Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Smarter Screen
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty-and-research/accounting/faculty/benartzi * http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/Documents/areas/adm/web/SHLOMO.pdf * https://www.linkedin.com/in/shlomobenartzi/ * https://www.ted.com/speakers/shlomo_benartzi
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Tel-Aviv University, B.A., 1989; Cornell University, Ph.D., 1994.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Behavioral economist, educator, and writer. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, assistant professor, 1994-96; University of California, Los Angeles, assistant professor, 1996-2002, associate professor, 2002-07; professor of accounting, 2007–, also cochair of the Behavioral Decision-Making Group at UCLA Anderson School of Management, 2004–; the Behavioral Finance Forum, cofounder, 2006–.; also serves as chief scientist for the California Digital Nudge Initiative. Advisory work includes U.K. National Employee Savings Trust, 2011–; State of California on the implementation of the California Secure Choice Retirement Savings Trust Act, 2012–; the State of California Financial Literacy Advisory Committee, 2013–; the Behavioral Insight team at #10 Downing Street, London, England, 2013-2014; the World Economic Forum’s Global agenda Council on Behavior, 2014–; Kevin de León, President pro tempore of the California State Senate, 2015–. Served as a consultant and/or on the advisory boards for about fifty financial institutions, including Fuller & Thaler Asset Management, Guggenheim Partners, and Morningstar.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Transformative Consumer Research, edited by David Mick, Routledge, 2012; The Behavioral Foundations of Policy, edited by Eldar Shafir, Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press, 2012. Contributor to periodicals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Political Economy, Science, and Quarterly Journal of Economics.
SIDELIGHTS
Shlomo Benartzi is a behavioral economist whose primary interest is to solve important social problems by combining insights gleaned from the fields of psychology and economics. A major area of research is the study of how and why people plan or do not plan well for the future. Benartzi uses this line of research to develop new programs to encourage saving for retirement. In addition to his college teaching duties and research, Benzarti is cofounder of the Behavioral Finance Forum, a collective of forty prominent academics and forty major financial institutions from around the globe. The forum assists people in making better financial decisions by fostering collaborative research efforts between academics and industry leaders.
A contributor to academic journals, Benzarti is also the author or coauthor of books focusing on his areas of interest. He is coauthor with science writer Roger Lewin of Save More Tomorrow: Practical Behavioral Finance Solutions to Improve 401K Plans. The book is based on Benartzi’s development of the Save More Tomorrow(TM) (SMarT) program, a behavioral prescription designed to help employees increase their savings rates over time via various innovative strategies for improving 401(k) retirement plans. Benarzi and Lewin are also authors of Thinking Smarter: Seven Steps to Your Fulfilling Retirement–and Life, in which a seven-step system called the Goal Planning System is presented. Benartzi “has become a superstar in the pensions world for the ways he has found to nudge savers into putting aside more for their retirement,” wrote Ruth Lythe in an article on the This Is Money Web site.
Benartzi is also the coauthor with Jonah Lehrer of The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior. The book examines the modern digital age within the context of how to make better online decisions when selecting services and products. Benartzi and Lehrer begin by discussing how the digital age has changed the way we live. For example, they discuss how the proliferation of digital viewing and an overload of information has led to an increase in attention scarcity. Benartzi and Lehrer point out that the sheer volume of information online and the associated choices available coupled with the ease of clicking on the “buy” button often lead to poor decision making. Benartzi “goes far beyond the shallow popular criticisms of the new technologies and tries to analyze the ways by which these technologies affect our behavior and our economies,” noted Web Mindset Web site contributor Reza Shabanali.
Drawing from the latest research Benzarti and Lehrer examine the various ways digital designs potentially influence decision making. These include such unusual examples as the finding that people are more likely to add bacon to their pizza and make other unhealthy food choice if they order online. Another finding is that a book’s content is harder to remember if the book is read online. Benzarti and Lehrer also point out that people are often not giving the proper attention to ferreting out those businesses and services that typically charge more because they are good at controlling the online viewer’s attention and enticing them to make superficial decisions.
