News - The University of Montana

Apparently, Barrack Obama was serious about this change thing.

A Time Magazine article last month, How Obama Is Using the Science of Change, revealed that a dream team of 29 leading behavioral scientists is advising the Obama administration on how to get us (you and me) to make better decisions about our finances, our health and our impact on the environment.

Turns out, humans aren’t all that good at making rational decisions.

MIT professor Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational and an Obama advisor, gave a recent talk where he demonstrated this idea. He showed data on organ donations from 11 European countries. Four countries had little success getting people to donate organs with 4-28% participation. The other seven were very successful with 86-100% participation.

The reason for the disparity? Culture? Religion?

Try the design of the form at the DMV.

In countries with low organ donation, the form asks people to check a box if they want to participate the organ donor program.

People don’t check, and thus don’t join.

The form in countries with high participation asks people to check a box if they don’t want to participate in the organ donor program.

Again, people don’t check, but this time they join.

The Netherlands-the most successful “opt-in” country-achieved 28 percent participation after mailing a letter to every household in the country begging people to join the program. To think they could have achieved 80, 90, or 100 percent success by understanding human nature and making a minor tweak to their form.

Default options pack power. As the Time article says, “Most of us will save for retirement, run our computers in energy-efficient mode and be organ donors if we have to take action to say no-but not if we have to take action to say yes.”

The Obama administration hopes to harness that behavioral reality to help people make better decisions.

Perhaps we should too.

Think about the myriad complex decisions and actions that confront UM students and employees: What course of study should I pursue? How will I pay for college? What benefits package should I choose? What’s the appropriate way to communicate and collaborate with others?

One answer is to create default options and design simpler processes that help people make better decisions.

On the first full day of Barrack Obama’s presidency, he issued an executive order on “Transparency and Open Government.” The order more or less says that we have to stop making information and processes about critical decisions people make so gosh danged complicated.

Web technology is a key player in all of this. Perhaps that’s why Obama charged his Chief Technology Officer with primary responsibility for the openness in government initiative.

“That’s exactly what this is about,” says Richard Thayler, co-author of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (and another Obama advisor). “If instead of the 30 pages of unintelligible crap that comes with a mortgage, you can upload it with one click to a website that will explain it and help you shop for alternatives, you make it as easy as shopping for a hotel.”

Now, that’s change we can believe in.