There's a Fly in My Urinal

In the December 19, 2009 National Public Radio (NPR) story "There's a Fly in My Urinal," Robert Krulwich reports that the aim of men is improved when they have a target. This is example of how people can be nudged into more socially desirable behaviors (peeing in the urinal, rather than on the wall and floor).

This will have to be a guys-only experience, but should an urgent need send you to the men's room at Terminal Four at JFK Airport in New York, or to the men's rooms at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, or to any number of stadiums, or — for any 10-year-old boys reading — to more and more elementary school bathrooms all over America, you may see, right above the drain, a perfect facsimile of a house fly.

No, it's not a real fly. It's a drawing, baked into the porcelain bowl.

Or it may be a peel-and-paste decal attached to the bowl.

There has been a worldwide proliferation of urinal flies, observed May Berenbaum, head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois in her new book The Earwig's Tail. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein also noted the spread in their book Nudge.

"They've been spotted in Moscow, Singapore," Thaler says. He thinks he knows why.

The presence of a fly in a urinal literally changes human behavior, he thinks — or at least the behavior of human males.

Men Like To Aim

"Apparently," Berenbaum says, in males, "there is a deep-seated instinct to aim at targets," and having a fly to aim at reduces what she politely calls "human spillage."

When flies were introduced at Schiphol Airport, spillage rates dropped 80 percent, says manager Aad Keiboom. A change like that, of course, translates into major savings in maintenance costs.

Thaler has tried to imagine how the airport made its calculations. "I'm guessing somebody went to the urinals without flies and repeatedly soaked up the ordinary spillage with a paper towel," which he then figures was carefully weighed on a scale. Then the same experiment was done at fly-emblazoned urinals, and presumably the scales reported a dramatically measurable difference in soakage.

Is This A New Idea?

However it was done, it's not exactly news that urinal targets reduce spillage. Julie Power, co-founder of a blog called Moms To Work, says she recently took a red Sharpie pen and wrote "AIM" in big letters on her home toilet bowl, and her twin boys immediately focused on the target.

Another mother reported on Thaler's blog Nudge that she tears off individual patches of toilet paper and tells her boys to "cut this in half." It apparently works. Thaler recommends Cheerios. Even though they move, or maybe because they move, Cheerios tend to focus young male minds.

Of course, the real mystery of the public urinals is: Why flies? Why not ducks or snakes or any mammals?

"Well, what do you want to pee on?" answers Doug Kempel, whose company Urinalfly sells peel-off flies for school and home bowls. Kempel is about to launch glow-in-the-dark fly decals for the adult male market because, he says, "men, evidently, hate to turn on the light at night because it blinds them," and they'd rather navigate to a soft glow in the bowl.

Kempel says while he has dabbled with a bull's-eye design, flies seem to have a special appeal.

Why a Fly?

Keiboom in Amsterdam says the original fly idea was proposed almost 20 years ago by Dutch maintenance man Jos Van Bedoff, who had served in the Dutch army in the 1960s. As a soldier he noticed that someone had put small, discrete red dots in the barracks urinals, which dramatically cut back on "misdirected flow."

Two decades later, he proposed to the airport board of directors that the dots be turned into etched flies. According to Keiboom, Van Bedoff decided that guys want to directly aim at an animal they can immobilize. The ability to use one's natural gifts and achieve victory over the foe while standing is the key, he explained. Guys, he felt, can always beat flies. That's why flies are so satisfying.

Is that the answer?

Berenbaum, the entomologist, says she's not convinced. More than a hundred years ago in Britain, bathroom bowls also sported insect images, she says. Back then, however, the favored target was not a fly, but a bee. And bees have stingers. It seems that men in the 1890s were willing to take more imaginative risks when peeing.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121310977

Credit Card Machines Nudge Passengers to Leave Larger Tips

In the November 8, 2009 New York Times article "New York’s Cabbies Like Credit Cards? Go Figure," Michael M. Grynbaum provides an example of behavioral economics in which the credit card machines in taxis nudge passengers to leave a larger tip.