The authors also address social media as they examine the disinhibition associated with Facebook posts, which also applies to comments on Yelp reviews. Benartzi and Lehrer provide numerous tips on making decisions. They also address how to read on the screen with more comprehension, such as changing fonts. The Smarter Screen includes a summary focusing on tools for the future and an appendix that provides a complete list of tools associated with bringing about onscreen behavioral changes.
The Smarter Screen “provides valuable, useful guidelines,” wrote E.G. Ferris in Choice, adding: “Some of the research information he shares has troubling implications.” Web Mindset contributor Reza Shabanali remarked: “The book is rich in collecting and reporting fascinating research showing how our mind processes information in the new digital world.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, June, 2016, E.G. Ferris, review of The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways To Influence and Improve Online Behavior, p. 1502.
Library Journal, October 1, 2015, Lucy Heckman, review of The Smarter Screen, p. 89.
ONLINE
A Source of Inspiration, http://www.asourceofinspiration.com/ (November 25, 2015), Armando Alves, review of The Smarter Screen.
Brands and Films, http://brandsandfilms.com/ (December 1, 2015), review of The Smarter Screen.
Fuller & Thaler Asset Management Web site, http://www.fullerthaler.com/ (April 29, 2017), author profile.
Psychology Today Online, https://www.psychologytoday.com/ (September 01, 2009), John Nofsinger, “Will You Save More Tomorrow.”
TED Web site, https://www.ted.com/ (April 29, 2017), author profile.
This Is Money, http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/ (December 8, 2015), Ruth Lythe, “Meet the Champagne-Swigging Professor on a Mission to Solve Britain’s Savings Crisis by Persuading Us to Put More into our Pensions.”
UCLA Anderson School of Management Web site, http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/ (April 29, 2017), author faculty profile.
Web Mindset, http://webmindset.net/ (March 26, 2017), Reza Shabanali, review of The Smarter Screen.*
Shlomo Benartzi is a behavioral economist, interested in combining the insights of psychology and economics to solve big societal problems. His goal is to help people make better decisions on a very large scale. He received a Ph.D. from Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, and is currently a Professor and co-chair of the Behavioral Decision-Making Group at UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Professor Benartzi’s previous work has demonstrated the potential for far-reaching improvement. Along with Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, he pioneered the Save More Tomorrow™ program (SMarT), a behavioral prescription designed to help employees increase their savings rates gradually over time. At one organization, SMarT increased employee savings rates from 3.5% to 13.6%. The SMarT program is now offered by more than half of the large retirement plans in the U.S. and a growing number of plans in Australia and the U.K. The program has also been incorporated in the Pension Protection Act of 2006, helping millions of Americans boost their retirement savings.
Professor Benartzi’s current focus is online behavior, studying the ways in which people think differently on screens. The end goal is to use this knowledge to design more effective information and choice architectures, thus improving decision-making for millions of people at a time. Professor Benartzi latest book, THE SMARTER SCREEN: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior, will be released by Penguin Portfolio in October 2015.
Shlomo Benartzi
Economist
TED Speaker
Shlomo Benartzi uses behavioral economics to study how and why we plan well for the future (or fail to), and uses that to develop new programs to encourage saving for retirement.
Why you should listen
Shlomo Benartzi studies behavioral finance with a special interest in personal finance. He is co-founder of the Behavioral Finance Forum (www.behavioralfinanceforum.com), a collective of 40 prominent academics and 40 major financial institutions from around the globe. The Forum helps consumers make better financial decisions by fostering collaborative research efforts between academics and industry leaders.
Benartzi’s most significant research contribution is the development of Save More Tomorrow™ (SMarT), a behavioral prescription designed to help employees increase their savings rates gradually over time.
Shlomo Benartzi
Professor of Accounting
Phone: (310) 206-9939
benartzi@ucla.edu
Biography
Shlomo Benartzi is a behavioral economist, interested in combining the insights of psychology and economics to solve big societal problems. His goal is to help people make better decisions on a very large scale. He received a Ph.D. from Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, and is currently a Professor and co-chair of the Behavioral Decision-Making Group at UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Professor Benartzi's previous work has demonstrated the potential for far-reaching improvement. Along with Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, he pioneered the Save More Tomorrow program (SMarT), a behavioral prescription designed to help employees increase their savings rates gradually over time. At one organization, SMarT increased employee savings rates from 3.5% to 13.6%. The SMarT program is now offered by more than half of the large retirement plans in the U.S. and a growing number of plans in Australia and the U.K. The program has also been incorporated in the Pension Protection Act of 2006, helping millions of Americans boost their retirement savings.
