#behaviouralchange

After almost 3 months in quarantine I finally managed to move from Milan to go to Palermo (Sicily), where my boyfriend Enrico lives. And it has been almost 2 week that we have started living together. You would say that staying together all days all nights after 3 months isolated must be great, a kind of paradise...and actually it is like that BUT spending so much time with a person – it does not really matter how much you love and care him or her – makes more visible and evident those little behaviours that annoy you!

He is a smoker, not an avid one since he does not smoke 2 packages of cigarettes a day…but not even an occasional one. On the contrary I do not smoke.

This is one of his bad habit that I cannot stand and when the ‘nudging exercise’ was launch I immediately thought that this one was the behaviour I wanted to change.

After a deeper thought I realized that making him stop smoking through nudging and in a couple of days it is something kind of extreme and impossible since he does not have this mind-set.

So I decided to focus on something else, always related to smoking. I thought that I really cannot stand when he does not put out the cigarette: it is not something that happens often, actually, but it is extremely annoying! That smell freaks me out! I mean, I do not really matter if you smoke close to me both outdoor and indoor just do not blow over my face or really close to me while you’re smoking!

Sometimes he starts smoking and doing other stuff at the same moment such as cooking and if he concentrates too much on his second action he just forgets/do not care he was smoking and just leaves the cigarette extinguishing in the ashtray. Sometimes he just finishes smoking and does not press enough to put out the cigarette because he is paying more attention on his phone. In both cases I AM the one who puts out the cigarette because as I have already said the smell is annoying!

Anyway by observing and paying more attention when he has this behaviour I could not figure out anything else except that he has this habit due to lack of attention and motivation. Why should he put out the cigarette if he is doing something else or if the smell does not bother him?

So I decided to face and try to change this annoying behaviour through ‘nudging’.

But, what is it? Nudging is about behavioural patterns and it is concerned with the design of choices: it can be seen as a light push, an indirect suggestion or help that influence the decisions we make without forbidding other options and/or changing their incentives in a relevant way.

I wanted to focus on a specific kind of nudging which is gamification: everyone likes playing game, especially Enrico!

The solution I designed is really simple. What I needed were just a picture of Enrico’s university mate that he cannot really stand and he always badmouths and the ashtray. I opened photoshop, cut the head of the poor guy, put it on a target and put them under the ashtray. The ashtray is transparent so you can see through the new target with the hated face on it! Now his face is the target to hit to gain points!

I know the solution might be quite childish and kind of mean…but it actually worked! I do not want to promote hate or anything like this for sure but now Enrico, when he finishes smoking, enjoys putting out his cigarette on the poor guy face and winning his “game” with the highest score!

P.S. Here I’m drawing Enrico as a really bad person, but I swear he is super nice and kind!

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