6 Minute English / Nudges: The secrets of persuasion

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Neil.

And I m Beth.

Have you ever been sent a text reminding you about a doctor s appointment? Or impulsively bought something on the internet because there was only one left ? If any of these have happened to you, then you ve been nudged.

A nudge is a subtle way of altering human behaviour. It s a powerful way for governments, advertisers and social media companies to encourage, or nudge, people into making choices that benefit themselves and society as a whole.

Imagine the government want people to eat better. It might encourage supermarkets to put healthy snacks in easy-to-reach shelves near the checkout, and hide the chocolate bars out of sight on the top shelf. Shoppers are being nudged to eat better.

Well that s the idea, anyway. But often nudging is used less to benefit society, and more to make money for big business. And it happens more often than people realise. So in this programme, we ll be asking whether the idea behind nudging - to influence human behaviour for good - is still true today. And, as usual, we ll be learning some useful new vocabulary as well.

But first I have a question for you, Beth. Another example of nudging happened in Woolwich, an area of London which in 2011 had a problem with anti-social behaviour, and particularly with shop windows being smashed. The local authority decided to use nudging to fix the problem by painting pictures on the shop windows, but what did they paint? Was it:

a) cute kittens?b) babies faces? or,c) barking dogs?

I guess barking dogs would keep the window breakers away.