New York’s cabbies howled when the city began forcing them to take credit cards. Some even went on strike, calling the requirements a kowtow to tourists and a burden on drivers.

But two years later, the back-of-the-cab swipe has emerged as an unlikely savior for New York’s taxi industry, even as other cities’ fleets struggle to find fares in a deep recession.

Overall ridership and revenue have increased. More and more fares are being paid with credit cards, even for shorter rides. And tips for drivers, usually an early casualty of tough times, are up sharply, double over the pre-plastic days.

Even cabbies are conceding that credit cards are good for business. “It’s better,” said Naveed Shah, 35, a driver for five years, as he gassed up his Ford Crown Victoria recently. “If there was no credit card, people aren’t going to take taxicabs.”

Other major cities are now rushing to follow suit. Although New York was late to bring credit cards to cabs, it leapfrogged ahead by pioneering a customer-friendly system that required no signed receipts, no minimum payment and an interactive device that let passengers swipe the card and add tips themselves.

In Los Angeles, for instance, credit card machines are often in the front seat, forcing riders to hand their cards to the driver. Business this year is off about 15 percent, according to fleet owners, mirroring national trends in the industry.

In New York, however, revenues have risen about 13 percent from the end of last year, according to data collected by the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. And tips, which hovered around 10 percent when cab rides were cash only, averaged 22 percent on credit-card transactions this fall.

“Credit cards helped the New York industry stay stable in a time when the rest of the for-hire industry was in significant decline,” said Alfred LaGasse, chief executive officer of the Taxicab, Limousine and Paratransit Association, a national trade group.

Taxi fleets in Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas and the suburbs of Washington are all beginning to experiment with back-seat card readers similar to those in New York, Mr. LaGasse said.

Once considered a convenient payment method for longer trips, often to the area’s airports, credit cards are now being used for shorter, cheaper rides, the type of $5 rainy-day indulgences that were once handled exclusively with cash.

Amos Tamam, president of VeriFone Transportation Systems, whose card readers are in 6,700 cabs, or about half of the city’s fleet, said his company’s average credit-card fare is now less than $15, down from $16 a year ago.

“The more usage you get with credit cards, the lower the average ticket is going to go,” Mr. Tamam said.

Passengers said that paying with credit cards has become second nature. “Any time I take a cab, I pay with a card, on the advice of my accountant,” said Michelin Hall of Manhattan, after swiping his American Express card in a taxi outside Pennsylvania Station the other day. Mr. Hall said that with cards, “it’s easy to track the receipts, it can tell you how long the cab ride was and where you went” — convenient information when he files expenses for his job in marketing.

The increase in tips, however, may have less to do with New Yorkers’ generosity than with the preset amounts suggested to passengers on the taxi’s software systems. In many of the city’s cabs, riders are offered options for their tip depending on the length of the ride. For fares under $15, a screen prompts tips of $2, $3 or $4; the numbers can range from 15 percent to 30 percent for higher fares. The presets are used about 70 percent of the time, according to industry estimates.

New York’s success seemed unlikely a year ago, when the last of the city’s 13,000 cabs were outfitted with credit-card readers, part of an initiative started in 2007 by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. The city was reeling from a maelstrom on Wall Street that disproportionately affected the high-income industries that drive the New York economy.

And riders were still reporting unpleasant run-ins with drivers who refused to accept the cards or pressured customers to pay with cash, a resentment left over from a two-day strike in September 2007 that forced officials to institute an ad-hoc system for shared rides.

But in 2008, taxi officials began noticing a trend: Cab business was staying steady, and credit card use was on the rise.

At the end of last year, about one-fifth of cab rides were being paid for with a card. That portion has grown steadily this year, reaching 28 percent in September, the latest month for which data was available. Meanwhile, black-car business has fallen about 30 percent, as companies encourage employees to use corporate credit cards to expense cheaper yellow-cab rides.

“It’s becoming a way of life in the taxi world,” said Matthew W. Daus, New York’s taxi commissioner. “New Yorkers are getting more accustomed to going around without cash. We think it’s a good thing.”

