Archive of Articles
One Small Nudge for Man and One Qualiadelic Leap for Mankind!
August 6, 2008
Just how do you change your bad habits, or those of your family, or the things that continually go wrong at work? A recent book on economic behavior provides answers and more -- in fact, it is a qualiadelic success.
"Nudge: Improvising Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness," shows how our choices are often made on the basis of completely irrelevant information. With the aid of some simple and fun thought exercises, they reveal how a number, or an idea -- or anything qualiadelic -- can become an anchor that influences our subsequent decisions.
The authors call these anchors "nudges." For instance, add two hundred to the last three digits of your phone number, and then answer the question: When did Attila the Hun invade Europe? Unless you know the answer already, you can be sure that the answer you give will be influenced by the number you just finished generating in your head. (Go ahead, try it. The answer is below).
Other things besides the products of active thinking can be nudges. Mental quirks and biases such as overconfidence, loss aversion, and inertia tend to make people avoid trying something different.
The authors apply the principle of nudge to issues like retirement saving and health care, but if we apply nudge to the qualiadelic experience it becomes a truly powerful tool for personal and community transformation.
What are the anchors in our lives that nudge our decision making? Well, maybe we're thinking our anchors are our spiritual beliefs or the best values we inherited from our parents and cultivated with experience and education. But the whole point is that the anchors that nudge us in our decision making tend to move in the wrong direction, not the right direction.
Even qualities such as being rich or poor, or beautiful or ugly, or healthy or sick, do not qualify as anchors. We make irrational decisions all the time, despite our circumstances.
Anchors are much more in the moment; they arise almost spontaneously within our daily ritualing. More likely, an anchor is something like a co-worker's mention of pizza, which leads to an unhealthy lunch decision. Or a shirt which, even though it needs washing, we wear because we got the idea that we look good in it, or that it is lucky.
In short, anchors are symbols with strong qualiadelic content. Remember, when something is qualiadelic it attracts us and we move toward it, again and again. This movement toward symbols is called ritual, and in this process we either evolve the symbol (and ourselves in the process), or we discover its qualiadelic content was not really what we thought it was.
The key is to become aware of this process -- to ritual consciously. Ritualing is the conscious use of ritual, and it allows us to choose the anchors that nudge us.
Our decisions are all too often inconsistent with our values, our needs, and even our desires. But conscious ritualing allows us to play with qualiadelic anchors when we have to make a decision. It can be as simple as having a conversation with your coworkers about eating healthier food, which is a common ritual. Let's look at this in a little more depth.
Ritual provides a framework for a controlled spontaneity. Knowledge is the control -- we know what's healthy and what's not, and we know the consequences -- but knowledge doesn't mean we can't be spontaneous. It means we can be spontaneous wisely and perhaps save ourselves some pain later.
The spontaneous suggestion might be to go to some place completely new instead of having pizza. But that would be more expensive...but so would the cost of becoming obese, or clogging the arteries, or...but the new food might not be good...and so on. These are playful suggestions, knowledgeable responses, and, eventually, a decision about lunch.
If we are conscious of what we are doing we can recognize the qualiadelic power of the various suggestions. They become symbols with which we can play. (The heart of ritualing is play.) In the process the changing qualiadelic effects of symbols are reflected in the group.
Today, we might not make the best decision. But tomorrow we will repeat a similar ritual, and we will make a different decision. In ritualing, both the qualiadelia (the anchors that nudge us) and our Selves (who playfully nudge the anchors) evolve as we ritual again and again.
Ideas and symbols and anchors are fighting for space in our brains, and they have the help of big media behind them. We need to become conscious ritualers if we are going to transform our world(s).
Oh, yes, Attila the Hun invaded Europe in the AD 440s.
Be Qualiadelic. Be Conscious. Change the routine.
Return to the archive of articles.