Choice Architecture as a Strategy to Encourage Elegant Infrastructure Outcomes

Abstract

Infrastructure that meets users’ needs with less complexity can satisfy growing demand and relieve system pressures. Such outcomes are defined as elegant. Unfortunately, social and cognitive biases can inhibit infrastructure stakeholders from achieving these outcomes. In other fields, similar biases are overcome with well-designed choice architecture, which considers how the presentation of choices effects the decisions that are ultimately made. Using a metasynthesis research approach, this article describes cognitive biases that can inhibit elegant infrastructure and then presents strategies to mitigate these biases with choice architecture interventions. The emphasis here is on high-impact decisions with cost-effective and plausible choice architecture interventions. This systematic merging of behavioral science and infrastructure systems is meant to provide readers with the background and examples needed to investigate choice architecture as a strategy to influence the infrastructure outcomes they desire.