Professor Benartzi's current focus is online behavior, studying the ways in which people think differently on screens. The end goal is to use this knowledge to design more effective information and choice architectures, thus improving decision-making for millions of people at a time. Professor Benartzi is co-author of THE SMARTER SCREEN: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior, published by Penguin Portfolio in 2015.
Professor Benartzi has supplemented his academic research with policy work and practical experience. He has advised government agencies in the U.S. and abroad and has helped craft numerous legislative efforts. He currently serves as Chief Scientist for the California Digital Nudge Initiative. He has also worked with many financial institutions, served on multiple advisory boards and currently serves as a senior academic advisor for the Voya Institute for Behavioral Finance Innovation.
Additional Content
Selected Publications
Benartzi, Shlomo and Richard H. Thaler, “Behavioral Economics and the Retirement Savings Crisis,” Science, March 8, 2013, Vol. 339, pp. 1152–1153.
Benartzi, Shlomo, Alessandro Previtero, and Richard H. Thaler, “Annuity Puzzles,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2011, Vol. 25.4, pp. 143–64. [ Link ]
Shlomo Benartzi, and Richard H. Thaler. (Summer 2007). Heuristics and Biases in Retirement Savings Behavior. Journal of Economic Perspectives. [ Link ]
Shlomo Benartzi, and Richard H. Thaler. (February 2004). Save More Tomorrow: Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Employee Savings. Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 112.1, Part 2, pp. S164-S187. [ Link ]
Shlomo Benartzi, and Richard H. Thaler. (March 2001). Naive Diversification Strategies in Retirement Saving Plans. American Economic Review, Vol. 91.1, pp. 79-98. [ Link ]
Shlomo Benartzi, and Richard H. Thaler. (February 1995). Myopic Loss-Aversion and the Equity Premium Puzzle. Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 110.1, pp. 73-92. [ Link ]
Shlomo Benartzi's Vita and Publications
Course Materials for Psychology and Personal Finance
CV: http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/Documents/areas/adm/web/SHLOMO.pdf
Professor Shlomo Benartzi is a leading authority on behavioral finance with a special interest in household finance and participant behavior in retirement savings plans. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, and he is currently a Professor and co-chair of the Behavioral Decision-Making Group at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Professor Benartzi’s most significant research contribution is the development, with Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, of Save More Tomorrow (SMarT), a behavioral prescription designed to help employees increase their savings rates gradually over time. At one organization, SMarT increased employee savings rates from 3.5% to 13.6%. The SMarT program is now offered by more than half of the large retirement plans in the U.S. and a growing number of plans in Australia and the U.K. The program has also been incorporated in the Pension Protection Act of 2006, helping millions of Americans boost their retirement savings.
Professor Benartzi has supplemented his academic research with both policy work and practical experience. He has advised government agencies in the U.S. and abroad and has helped craft numerous legislative efforts and pension reforms. He has also worked with many financial institutions and served on about half a dozen advisory boards, and currently serves as an academic advisor and chief behavioral economist for the Allianz Global Investors Center for Behavioral Finance. Professor Benartzi is also a co-founder of the Behavioral Finance Forum, an organization dedicated to helping consumers make better financial decisions by fostering collaborative efforts between academics, industry leaders and government officials.
Meet the champagne-swigging professor on a mission to solve Britain's savings crisis by persuading us to put more into our pensions
By Ruth Lythe for the Daily Mail
Published: 22:25 BST, 8 December 2015 | Updated: 15:27 BST, 9 December 2015
23
shares
View comments
Savings superstar: Professor Shlomo Benartzi
+2
Savings superstar: Professor Shlomo Benartzi
‘People do stupid things with their money,’ says Professor Shlomo Benartzi.
