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Nudging is a process of changing something or someone one little bit at a time. Small changes that compound become large changes fairly quickly, so it's important to understand what changes are being made and how they can play into the larger picture. This idea can be used as a tool to change bad habits into good habits, like being more productive or fixing your sleep schedule.

This idea should be a bit of a no-brainer, really. Of course it's easier to make changes slowly over time, that's obviously much easier than doing large changes. So it's also important to look at it on a large scale and see what society pushes as small changes, and what they may lead to if they compound. Recently, there have been a number of breaches of trust among corporations and the (federal) government that seem to be becoming more and more frequent thus nudging the population into accepting that this type of behavior is acceptable. On the other hand, nudging can be a good thing for society such as slowly improving gay rights and recognizing the importance of climate change. In fact, the latter is a great example of physical nudging where, since the industrial revolution, humans have been adding more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, thus nudging the global temperature up as more heat is trapped inside. This process could be reversed if we filter such gasses out and the temperature can be nudged back down.

All things have intertia, and generally it's easier to get things moving if given numerous litte pushes rather than trying to do one big one.