5 Things / Nextdoor nudges

This week I learned that the Nextdoor app added nudges to the user experience to reduce racial profiling and online bullying. The app prompts users who appear to be reporting a crime to consider whether what they're seeing is really a crime (walking in a neighborhood isn't, for example) and to not  rely on racial description in their reports. Nextdoor encourages users to provide more unique and complete details, such as clothing, tattoos, and facial hair.

Those nudges reduced racial profiling on the app by 70% globally. The app also has a built-in content moderator that prompts users to consider kindness when replying to posts. This nudge led to 1/3 of replies being rewritten.

Nextdoor showed an awareness of behavioral science by using nudges to shift users towards inclusion. One of my favorite books on the subject is Inclusion Nudges, a crowd-sourced collection of behavioral science-approved "nudges" that, among other things, aim to set inclusion as the default. Fun fact: one of my nudges from my former wedding career is in there!

This matters because, unless we change the systems and policies so that inclusion is the default, there's going to be an awful lot of bias and harassment. Because we're human, after all. (That's why my book Inclusive 360 is heavily focused on policy change.)

Here are some of the other good vibes I learned this week:

Image by Tom Wilson

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5 Things / an inclusive future

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5 Things in 15 Minutes / making it right with Erma BreAnn Standley