In interviews, drivers acknowledged that business had improved, but still groused about the credit card machines. The higher tips are tempered by a 5 percent service fee applied to fares that are paid with plastic. Drivers must also wait anywhere from a day to a week to retrieve their fare money paid by credit cards, and they said the machines occasionally break down, resulting in lost fares.

“Because of credit cards we get customers, that’s true,” said Muhammed Hamid, 35, of Queens. “But if they give us cash, you can put the gas on that; you don’t have to wait three, four days.”

Told of the statistics that showed higher tips, some drivers scoffed. “I know that’s not true,” said William Lindauer, a driver and coordinating member of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. “They get no tips, or less tips.”

A random survey suggested otherwise. Several drivers were asked to share their credit receipts after their shifts. Of 20 receipts reviewed, the average tip came out to just over 18 percent. The preset tip amounts were used more than half the time, resulting in a $5.30 ride getting a tip of $2, or about 38 percent.

It may be difficult, however, for other cities to recreate New York’s success. “Not all agencies in other cities have the same tools, manpower and budget to do what New York City did,” said Mr. Tamam of VeriFone. And New York’s fleet, the largest in the country, has a bigger customer base that can help justify the high cost of installing more advanced credit card technology.

Some drivers suggested, paradoxically, that the recession itself may be prompting greater credit card use. Simon Palade, a driver for more than 40 years, said he sees far more cash fares around the first of the month, when paychecks are often issued.

“After that it slows down and they’ve got to use plastic more and more,” Mr. Palade, 59, of Sunnyside, Queens, said the other day, as he navigated a Central Park transverse. “People don’t got no money. They’re banking on the future.”

The Ford Fusion Hybrid: Grow a (Digital) Tree on Your Dashboard

According to the 22 May 2009 CarAndCaboodle.com article "The Ford Fusion Hybrid: Deserving of Recognition," the Ford Fusion Hybrid provides a great application of behavioral economics. Fuel efficient driving is rewarded by the illumination of increasing numbers of leaves on a digital tree on the dashboard.

According to the article:

You made me love you. I didn’t want to do it.

Let’s be perfectly honest. I wouldn’t normally look twice at a mid-sized sedan. I have four kids. Two who sit in carseats. I rarely even glance at normal vehicles that seat less than six. Plus I’m a car snob. I’m into auto everything, extra options and the leather seating. So I probably would have completely overlooked the Ford Fusion Hybrid (and really missed out on a fabulous vehicle) if it were not for two things:

1. This past Wednesday I got to drive the Fusion all around LA with fellow blogger Jessica Gottlieb as part of an “eco driving challenge”, prior to attending the American Idol finale. We drove on a course with yellow flags. I pretended I was on Amazing Race.

2. The music video commercials for the Ford Fusion shown all season during American Idol, were just so cool. They definitely piqued my interest. I love car commercials, and when I see a great one, I’m more inclined to want to check out the car.

Hopping into the Fusion Hybrid I was struck that the interior was really nice. Posh even. The leather seats had contrast stitching like a nice handbag (I am forever comparing car seats to handbags) and were comfortable to sit in. The interior was quiet and surprisingly luxurious. Sitting in the drivers seat I admired the high tech gadgetry. It felt very cockpit-like, in a good way. I might even have thought I was in a higher priced luxury car, until Jessica attempted to adjust her seat. She discovered the passenger side seating was manually operated. A little odd, but not my problem. I was behind the wheel. A fun place to be. I was willing to overlook the seat issue, considering the Fusion’s other charms. Namely, it appreciates me.

I could go on about the way it handled, and how great the mileage is but you can get that kind of review anywhere. So I’ll tell you why I really loved the fusion. It was all about the recognition.

As a self employed mom, I so rarely get told that I am doing a good job. Whole weeks go by without kudos. My kids don’t evaluate my performance and tell me I got a gold sticker for recycling this week. No one ever musses my hair and says, “job well done on the cloth diapering!” Come to think of it, perhaps I was an easy mark for Ford. They definitely clued into something that I was hungry for. That nod, that pat on the back, a little recognition!

