Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Linking Architecture and Behavioral Economics

by Sally Augustin, Ph.D. | July 2nd, 2018

Behavioral economics is hot – for a brief introduction to the field, read this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics. Richard Thaler won a Nobel prize in economics in 2017 for contributing to the development of behavioral economics (see his Nobel lecture here: www.nobelprize.org. Avani Parikh and Prashant Parikh have written an important introduction to how behavioral economics can, and should, be linked to design and design-decision making. Their book is titled Choice Architecture: A New Approach to Behavior, Design, and Wellness (Routledge, 2018). Parikh and Parikh detail how users apply behavioral economics, largely unconsciously, in the spaces in which they find themselves and how designers can guide decisions made through options presented. That, alone, would be useful and significant. But Choice Architectureis also important for another reason. It teaches readers, in a straightforward way, a language that they can use to communicate to finance and accounting types – who often were finance, accounting …