Translator: Fabio Pereira Reviewer: Claudia Sander
Good evening folks.
Audience: Good evening.
Fabio Pereira: I'd like to start with a number: 35,000.
What do you think this number means?
This number is the number of decisions that each person makes a day.
It is almost one decision every two seconds.
Can you imagine? One... two... you've just made a decision.
I hope it was to pay attention to my talk.
Speaking of decisions, I'd like to tell you a story
that changed the way I see the world of decisions
and the way I made decisions.
It's an experiment that was made by the magazine The Economist.
Readers had three options for subscription:
a digital subscription for US$ 59,
a print subscription for US$ 125,
or a combo subscription, digital plus print, also for US$ 125.
The result for this experiment was that the majority of the readers
chose the combo for US$ 125.
What I like about these experiments
is that usually there are two groups.
For a second group, they only showed two options:
a digital subscription for US$ 59
and a combo for US$ 125.
It's interesting because in this second group,
the majority chose the digital option.
When I heard about this experiment,
I thought, what about the middle option, for US$ 125 print only,
that nobody chose?
Why does this option affect the choices of the majority of the readers?
This left me really uncomfortable,
because I started thinking, would I make this decision?
Then I started studying about this.
I studied a lot about this and I found out that the middle option has even a name.
It's called "decoy."
It's an option added to an equation
to influence someone to make one decision or another.
I learned a lot about this theory called Behavioral Economics.
It's a theory that studies
cognitive psychology and neuroscience applied to decision making.
There's even a formula;
it's interesting, if you want to use...
Imagine you have two options, A and B,
and you want people to choose option B.
You add a "minus B" option to the equation.
This "minus B" option makes B look better.
Why should I pay US$ 125 for print subscription,
if I can have both for the same price?
This is impressive.
I started questioning the reasons behind all this,
and a talk, from TED, helped me understand it all.
It was a talk that compared
these behaviors with optical illusions.
I guess everyone here knows a bit about optical illusions.
The blue circle on the left
seems a bit bigger than the blue circle on the right.
Agree?
Because what's around it
makes us see things in a different way.
Actually, they're the same size,
but we see it differently
because what's around it influences us.
There's another optical illusion that fascinated me when I saw it,
it's this one:
the chess pieces above are the same as the ones below.
That's the moment when we think,
"No, I must have some kind of problem in the way I see things."
But I'll show you that it's the same:
without modifying the pieces, just the background,
we can see that they're really the same.
When I saw this presentation,
I really understood that it makes sense to say
that what's around influences us.
The same way that what's around
influences the way we see things,
what's around also influences the way we make decisions.
I work with technology,
and one day my team was working on a project
to create an application to sell insurance.
We know how hard it is to buy insurance, right?
There are too many options, and we can't choose right.
you can choose these two options, or these three, or these two,
so, in one insurance scenario in which we were working,
there were 511 possible choices.
And the team I was working with ended up choosing a way
to simplify this decision to people.
This way was implemented based on the profession.
If they were a photographer, they would see these three options;
if they were a mechanic, they would see these three options...
At this moment, combining this theory with the theory from The Economist
that I finally understood that there are people
who design the choice architecture
in which I am making my decisions,
and this really caught my attention.
In the world of technology there's a name for this profession.
It's called UX, "user experience."
It's exactly the decision architects,
who work with the choice architecture,
designing the environments in which we make decisions.
Incredibly, a friend of mine, Roger, met this amazing person one day,
Dan Ariely, who's a guru in the Behavioral Economics subject.
He sent me this photo and said, "Check out who I met in a coffee shop.
I told him about your theory,
to bring the knowledge of Behavioral Economics
to the digital world, he really liked the idea and wants to talk to you."
I had the privilege to chat with Dan Ariely,
and it changed the way I see Behavioral Economics.
I believe there's no stats needed
to show that we use our smartphones a lot, right?
Everyone here must have yours in your pocket
or out and looking at it;
but I found this research to highlight this even more:
79% of people who have a smartphone
have them on or near them for 22 hours a day;
and "near" means one can get them with their hand.
So, from all these 35,000 decisions we make,
how many do you think are digital decisions?
Digital decisions are the ones we make using a digital device
or that the digital device, many times, makes for us.
I started asking myself this,
when I go to Google
and search, "where to eat in João Pessoa,"
who's making this decision? Is it me?
When we drive somewhere
using Waze,
and Waze chooses the way we take,
did I make this decision, or was it Waze who decided for me?
How many decisions we are delegating the power
so that the digital world makes for us?
It's Waze... it's Google...
[Tinder Logo]
(Laughter)
I don't even need to explain, right?