The Ford Fusion dishes out the recognition right on the dash via the SmartGauge with EcoGuide. This unique display is one part personal driving coach and one part behaviorial therapist. It rewards good eco driving behavior by “growing” leaves on the dash. Drive really well and you’ll not only save dollars at the pump, you’ll grow a full leafy tree. Which is the grown up, eco responsible version of a sticker chart full of gold stars. As silly as that sounds when I type it, it was terrifically fun and rewarding to see the tree grow as we drove.

Jessica and I were awesome eco drivers I should tell you. We grew a gorgeous tree with our fabulous eco driving skills. We had an average of 42mpg between us, on our urban driving course. We blew most of the other drivers out of the water. 42 mpg through downtown LA is just phenomenal. But honestly, who cares about numbers, because…tree!

Sadly , despite our eco-prowess, we did not win the eco driving challenge. In the end it was our vanity that did us in. We left on the AC after we exited the freeway. Our efforts to be cool put a ding on our mileage and cost us the championship title.
Another (far less cool and far more sweaty!) team managed 43.4 mpg on the same course. I personally, did not get to see their tree but I refuse to believe it was anywhere near as pretty as ours.

Ford is really onto something with their attention to detail, and clever user friendly technologies. I could get spoiled with all this recognition and reward. Pretty soon I’ll be expecting my low-flo showerhead to make me pretty rainbows for me when I manage to wash, rinse and condition in under 10 minutes.

Japanese "melody roads" play tunes as you drive over them

According to the November 14, 2007 boingboing.net blog entry "Japanese 'melody roads' play tunes as you drive over them,"

POSTED BY CORY DOCTOROW, NOVEMBER 14, 2007 6:56 AM
Several experimental Japanese "melody roads" have been deployed, whose cut grooves and bumps play distinctive songs through your car, but only when you drive slowly and carefully down them. This seems like a potentially useful bit of social engineering -- set the musical timing on a road at the safe speed, and combine that with timed traffic lights that reward you with a "green wave" if you stick to the limit, and you'd have a pretty good set of cues telling you how to travel at speed. Bobbie Johnson writes in the Guardian:

A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of "melody roads", which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel.
m
The concept works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit a rumbling tone throughout a vehicle, the melody road uses the spaces between to create different notes.

Depending on how far apart the grooves are, a car moving over them will produce a series of high or low notes, enabling cunning designers to create a distinct tune.

Here are some YouTube videos of melody roads:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTsoP3WWgU4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Aey7Jq0G3EU&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBfRZH8kkdk

Joel Stein satirically suggests some ways government can improve social outcomes

In the October 12, 2009 TIME magazine article "Dictator of My Dreams," Joel Stein satirically suggests some ways government can improve social outcomes:

I have voted for two libertarian candidates for President, believe in drug legalization and have done many things that would have gotten me caned in Singapore, a Catholic school or anyplace someone happened to be near a cane. I've fought the left's paternalism of the body and the right's paternalism of the soul. But recently I've been wondering if my political assumptions are wrong, if America might not be better off under a dictatorship. I've also been wondering if somewhere deep inside, I secretly want to be caned.

My opinion shifted after New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg banned smoking in bars. At the time, I believed having a scotch in one hand and a butt in the other wasn't just essential to the pursuit of happiness but a necessary means for Jersey women to let people know that they weren't going home alone. I was outraged by Bloomberg's hubris. Was he also going to outlaw short skirts, hair spray and singing along to "Livin' on a Prayer"?

But almost seven years later, smoking in bars and restaurants seems insane. It went from dictator Bloomberg's horrible idea to something you wouldn't think of doing anywhere, including Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong and Istanbul. Not only do I go to far more bars now, but I even bring my baby. Which is something Bloomberg should probably also make illegal.

Social change may happen fast, but no one stops polluting unless an Indian cries on TV. My point isn't that activists and advocates don't shift the way we think; public opinion shifts in various ways, the prolonged explanation of each of which has made Malcolm Gladwell millions of dollars. My point is simply that, everything being equal, a dictator can make an Indian cry fastest.

