Technology’s new frontier
Scholars are beginning to learn what’s working and what’s not when it comes to using new media to get people to do what you want, and a conference on “Behavioral Economics, Social Media, and Apps” at Harvard Law School on Wednesday brought together experts from academia and business to discuss it. While the issues are complex, the psychology behind them is straightforward. Sendhil Mullainathan, former assistant director for research at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and now an economics professor at Harvard, said that businesses need to pay attention to the influence of advice (people are more affected by others than they realize); persuasion (people are more inclined to take a given action when others are doing the same); and, basically, laziness, what Mullainathan called “outsourcing self-help” to technological aids such as an alarm clock that forces dozers to rise to silence it. “There’s a lot of technology that’s going to be...