Damani started a behavioural design firm, Briefcase, back in 2013, along with his partner Mayur Tekchandaney. Their first project, Bleep, aimed to reduce Mumbai’s rampant car horn honking problem.
The method was simple: over six months, Anand and his partner offered their own cars to participants to drive for a week. The vehicles were fitted with a buzzer that would light up and go off each time the driver pressed the horn and had to be manually switched off. It also recorded honking data that was used for analysis. The result: drivers reduced their honking by an average of 61%, because the buzzer was such a nuisance.
Damani describes Bleep as a simple, practical and low-cost solution to a big urban problem: noise pollution. “If the government wants to reduce noise levels in cities, it should make Bleep mandatory in all vehicles. We even installed it in the official vehicles of the Joint Transport Commissioner of Maharashtra, but it hasn’t moved further from there,” he says.
Beyond India other countries have been quicker to embrace behavioural design at government level. The UK, for instance, has a well-established, successful ‘nudge unit’, a public-private partnership called the Behavioural Insights Team. Its projects include helping persuade people to pay tax on time, increasing organ donor numbers and convincing students from low-income backgrounds to aim for top universities.
The idea that human beings are irrational goes against classical economics, which assumes that all decision-making is based on logic. It is the premise for behavioural economics, which also incorporates psychology and cognitive neuroscience into the discipline. In 2017, American economist and creator of the “nudge theory” Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his pioneering work in this new field. But is behavioural science as promising and innocuous as it seems? Could human irrationality also be exploited, not just manipulated?
Last year, Uber, the global taxi-hire service, found itself on the wrong side of nudging. As the New York Times reported, Uber used “videogame techniques, graphics and non-cash rewards to prod drivers into working longer and harder”, arguably to the company’s gain. For instance, Uber preloaded the next journey before the current one had ended, enticing drivers to continue working without a break. Some local Uber managers adopted female personas online so that the largely male driver workforce might be more inclined to their suggestions. Finally, when drivers logged out for the day, the app would encourage them to keep working, citing arbitrary targets such as beating the previous day’s earnings, the paper reported.