#coffeaddiction

Vitto, the blonde and clever girl, who I met the first day of master, invited me and our friend Anna to spend a week in her granny’s house beside Como Lake.

Actually when I said she is clever I am really serious … what a perfect situation for a nudging experiment: locked in the same place for a 5-days workshop, sharing emotional instability and reassuring each other sleeping time will come as soon as possible.

By the way, we decided that each of us would have done the nudging experiment once one day and a yesterday was my chance to...encourage Vitto get rid of soluble coffee. *You can see from her discouraged beautiful face*

But, let’s go back to the very beginning: what I could discovered in this days of cohabitation is that she is coffee addicted. I was surprised a lot because I started recalling our past experiences I remember she always decline groups coffee breaks at university.

“I didn’t know you like coffee” I said once but she immediately showed me the coffee cup saying “this is not the coffee you imagine”. Indeed I got to know this particular coffee: it’s a soluble one, without caffeine, to make it you have to add few spoon of “material” from the packaging into the cup which has hot water inside. She uses to do this in a very simple way: as soon as she feels the desire, she goes into the kitchen, where she takes the cup, she fills in with water, she heats up this using the microwave Owen, she adds few quantity of powder coffee and she mixes the solution using her spoon, the result is a very liquid coffee similar to the “americano”.

Observing her attitude I noticed that the coffee moment is extremely present in her routine: the first as soon as she gets up, then two both in the morning and during the afternoon and finally 2 after dinner. It’s basically the right water consumption I might say, but for sure not the recommended ingestion of soluble coffee. Instead for her it is really an habit.

I figured out that what I have to discourage is the Default Bias, defines as the behavioural principle based on the idea that people pick the easiest option to avoid complex decisions. Defaults provide a cognitive shortcut and signal what people are supposed to do.

I decided to increase the difficulty in the actions she needs to do in order to reach her final goal. Yesterday morning when she went to the pharmacy, I put in practice my pitiless plan! A metaphors could briefly explain the final result: “making coffee it’s becoming a treasure hunt”. So first of all I hid the cups in specific spots of the house and when she come back and wanted a coffee she spent 2 hours “looking for the cups”. Then in the afternoon when she was having a shower I put in practice the second step, I removed the microwave oven from the kitchen and put it in the terrace upstairs. Acting on a space level, made my modify the time one and this is perceived as an increasing difficulty.

“I would not make any coffee it takes that much effort” said Vitto at the end of the day, maybe she was just under pressure because of the delivery but what she understand is that she can survive even without a frequent a continuous consumption of soluble coffee.