It’s a phrase this leading economist repeats often.
‘Take residents of Singapore, for example. The average household spends £2,500 on lottery tickets a year. But the odds of winning are tiny.’
It’s certainly a staggering statistic — and Shlomo has dozens more of them that highlight what foolish decisions we all make.
But as one of the world’s leading academics, he’s been trying to get ordinary consumers to change their ways.
In fact, this tall and direct man is credited with changing the fortunes of millions of Americans — and now he’s set his sights on doing the same in the UK.
Shlomo has become a superstar in the pensions world for the ways he has found to nudge savers into putting aside more for their retirement.
‘Instead of making fun of people for their mistakes, I see my job is to look at the errors people make and to help them change their behaviour so they save more for their futures,’ he says.
‘I never dreamt how effective these techniques could be.’
A number of British firms are convinced Professor Benartzi may be the man to rescue us from our woeful retirement savings record.
He’s done this in America through a scheme called Save More Tomorrow, developed with fellow academic Richard Thaler.
The basic idea is that when a saver signs up to a pension scheme with a company, they tick a box agreeing to give up a little of their pay increase every year and pay it into a pension.
So the worker still gets a pay bump, but they’re also saving a little bit more every year, though they don’t notice it happening.
Little by little, their pension grows — and far faster than if they had continued with their old habits.
RELATED ARTICLES
Previous
1
Next
Nursing home fees on course to reach £70k A YEAR by 2035 -...
Pensions data hack is 'an incident waiting to happen'...
UK state pension is among the stingiest in the developed...
Unregulated firms of financial advisers duping customers...
Share this article
Share
23 shares
HOW THIS IS MONEY CAN HELP
Need help managing your pension? Find an independent financial adviser near you
In recent years, the method has become hugely popular among policymakers as they try to find ways of making saving more palatable. In the pensions world, the idea has made Benartzi a star.
And when we meet, he’s behaving like it.
For 20 minutes I’ve been left waiting for him in the empty dining room of a Michelin-star restaurant in London. A giant table is laid for a four-course meal being prepared in his honour.
Eventually the professor — athletic-looking and with a shaven head — stomps in.
He is dressed in dark trousers and a white shirt with his initials embroidered on his cuffs. He gives me a hard stare, shakes my hand and flops into one of the chairs.
‘I need alcohol,’ he says brusquely. He orders a glass of champagne.
Benartzi, 46, based at Anderson School of Management at the University of California, has risen to stardom because his area of expertise, behavioural economics, has never been in such high demand.
Roughly speaking, it’s a way of uncovering how economics can influence consumers’ behaviour.
Since 2012, policymakers have used the emerging science of behavioural economics to sign up millions of workers into pensions for the first time.
The idea is that while most people intend to save for their retirement, many never get round to it.
Instead, a policy of auto-enrolment relies on our natural laziness. Rather than waiting for you to opt into pension schemes, you are automatically enrolled; if you don’t want to save, you have to opt out, and most never do.
Ideas on how this can work further are expanding by the day. The Government even has a ‘Nudge unit’, a team of behavioural experts, who work on ways to influence everything from switching energy provider to becoming organ donors.
WILL YOUR PENSION BE ENOUGH? LISTEN TO SIMON LAMBERT ON WHAT YOU'LL GET
Shlomo is slumped in his chair swigging his champagne — he’s clearly had a bad day. He comes alive, though, when he talks about our savings habits.
‘I’m a very emotional sort of guy, helping people makes things more exciting for me,’ he says.
‘With behavioural economics we can look at the obstacles that stand in their way and turn slip-ups into opportunities.’
With behavioural economics we can look at the obstacles that stand in their way and turn slip-ups into opportunities.
Shlomo started to develop his ideas as a PhD student at Cornell University in the Nineties, following an economics degree completed in just two years at Tel Aviv University.
Save More Tomorrow came about in 1998.
Around two-thirds of big companies in America signed up to the scheme, or one similar, and it has played a huge part in easing the U.S. savings crisis.
In one company, workers who signed up to the scheme increased their contributions from 3.5 per cent of their salary to 13.6 per cent in three-and-a-half years.
