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Limited Bandwidth
If you think about the human mind, the general fact is that our bandwidth is limited. But for certain categories of people and for all of us at certain times of life, our bandwidth is really limited.
If you are hungry or busy or sick or elderly or poor, your bandwidth is by virtue of those conditions likely to be strained. So if you’re sick, you’re often thinking about the fact that you’re sick and how you’re going to get better. And so if you’re asked to do 10 things while you’re fighting, let’s say, heart disease or a bad case of COVID-19, that’s not going to happen.
If you are elderly and your processing power is reduced, let’s say just by virtue of that fact, to ask you to navigate a bunch of barriers to get, let’s say benefits to which you’re entitled, is ironically damaging. If you are poor and trying to deal with a very tough economic situation, then to ask you to navigate sludge is unrealistic and a particular form of indignity. And the worst part is that some institutions actually exploit that limited bandwidth.
So a company might know that its population, let’s say, isn’t going to be able to stay on the phone for two hours, or it might know that if the product is defective, the demographic that buys the product aren’t going to have the time to fill out the complaint form. That is a way of benefiting economically. We might even call it manipulating people.
Distributional Unfairness
Suppose you have some program that could benefit a democratically diverse group. It might be a job-training program, it might be a loan program, it might be a program that involves learning.
Now for some people, it may be that sludge is in a language that is congenial to a certain percentage of the population. So it’s fine, but it might be a certain percentage of the population just struggles with that language. That is an injustice and something can be done that might be really costless to help.
Or it might be that some part of the relevant population doesn’t have a lot of education. So navigating the sludge for it is really, really hard. And some other part of the population has plenty of education so filling out a seven-page form is a snap. That suggests that a requirement, whether it involves paperwork or attending some place physically or dealing with some conversation with an interviewer, might have distributional unfairness built into it if you’re not careful. And it can be completely unintended.
It might be easier for men to do something, maybe because they don’t take care of children as much as women, or maybe because of something in the culture. Doing something for men might be straightforward. Whereas for women, it might be particularly burdensome and that’s an injustice. And sludge can come down particularly hard on women in some nations because women bear the bulk of the burden of sludge. The paperwork and administrative tasks associated typically with households and with childcare are born disproportionately by women.
The question is, what are we going to do about that? Sludge reduction is often an engine of decreases in sex inequality. And if it works well enough, it can be an engine of increases in sex equality, which is one reason that sludge frictions of various sorts are no mere technical matter. They are sometimes associated with violations of human rights. And for architects of all kinds to be alert to the harmful effects of even a little bit of sludge, or the potentially beneficial effects of a little bit of clear, simple information, is essential to ensure that the program works well and can be essential to avoid really unintended unfairness.