolls meant building toll booths and paying toll collectors. But there is another aspect of collecting the toll that can easily get lost: How much time will people spend waiting in line to pay the toll? Time spent waiting in line is a good example of sludge, and although the costs of sludge are not borne directly by the government, they do fall upon the citizens, and they are real costs.

When governments make decisions, they often give too little attention to these types of costs. To return to the bridge example, think of how long it took (decades!) for someone to realize that in many contexts there is no reason to collect a toll in both directions. You have to pay a toll to drive your car into New York City but (unlike the Hotel California) you can leave for free anytime. Over time, technology has significantly reduced the costs of collecting tolls, both in terms of labor costs and customer waiting times. The technological improvements allow tolls to be used in situations in which it would previously have been impossible, such as the congestion fees imposed when entering the central business district of London or Singapore. Entry is monitored by cameras.

This toll collection analogy is useful in thinking about many governmental regulations, paperwork requirements, and administrative burdens. The evaluation of any rule must include all the costs and benefits that the rule creates, emphatically including time. Using technology to reduce or eliminate sludge can greatly expand the range of possible policy alternatives.

Governments both create and reduce sludge. The book cites an estimate of eleven billion hours in annual paperwork burdens imposed by the United States government. This number includes burdens imposed on hospitals, doctors, and nurses, who have to spend a lot of time satisfying government requirements; on poor people seeking to get benefits to which they are legally entitled; on truckers, who have to fill out a lot of forms; on students, colleges, and universities; on people who are seeking visas to study or work in the United States. The cost of those eleven billion hours is not merely time. In many cases, sludge operates as a wall, and people cannot find a way to get over it. As a result, they are blocked from getting permits, licenses, money, health care, or some other kind of right or assistance. A sludge-reduction effort would pay big dividends.

To evaluate a burdensome step, ask what purpose it serves, how much time it takes, and whom it prevents from completing the process. Compare that burden with the benefit the step is meant to provide.