By contrast, those employees who don’t sign up are squirrelling away only half this amount.
If a similar scheme came to the UK it could see someone increase their pension contributions from 4 per cent to 8 per cent.
For a 30-year-old earning £35,000, these extra savings could be worth more than £44,000 by the time they retire.
Nudge: The basic idea is that when a saver signs up to a pension scheme with a company, they tick a box agreeing to give up a little of their pay increase every year and pay it into a pension
+2
Nudge: The basic idea is that when a saver signs up to a pension scheme with a company, they tick a box agreeing to give up a little of their pay increase every year and pay it into a pension
Benartzi is helping the National Employment Savings Trust (Nest), the Government-backed body that provides pensions for two million workers.
He says: ‘Nest has made it much easier for people to save, and the number of people who have left the scheme has been remarkably low. It is a huge improvement on how things stood in the past.
‘But there is a danger that a lot of people may have the illusion they are saving for retirement but may eventually find they have been putting away too little, and by then it is too late. We have the opportunity to make it easier for people to save more today.’
Benartzi’s next big idea is to get savers to manage their retirement savings using a mobile phone.
He wants companies to lay out their smartphone sites so that it’s harder to make spur-of-the-moment decisions and more appealing and easier to save.
There is a danger that a lot of people may have the illusion they are saving for retirement but may eventually find they have been putting away too little, and by then it is too late
‘The challenge is that people tend to make more emotional and impulsive decisions on their smartphones.
'If you make it easy for someone to withdraw their cash then they will. I would like to see the Government give awards to pension companies based on how well they design their smartphone apps.’
Professor Benartzi grew up in Israel, where he has admitted to annoying his teachers by shouting out the answers to questions in class.
You can see his mind is still constantly darting all over the place. At one point his curiosity about what’s in the next room gets the better of him. He suddenly leaps out of his seat and dashes over to find out.
Then he starts quizzing me and the waiter about the history of the restaurant. He seems thrilled that it was probably built in the 18th century but also mildly disappointed that it’s not possible to knock it down and rebuild it.
He lives in Santa Monica with his wife and five-year-old daughter. His day starts at 5.10am with a quick breakfast of oatmeal and fruit before heading to a nearby cafe.
He returns home around 8am to take his daughter to school before exercising for a few hours in his swimming pool and stretching.
He then might go into the University of California but likes to be at home for lunch, where he digs into a healthy plate of steamed fish and vegetables. If this all seems a little too virtuous, he admits that in the evenings he’s partial to glass of wine.
He’s clearly a wine buff and so spends the rest of our interview quizzing the waiter about what red would match best with the meal before settling on a magnum of Mas de Daumas Gassac from 2008 — priced £195.
The guests look slightly starstruck as they come in. But he’ll have deserved all his plaudits if he can get UK consumers to change their ways.
Read more: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-3351794/Meet-champagne-swigging-professor-mission-solve-Britain-s-savings-crisis-persuading-pensions.html#ixzz4cQD535mz
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Benartzi, Shlomo with Jonah Lehrer. The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways To Influence and Improve Online Behavior
Lucy Heckman
140.16 (Oct. 1, 2015): p89.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Benartzi, Shlomo with Jonah Lehrer. The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways To Influence and Improve Online Behavior. Portfolio. Oct. 2015. 256p. notes, index. ISBN 9781591847861. $27.95; ebk. ISBN 9780698194304. BUS
Benartzi (professor & cochair, Behavioral Decision-Making Group, Univ. of California Los Angeles's Anderson Sch. of Management; Save More Tomorrow) with science writer Lehrer (How We Decide) describes the impact of the digital age on decision making, selection of services and products, and how the "digital revolution is changing the way we live." People today spend time not passively watching screens but interacting with them. Benartzi believes it's possible to improve the choices made during those interactions. Offering consumers a tournament model--think Wimbledon and March Madness--is one solution described; this theory, based on work led by Tibor Besedes, aims to promote improved decision making. Case studies and thought-provoking exercises for readers include selecting from a series of health insurance options, a test of memory, and a series of Ask Yourself questions. Benartzi summarizes useful tools for triggering behavioral change onscreen--they include guidance to factor in the attention environment; when in doubt, err on the side of simplicity; offer a manageable consideration set; and create thinking tools. VERDICT Recommended to business practitioners, faculty, and students of business and psychology.--Lucy Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., Queens, NY