And people love a good dictator — or at least get over their hatred of one pretty quickly — provided that the dictator doesn't put up too many pictures of himself. We instinctively object to new forms of paternalism, but we also quickly accept them: laws requiring seat belts and motorcycle helmets, forced retirement savings through Social Security, waiting periods for marriage and gun licenses. Though you're not hurting anyone else, you can't commit suicide, have sex with your dog, drink in public, do drugs, be a prostitute, swim at a beach without a lifeguard, eat unpasteurized cheese or do most things that are crucial to the plot of independent movies.

President Obama should probably get a little bit dictatorial up in here. He's the only person in the U.S. unaware that we elected him dictator, giving him both houses of Congress and the major television networks whenever he wants them. Instead of ignoring people's objections until they get socialized medicine and realize they like it, as England's leaders did, Obama is worried about seducing Olympia Snowe so he can say his health bill is bipartisan. Do you know how long it takes to charm people from Maine? They're uptight white people coated with a hard exterior made from other uptight white people. While Obama negotiates on climate change, the Chinese government has forced China's entire tech industry to focus on energy efficiency, and soon we'll all buy Chinese products because they'll be far cheaper to power — and people can stay mad about poisoned babies and puppies for only so long. The lesson for Obama isn't that we didn't like George W. Bush because he bossed us around. We just wanted to be bossed around far, far better.

In fact, we need a dictator to do all kinds of things. I want a law making all Internet browsers' default setting block pornography and for that setting to be difficult, but not too difficult, to change. I want all alarm clocks, when they go off, to mention going to the gym. I think there should be limits on when you can sue, a ban on guns not used for hunting, parenting licenses enforced by social-services visits, more obstacles to post-first-trimester abortions and a European-size tax on gasoline. Soda should be sold in containers no bigger than 8 oz. People should pay for their garbage by weight. And their plane tickets.

Despite what you're thinking, I don't want to be the dictator. That's mostly because I'm already prone to bad haircuts. But also because instead of an actual dictator, I think what we need is to recognize that social mores require government nudges like the ones Bloomberg creates and Obama adviser Cass Sunstein advocates. We live in a connected age in which our liberties bump against one another. I know this is all easy to say since I'm not a smoker, a soda drinker or a columnist whom politicians listen to. But in an age of overwhelming choice, some dictatorial direction would help. Plus, then Obama wouldn't have to be on TV so much.

Nudges

http://www.economistsdoitwithmodels.com/2009/06/19/if-at-first-you-dont-succeed-nudge-harder/

The fly in the urinal

A company called Urinal Fly manufactures a sticker to place inside urinals to "reduce spillage." The founder explains the origin of the idea on the company website:

I often get asked about where I came up with the idea for the UrinalFly. The original idea belongs to economist Aad Kieboom. From a 1999 Whole Earth Aricle talking about bringing the UrinalFly to JFK airport:
“Each urinal at the Amsterdam airport has the black outline of a fly etched into the porcelain-”This improves the man’s aim,” says Aad Kieboom, an economist. His staff conducted fly-in-urinal trials and found that etchings reduce spillage by 80 per cent. The Dutch will transfer the technology to New York. “It gives a guy something to think about,” says Jan Jansen, the new Dutch general manager in New York. “It’s a perfect example of process control.”

Economist Jodi Beggs talked about this in an August 26, 2009 post on her blog Economists Do It With Models.

Predictably Irrational on YouTube

Predictably Irrational on YouTube.

The New York Times review of Predictably Irrational

In the March 16, 2008 New York Times review of Dan Ariely's Predicably Irrational, David Berreby writes:

For years, the ideology of free markets bestrode the world, bending politics as well as economics to its core assumption: market forces produce the best solution to any problem. But these days, even Bill Gates says capitalism’s work is “unsatisfactory” for one-third of humanity, and not even Hillary Clinton supports Bill Clinton’s 1990s trade pacts.

Another sign that times are changing is “Predictably Irrational,” a book that both exemplifies and explains this shift in the cultural winds. Here, Dan Ariely, an economist at M.I.T., tells us that “life with fewer market norms and more social norms would be more satisfying, creative, fulfilling and fun.” By the way, the conference where he had this insight wasn’t sponsored by the Federal Reserve, where he is a researcher. It came to him at Burning Man, the annual anarchist conclave where clothes are optional and money is banned. Ariely calls it “the most accepting, social and caring place I had ever been.”

