Unconditional love is a swell idea yet admit it. Aren’t there times you’d like to change other’s behavior? Get them to act right, like you. Or perhaps you’d like to drop a bad habit. Then learn how to “nudge.”

That’s a situational prompt that sways people to change.

For example, the traditional approach to getting drivers to reduce speed are those portable signs stationed at the side fo the street, showing how fast you are driving.

This is a shame or fear-based method. Instead, evoke pride or humor – or make it easier to do the right thing. In places in the UK, those signs don’t just tell drivers their speed. They smile at cars under the limit, and frown at cars over the limit.

Make the Right Option More Pleasurable Than the Other One

To encourage people to get exercise by taking the stairs instead of the elevator, one inventive group made the stairs sunnier and another made it more fun (piano stairs experiment) to walk than stand on the elevator.

Appeal to Our Better Nature

To motivate more people to wash their hands in the restroom two signs were

added, one for women and a more blunt one for men.

Instead of telling motorists to stop acting bad with “Don’t Litter” signs the state of Texas had much greater success by appealing to Texans’ pride, with signage saying “Don’t mess with Texas.”

Make it Easier to Do the Right Thing

If you worked for an organization that offered automatic payroll deduction for savings you’d be much more likely to save if the system was one where you had to opt-out than how they usually are set up – you must opt in to save. So discovered the authors of Nudge.

What nudge will you try to improve behavior – yours or others? See links to this post at http://www.movingfrommetowe.com/2009/10/18/how-to-nudge-others-to-act-“right”/

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“Life is the sum of all your choices,” wrote Albert Camus. Unfortunately, just as we misjudge howhappy we will be in the future, we misjudge how our fear of immediate loss hampers our future options. In this game recognize how that happens and make smarter choices:

Participants get $20 to place $1 bets on 20 tosses of a coin. Each losing bet costs $1.  Each winning bet earns $2.50. Given the payout and the 50/50 chance of winning the smart behavior is to bet every time.

Yet most participants passed up several chances to place a bet. Why? Because fear mounts with each coin toss, making people less and less likely to take the gamble and potentially lose what they already have.

Hint: Those who can blunt their fear of loss, to rationally think of their options, win more. That’s easier to do when not multitasking or feeling distracted or rushed.

Three other ways we sabotage decisionmaking and how we can do better

1. How Valuable Does it Appear to Me?

When people bought an energy drink at a discount, they actually performed worse on a puzzle-solving task than those who had paid full price for it. Why? Our unconscious belief equates low price with low quality.

Also when blind tasting wines, people most enjoy the ones they are told cost more.

“That suggests, for example, that drugs bought at a discount, such as drugs from Canada or generic versions of brand-name medications, might be less effective even when they’re otherwise identical,” observes Shiv.

Hint: Charging a premium price for your product or service – and branding it as “deluxe,” “full-service” or other upscale characterization may increase buyer’s:

• Happiness with what they bought.

• Motivation to share their choice with others.

Also, context and habit trigger perceived value. Those moviegoers who usually eat popcorn while watching, for example, areless likely to notice its quality. Since much of our everyday activities are habitual, we can see why it is difficult to change, especially when we are distracted or rushed. Relatedly sampling in context influences behavior, including buying as I discovered in my Bon Bon Bombshell experiment.

Hint: Slow down to act smarter

1. Leave Room in Your Brain to Make the Smart Choice

Recognizing that emotional impulse can tempt us to pick that juicy-looking bacon hamburger over the salad, here’s Baba Shiva’s way to make the better choice. Participants, in his study, who are asked to memorize a seven-digit number were much more likely to choose chocolate cake over fruit salad than those who’d been asked to memorize only a one-digit number.

Hint: Those who had more brainpower left (less to remember) were better able to think about making the healthy choice.

3. Recover From Rejection

Did you get dumped? (We all have at some time). Compounding the pain, not only do we want something more when it appears to be scarce, we are more motivated to pursue the person or object we’ve lost.

Recognizing this tendency may enable you to blunt the effect of it.  Plus we can be tempted to increase someone’s appreciation for us by not being readily available.

Here are more resources that have helped me be a smarter decider …. sometimes:

• How Groups Can Make Better Choices

• How to Nudge Others to Act “Right

• How We Sometimes Fool Ourselves When Making Decisions then read about what Zachary Shore describes as seven cognitive traps in Blunder.  They include static cling (an inability to accept change), causefusion (confusing the causes of complex events) and flatview (black and white thinking).

• Shiva’s friend, Dan Areily describes other ways to make smarter choices in Predictably Irrational.

• For extreme examples of warped reactions read Shankar Vedantam’s story on how the heat of passion deeply alters behavior no matter how smart, rational or well-trained we are.

See links for this post at http://www.movingfrommetowe.com/2010/03/03/four-ways-we-can-make-smarter-choices/

Get fresh ideas on how we can accomplish greater things together than we can alone - and savor life more by following Kare on Twitter: @KareAnderson

“Here’s your latte. Want to sit there to decide which of those people to put on the team? Here let me move my computer bag over so you have room.”

Imagine you were the person who took the latte in that scene. Subconsciously you’re being primed. You’re getting sensory cues that influenced how you felt about that person and how you acted. Powerful people can be primed, for example, to feel more entitled to get whatever they want. While some assertions of so-called subliminal influence are bogus, others are not.

You can be swayed (or can nudge others), using priming cues as these three surprising experiments demonstrate:

1.   Walking down the hall to participate in an experiment some students encountered a lab assistant who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers  – and either a cup of hot or iced coffee. The assistant asked teach student for a hand – to hold the cup for a moment.  Those who held the cold coffee later rated a hypothetical person they read about as being less social or friendly and more selfish than did their fellow students, who held a hot cup. See links to post here http://www.movingfrommetowe.com/2010/03/30/want-to-know-why-you-did-that/

2.   You are more likely to tidy up an area, if you get a slight whiff of a cleaning liquid when you are in it – or not if you don’t.

3. Study participants took part in a one-on-one investment game with another, unseen player. Half of them played while sitting at a large table, at the other end of which was a briefcase.

These students were far stingier with their money than the others, who played in an identical room, but with a backpack on the table instead.

The mere presence of the briefcase seems to have made them more competitive. The students had no sense of whether they had acted selfishly or generously.

Takeaways

Be aware of your emotional response to even subtle sensory cues in a situation (from hard vs. cushy chairs to a dark vs. sunny space)  – especially when meeting someone new or making a decision.

When you want to reach agreement or get closer to someone, chose the setting, your actions and the “props” that support that goal.