Heckman, Lucy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Heckman, Lucy. "Benartzi, Shlomo with Jonah Lehrer. The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways To Influence and Improve Online Behavior." Library Journal, 1 Oct. 2015, p. 89. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA430497097&it=r&asid=c0d41b40b07f07dca893ba18c70114d7. Accessed 26 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A430497097
Benartzi, Shlomo: The smarter screen: surprising ways to influence and improve online behavior
E.G. Ferris
53.10 (June 2016): p1502.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Benartzi, Shlomo. The smarter screen: surprising ways to influence and improve online behavior, by Shlomo Benartzi with Jonah Lehrer. Portfolio/Penguin, 2015. 248p Index ISBN 9781591847861 cloth, $27.95
(cc) 53-4400
HF5415
MARC
Benartzi, a behavioral economist, provides valuable, useful guidelines for users and designers of screens. Some of the research information he shares has troubling implications. For example, people are more likely to score lower on standardized tests taken online. Other examples focus on online behavior on websites for travel agencies, Uber, health plan enrollment, and financial services. Benartzi integrates easy to understand definitions of technical terms into the text and an appendix. Each chapter has an "Ask Yourself" section that summarizes key points and strategies. Research is explained in enough detail to provide a sophisticated level of understanding in both the body and the notes. The book includes information on online sources that enable readers to access many of the screen views that research subjects saw. They might even have fun doing so. Readers will develop a basic understanding of such things as the impact of color, brightness, position on screen, vertical versus horizontal arrangement, length of exposure, readability of the font, and the amount of information on decision making. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All levels.--E G. Ferris, Goodwin College
Ferris, E.G.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ferris, E.G. "Benartzi, Shlomo: The smarter screen: surprising ways to influence and improve online behavior." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1502. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942811&it=r&asid=66993151ea0cbd3d21760cb6e9ca357f. Accessed 26 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942811
There is a passage in the book that covers the scarcity of our attention and I especially liked the quote by a Nobel prize winner Herbert A. Simon who once said: “…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention …”. The human mind can only process a limited pieces of information and we are constantly unable to focus on more than a few things at the same time.
I’ve started reading The Smarter Screen, written by behavioral economist Shlomo Benartzi, as a blogger who covers product placement in the movies and TV shows. However I soon realized that the book works better if I forget about product placement and start reading it as a head of digital marketing, which is my current occupation. I found several very interesting and useful topics that I could apply to my work.
The Smarter Screen by Shlomo Benartzi
The Smarter Screen by Shlomo Benartzi
The Smarter Screen is essentially about the use of screens that should make us smarter. Not literally, but screens should be designed in a way that we make better decisions and that they actually improve out lives.
Benartzi uses a lot of cases, examples, studies … that give examples of how a mind works and how can we apply that knowledge to designing online screens. There is however an abundance of information and choices that we must tackle every day and I agree with Benartzi who said that human attention has become the sweet crude oil of the twenty-first century.
Back in 1956 George Miller presented a paper where he insisted that people can remember only about seven pieces of information at any given time. Psychologist Nelson Cowan argued that the true magical number is actually four. What is the outcome of this: in a world overflown with information and because our mind has a limited power of processing, we are consistently forced to choose what to attend to. We can only check four bits of information. And as Benartzi said: the rest is noise. Well, scientists blame inattention blindness for those mental deficits. It occurs whenever the amount of information that goes to our brain exceeds our ability to process it. We just don’t notice things or words.
The Smarter Screen by Shlomo Benartzi
The Smarter Screen by Shlomo Benartzi
The book can be useful to all of us working in digital sphere, but we could apply some findings to product placement as well. Let’s try to narrow them down:
more and more people watch movies, TV shows and music videos on small screens where the visibility is lower than in cinema or on TV screen
human attention is low and we can’t process all information
we can only remember a finite (and small) number of things
there are some display biases, e.g. the items that are in the center of the screen have much higher visibility
personalization is a really powerful tool.
