Everyone thinks of “Medicare for All” as a liberal idea, an extremely liberal one embraced by the socialist wing of the Democratic Party. It’s an idea Democrats were hesitant to embrace in the Obama era, for being too far out of mainstream political thought. It was thought of as an idea that was too easy…
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, lots of companies are encouraging workers to get biometric screening. Here’s a picture of that: But is there evidence that this promotes healthier behavior? Would love someone to direct me to any relevant research.
The MacOS has a new self control app called, straightforwardly, SelfControl. The app has an ominous icon, which looks like a cross between a poker game gone wrong and the warning symbol on a bottle of poisonous chemicals: The app gives users the ability to temporarily block websites, which they know they are wasting too…
If I told you there was a new medicine effective in treating a previously untreatable illness, you might be interested. If you have the illness, you might even read up and try to figure out whether the medicine would work for you. Ideally, you will evaluate the strength of evidence – was it a randomized…
Every once in a while, I post a picture of an effort to nudge people into better behavior. Sometimes, I post pictures of pretty horrendous nudges. In response to one of those posts, Lydia Ashton sent me this picture, of an absolutely, horrendously and horrifically designed “nudge.” Fortunately, I have determined that if you stare…
Heuristics is jargon used by decision psychologists and behavioral economists to refer to cognitive shortcuts we humans take to make judgments and decisions. One of the first heuristics identified as such by Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky was the anchoring heuristic. I would define it for you, but it is wonderfully captured in this cartoon:
In the United States, the FDA tried to mandate that cigarette companies put nasty images of the harms of smoking onto cigarette packages, images that would take up at least half of the carton. It looks like that effort has failed, because the courts have determined that it violates the First Amendment. I wonder what…
Experts in decision psychology and behavioral economics have conclusively shown that humans, those silly creatures, are not always rational decision makers. They let unconscious forces influence their thinking, and not always for the better. But of course, doctors aren’t human. Right? Well, here is some evidence of just how human we doctors are. The odds…
Last summer, Facebook received terrible press for running experiments on its users, adjusting the proportion of happy and unhappy posts at the top of people’s news feeds to see how that effected their moods. Shortly after that controversy surfaced, OK-Cupid founder Christian Rudder proudly announced “we experiment on human beings.” He unabashedly admitted that he…
A while back, I posted an interesting effort to get people to walk upstairs, rather than take the escalator. It involved a staircase designed to look like a piano, with musical sounds generated when people stepped on each stair. I love that approach not only because it is clever, but because I am a serious…