Obviously, this sly and lucid book is not about your grandfather’s dismal science. Ariely’s trade is behavioral economics, which is the study, by experiments, of what people actually do when they buy, sell, change jobs, marry and make other real-life decisions.

To see how arousal alters sexual attitudes, for example, Ariely and his colleagues asked young men to answer a questionnaire — then asked them to answer it again, only this time while indulging in Internet pornography on a laptop wrapped in Saran Wrap. (In that state, their answers to questions about sexual tastes,, violence and condom use were far less respectable.) To study the power of suggestion, Ariely’s team zapped volunteers with a little painful electricity, then offered fake pain pills costing either 10 cents or $2.50 (all reduced the pain, but the more expensive ones had a far greater effect). To see how social situations affect honesty, they created tests that made it easy to cheat, then looked at what happened if they reminded people right before the test of a moral rule. (It turned out that being reminded of any moral code — the Ten Commandments, the non-existent “M.I.T. honor system” — caused cheating to plummet.)

These sorts of rigorous but goofy-sounding experiments lend themselves to a genial, gee-whiz style, with which Ariely moves comfortably from the lab to broad social questions to his own life (why did he buy that Audi instead of a sensible minivan?). He is good-tempered company — if he mentions you in this book, you are going to be called “brilliant,” “fantastic” or “delightful” — and crystal clear about all he describes. But “Predictably Irrational” is a far more revolutionary book than its unthreatening manner lets on. It’s a concise summary of why today’s social science increasingly treats the markets-know-best model as a fairy tale.

At the heart of the market approach to understanding people is a set of assumptions. First, you are a coherent and unitary self. Second, you can be sure of what this self of yours wants and needs, and can predict what it will do. Third, you get some information about yourself from your body — objective facts about hunger, thirst, pain and pleasure that help guide your decisions. Standard economics, as Ariely writes, assumes that all of us, equipped with this sort of self, “know all the pertinent information about our decisions” and “we can calculate the value of the different options we face.” We are, for important decisions, rational, and that’s what makes markets so effective at finding value and allocating work. To borrow from H. L. Mencken, the market approach presumes that “the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

What the past few decades of work in psychology, sociology and economics has shown, as Ariely describes, is that all three of these assumptions are false. Yes, you have a rational self, but it’s not your only one, nor is it often in charge. A more accurate picture is that there are a bunch of different versions of you, who come to the fore under different conditions. We aren’t cool calculators of self-interest who sometimes go crazy; we’re crazies who are, under special circumstances, sometimes rational.

Ariely is not out to overthrow rationality. Instead, he and his fellow social scientists want to replace the “rational economic man” model with one that more accurately describes the real laws that drive human choices. In a chapter on “relativity,” for example, Ariely writes that evaluating two houses side by side yields different results than evaluating three — A, B and a somewhat less appealing version of A. The subpar A makes it easier to decide that A is better — not only better than the similar one, but better than B. The lesser version of A should have no effect on your rating of the other two buildings, but it does. Similarly, he describes the “zero price effect,” which marketers exploit to convince us to buy something we don’t really want or need in order to collect a “free” gift. “FREE! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is,” Ariely writes. None of this is rational, but it is predictable.

What the reasoning self should do, he says, is set up guardrails to manage things during those many, many moments when reason is not in charge. (Though one might ask why the reasoning self should always be in charge, an assumption Ariely doesn’t examine too closely.)

For example, Ariely writes, we know our irrational self falls easily into wanting stuff we can’t afford and don’t need. So he proposes a credit card that encourages planning and self-control. After $50 is spent on chocolate this month — pfft, declined! He has in fact suggested this to a major bank. Of course, he knew that his idea would cut into the $17 billion a year that American banks make on consumer credit-card interest, but what the heck: money isn’t everything.

David Berreby is the author of “Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind,” which will be published in paperback this fall

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Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely's website

Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely's website

Nudge

Nudge

Predictably Irrational

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely