Nudge Nation: A New Way to Prod Students into and through College. ES Select.

» When Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein took his teenage daughter to the Lollapalooza music festival during a Chicago heat wave some years ago, the huge electronic displays that typically show performance schedules also flashed periodic admonitions: DRINK MORE WATER. YOU SWEAT IN THE HEAT: YOU LOSE WATER. “The sign was a nudge,” wrote Sunstein and his coauthor Richard Thaler, one of many described in their bestselling 2008 book, Nudge.1 Without coercing concertgoers to behave in a certain way, it provided information designed to prompt them to make wiser decisions—increasing their water intake to prevent dehydration.