It all seems to be about ‘nudges’ at the moment. With the UK Government creating its Behavioural Insight Team, lovingly nicknamed ‘the nudge unit’, and with behavioural economics becoming more and more recognised I seem to stumble into examples everywhere. This one in particular deals with the elephant in the room topic of addiction to online pornography (don’t ask how I stumbled into it).

The basis is that many people are becoming addicted to watching internet porn and that it’s ruining their lives. Whilst I’m not too sure about the research to back that claim up the XXX Church has decided to do something about it. The XXX Church is run by a group of Christians who aim to help people change their behaviour towards pornography and have developed an interesting tool to help to ‘nudge’ them in the right direction. The X3 Watch is a piece of software that you load onto your computer, phone or tablet device (basically all your internet enabled devices) and it monitors what websites you visit. All very well and good, but why would that stop you looking at porn? Well, part of the software asks you to nominate an ‘accountability partner’, such as your mum, other family member or friend, and the software sends a weekly report to them of your internet activity. The software also lets your ‘partner’ know if you uninstall the software.

I’ve no idea how popular this software has been but I’d be interested to know how many people have made the decision to load it on and what the feedback has been. Less of a ‘nudge’ and more of a shove really.