"Sludge": How bureaucracies abuse your time | Cass Sunstein for Big Think

All over the world, 'sludge' is an obstacle to freedom. Sludge consists of frictions that separate us from something we want. When there's waiting time, paperwork requirements, some confusing process that you can't navigate— that's sludge. It's like a kind of gooey, viscous substance in which your feet are stuck and you can't get out. If you're dealing with a criminal justice system, it's especially severe, but if you're dealing with a hospital or your employer, your school, your government, or company, it can also be really bad. And it's not merely frustrating; it's treating you without dignity.

The question is: What are we gonna do about it? Sludge reduction can produce big dividends. My name is Cass Sunstein. I teach at Harvard Law School. I have a new book; it's called "Sludge," and it's about what makes it hard for us to get where we're trying to go. Sludge can be good when it is ensuring that people aren't reckless or impulsive. For example, if you need to get a driver's license, you will encounter some sludge. It's justified. You shouldn't get a driver's license just because you want one. It's a matter of health and safety.

Sludge can also be good when it's a way of ensuring that the people who are seeking benefits are actually entitled to them. So, to impose a little bit of sludge to make sure that those who are trying to get something from the government or company actually have a right to that thing, that's 'okay sludge.' Sludge is bad when it makes navigation really hard between a human being and something that can make their life much better. So, it might be that in order to get a loan, you need to fill out paperwork, and it might be 14 pages. And each of the pages might have really small font.

And we might, three pages in, give up and think, "I can't handle this," or "I'll handle this tomorrow." And tomorrow never comes. Sludge. To get health care, sometimes you might have to wait for weeks or months to get a test—sludge. And you might find in a hospital, for example, that nurses are spending 10 hours a week entering things into forms— that's sludge. Our lives depend on our capacity to navigate something, and when we can't, frequently because sludge stands in our way, we're lost in a world of just fog and diminishment.

One of the less lovely facts of the last decades of research into behavioral science is that we now know more than we ever did about how to manipulate people. But if you have a company that wants to make money at people's expense, it can use sludge strategically as a way of achieving that goal. 'Dark patterns' are patterns of architecture online that end up exploiting people's lack of information or behavioral biases to ensure that they end up buying things they really ought not to buy, or that they part with something that matters to them without fully knowing what they're getting into.

So, for many of us, unsubscribing to something is an ordeal. And that's intended by the people who make it an ordeal because subscribing makes them money. They impose sludge in order to make it hard for us to unsubscribe. I myself subscribe to four magazines which I more or less hate because I didn't want to navigate the sludge that was entailed in the unsubscribing to those products. It's also the case that you can use sludge as a way of disguising terms that you're obliging people contractually to agree to.

It's time to recognize, right, not to be manipulated, and often the method by which people are manipulated is through the selective imposition of sludge. Some of the most admirable designers of programs or cities or products are acutely attentive not only to the product itself but to what human beings are actually like— and often with a kind of humor and delight. Never with a sense of condescension, and never exploiting people's human foibles to try to trap or trick them.

We can think of companies that are minimalist with respect to sludge, in the sense that it's just really easy to deal with them. If you want to buy something, return something, make a complaint— they make it really easy for you. The products...