But how can we apply those findings to product placement? Some issues are quite easy to take into account, for example the number of placements in a movie, TV show or music video. People just can’t remember unnecessary details and sometimes it’s better not to pursue some deals. Brands and products that appear on the screen for a fraction of a second won’t provide the desired impact – viewers won’t notice them or they will forget about them.
The Smarter Screen, Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior by Shlomo Benartzi with Jonah Lehrer is available on The Smarter Screen or The Smarter Screen.
Book Review: The Smarter Screen (By Shlomo Benartzi and Jonah Lehrer)
by Reza Shabanali
The smarter screen front cover - Surprising ways to influence and improve online behavior
Most of us now spend a majority of our waking hours watching screens: Mobile screens, Laptop screens or TV screens.
So it’s interesting and critical to study the ways in which people think differently on the screens.
Such studies can help online marketers to influence online behavior while developing a rich body of knowledge on designing more effective choice architectures.
Shlomo Benartzi has done an excellent job in using insights from behavioral economics to explain how people respond to digital information on a screen.
He goes far beyond the shallow popular criticisms of the new technologies and tries to analyze the ways by which these technologies affect our behavior and our economies.
Attention scarcity is the first result of the new digital gadgets. An important concern that Benartzi expresses using a famous quote from Noble-prize winner Herbert Simon:
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention - Herbert Simon
In the world of screens, the first impression is one of the most powerful shaping forces in managing attention flow, a critical point that should be seriously considered by digital designers as well as authors.
The book is rich in collecting and reporting fascinating research showing how our mind processes information in the new digital world. A world that is full of digital screens and people who are craving for the fastest and easiest way to receive and digest information.
The smarter screen somehow reminds me the theme of Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. The irrational humans of the physical world have found a new place to live and evolve their long-lived irrationality.
The irrational humans of the physical world have found a new place to live and evolve their long-lived irrationality.
As a reader who is interested in content strategy, the core message of the book can be stated as follows:
In the world of endless possibilities for finding the desired content, better curators would have a greater chance of success. In other words:
While the last decade was belonging to search engine specialists, the content curators would reign the next decade.
About the authors
Schlomo Benartzi is a leading behavioral economist and faculty member of UCLA Anderson School of Management.
He serves as Chief Scientist for the California Digital Nudge Initiative and has also worked for many financial institutions.
Although Shlomo Benartzi has addressed Jonah Lehrer as his collaborator, as publisher mentioned the name of Jonah Lehrer with a far smaller type size on the cover, it may look safe to consider Shlomo Benartzi as the main author of the book.
However, in my opinion, after it was revealed that he has fabricated some quotes in his bestselling book Imagine (2012), may publisher has decided to understate his contribution to protect the credibility of the book.
It’s worth mentioning that as a reader of Lehrer’s instructive and inspiring books, I believe that the publishing industry has gone too far in penalizing his misdeed.
Review: The Smarter Screen
By Armando Alves in Books on 2015/11/25
If you’re reading this on a screen, let me tell you there are better ways you can do it.
Or at least, that’s what I’ve learned with Shlomo Benartzi’s book “The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behaviorâ€, which offers solutions to improve our digital lives by managing the surplus of digital information and our relation with screens.
Disclaimer:  book kindly sent by publisher/PR agency .
“a wealth of information creates a poverty of attentionâ€
— Herbert Simon
The book starts by recognising that we’re mostly not paying attention and those companies and services that excel at controlling attention can easily charge more, with Online Travel Agents given as an example.
With our working memory increasingly smaller, it’s important to find ways to provide shortcuts and ease the cognitive load on screens, making us less vulnerable to the limits of attention.  From writing less verbose copy to listicles, each time we don’t compete for limited attention, we win.
“It’s not that screens are making us more superficial. Rather, the world of screens merely makes it easier for us to act on these superficial first impressionsâ€
The author provides at digitai.org a few examples on how we process information on screens, even at an unconscious level, before we get a chance to analyse the information, similar to Motivational Research studies done in advertising in the 50’s.  We think different on screens, from first impressions on Tinder to buying more expensive items when on mobile,  which highlights the importance on how we build experiences on screens, besides content and imagery.