Speaking of numbers, I'd like to talk to you about an interesting one.
It's a number that in Austria is 99% and in Denmark it's 4%.
Once I asked a group what they thought this number was,
and they told me, "It's the number of Austrians."
(Laughter)
It can be... but not necessarily.
In this case, it's the number of organ donors.
When I saw this number, I asked myself,
"Why in Austria there's 99% of organ donors?"
Because in Austria you already are an organ donor.
You have to opt out.
In Denmark, you are not, you have to opt in.
So, there is a magic word here that is "default."
This word means what you already are without doing anything.
It's the decisions I call "Capitão Nascimento decisions."
You have to opt out.
Someone has made this decision for you,
and you have to go there and opt out.
I was charging my prepaid cell phone the other day,
and there were two options:
one to receive receipts
and another to receive offerings.
The receipt one was unselected;
the offerings was selected.
Someone decided I would like offerings and not receipts;
so I opted out, asked to leave.
Asked to leave, unselected the offerings and selected the receipts.
Uber has a new feature called "pool,"
you can share the car with other passengers.
I opened Uber and the "pool" was already selected for me.
This time I didn't opt out, I took the pool,
I even thought it was cool, because I met someone.
I talk a lot to Uber drivers.
Don't know if you use Uber much, but they love to talk.
Once an Uber driver told me a story:
a lady chose the "pool,"
she got to the car and there was another passenger,
and she strangely said, "How come? There's another passenger in the car?"
He looked at her and said, "Yes, you chose the pool."
She said, "I chose what?"
(Laughter)
The lady chose something without even knowing.
She chose because it had already been chosen for her.
This is very complex, and very interesting.
we believe that we are making these decisions.
If we search on Google today, "where to eat in João Pessoa"
there are 567,000 results.
Which one do we click?
Well, 91.5% of people click on a result on the first page.
Do you think who chose the place I will eat today in João Pessoa
was me or was it Google?
After that, you know what I do?
I look and click on page seven. I really like page seven.
I see what's on the first page, then I click on page seven,
just to "opt out."
(Laughter)
In fact, this is Google, Uber "nudging" us.
These "nudges," in English, that's the name,
and on Behavioral Economics too.
They are called "nudges."
Nudge is exactly a small push in English.
I even want to ask you to nudge the person sitting next to you.
You don't need to drop them off their chair, just a nudge.
Cool? That's a nudge.
There's a theory from an author called Richard Thaler,
he wrote a book called "Nudge."
And the theory of "digital nudge" is a name that I gave to the simple ways
of understanding these nudges, these little pushes, in the digital world.
It's funny because once someone came to my talk
and, at the end, they said,
"Now I understood. I thought it was 'nudes.'"
(Laughter)
But it was not nudes.
At this talk they took a photo of me cutting off the 'g'...
(Laughter)
You're thinking that only Europeans fall for this, from Austria and Denmark.
Everyone here received a confirmation email from TEDx.
On this email there was a text saying, "When you sign up to TEDxJoãoPessoa,
you are automatically delegating the power of all the decisions
that you will make in your life to the speaker."
Me.
(Laughter)
"If you don't want to delegate, it's easy, you just have to click here and opt out."
How many people clicked the link?
More than 400 people signed up, 13 people clicked the link.
This means I can make all the decisions
for the life of more than 370 people here.
No, this was just an experiment,
it's one of the things I do.
I run these experiments to understand how people behave
then I show the results.
Usually people ask me, "Fabio, having this knowledge
from these nudges
can allow me to manipulate someone?"
And my answer is, "Yes."
And that's the danger.
Knowledge is a tool.
If you have the knowledge, you can use it
to influence someone to buy something they don't need;
or you can use it to do good.
For example, you can use it
to help patients with diabetes know the right time to take their insulin.
Or you can use it to avoid truck accidents,
like this cap, called "Smart Cap,"
that measures brainwaves to detect a microsleep,
and avoid an accident.
So, from these 35,000 decisions,
what I know is that it's a lot of decisions
and I know that we've been making more and more of them in the digital world.
There's a 2016 event
that allowed people to give 144 billion steps.
What do you think this was?
The release of Pokemon Go.
(Laughter)
Pokemon Go is a game that uses the concept of "augmented reality."
Each day we are more immersed in this world
of augmented reality, virtual reality, machine learning.
What I know is that the digital world is more and more present in our lives.
I believe that, if we understand better
how these little pushes work,
how these "nudges" work,
we will be able to build a better world,
we will build better interfaces
and we'll be more conscious
to make better decisions.
Thank you.
(Applause)