“In a world of screens, the act of looking has never mattered moreâ€
According to Katherina Reinecke’s research described on the book, and which you can explore at http://www.labinthewild.org/, colourfulness and visual complexity are key variables determining our aesthetic preferences on screens,  influencing the way we trust brands online or amplifying how we behave on screens,  and even determining the success or failure of brands.
Using screens is also about feedback, and managing the volume of information provided, a challenge to be reckoned as Internet Of Things will make it harder to process all this data available. The author also discusses the issue of dishinibition effect we face on Yelp reviews or Facebook comments, and how we deal with not having other people around. Note of warning: avoid ordering food online – we make less nutritional choices as we’re less worried about what other people think.
Another practical tip I found on the book, that curiously I used unconsciously on my Kindle/iPad, was changing the reading font for better comprehension when in learning mode. A lack of spatio-temporal markers on screens leads to reduce reading comprehension, so a disfluent font (uglier or less common) will slow us down and allow us to process information better. It’s similar to note taking: we do it better on paper than on a laptop.
We don’t want endless possibilities.
What we really crave is effective curation.
In the real world we usually have a limited set of choices, but online they multiply, and not in a good way. The websites offering better routes and less possibilities usually succeed, with consideration sets being a way to deal with too many alternatives and too little time. From category filters to personalisation, online services can find better shortcuts and influence consumer choices.
The book is a good entry point for those interested in UX or those working in advertising trying to influence decisions on screens. It’s somewhere between Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make me Think†and Heath’s “Decisiveâ€, mixing research with practical consideration on how to be smarter when using our screens.
John Nofsinger Ph.D.
John Nofsinger Ph.D.
Mind on My Money
Will You Save More Tomorrow?
The SMarT program uses psychology to help employees save.
Posted Sep 01, 2009
SHARE
TWEET
EMAIL
MORE
Source:
If you plan to live a life of comfort in retirement, most of your retirement income will need to come from your savings. Social Security won't provide much and defined benefit retirement plans are becoming extinct. So how do we get people to contribute to their own defined contribution plan (i.e., 401k plan)?
Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi proposed a four-step approach that they call Save More Tomorrow (SMarT) that overcomes several psychological biases. They suggest that employees who are not contributing to their 401(k) plan can begin to do so by agreeing to the following plan:
(1) The employee is asked to agree to the plan well in advance; that is, the decision does not have any immediate ramifications.
(2) The plan starts by having the employee agree to begin contributing at his/her next pay raise with a small contribution rate, such as 2 percent. By combining a pay raise with the contribution, the employee still sees a small increase in pay but also begins the contribution.
(3) The employee agrees to increase the contribution rate at each pay raise until a preset maximum level is reached.
(4) The employee can opt out of the plan at any time. Although the hope is that employees will not opt out, the ability to do so makes them more comfortable about joining the plan.
(5) The SMarT plan requires the employees to make decisions far in advance, and then the status quo bias works to their advantage because they do not take the option of opting out of the plan.
This plan was tested at a midsize manufacturing company whose savings participation rate was low. The 315 employees had an average savings rate of 4.4% of their earnings. They were asked to increase their contribution by 5%. Those employees who claimed they could not contribute the 5% were offered the SMarT program. The program was made available to 207 employees, and 162 employees agreed to join. These employees had a low savings rate of 3.5%, on average. The 153 employees who did not join the SMarT plan either did nothing or made a one-time increase in their savings rate. On average, the people who did not adopt the SMarT plan had a savings rate of 5.3%. The effect of joining the plan was dramatic. After three pay raises, those who had joined the SMarT plan had increased their savings rate from 3.5 to 11.6%. Those who did not join the SMarT plan increased their savings rate from 5.3% to only 7.5%. The dramatic increase in the savings rate associated with the SMarT plan was beneficial to those employees because they began saving more for their retirement.
For other programs that use psychology to help people make better decisions, see my post.
Reference: Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi, "Save More Tomorrow: Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Employee Savings," Journal of Political Economy 112(2004): S164-S187.