From Pangaro and Dubberly, biocost is the energy expended by an organism to do a specific action. To hail a cab on the street, you have to raise your arm. A quick, informal comparison of various ways of getting dinner: Cooking dinner requires biocost expended over different areas, and arguably more biocost than eating out. Cooking dinner has more and more complicated steps, requiring thinking of what to have for dinner, verifying the ingredients, preparing the ingredients, cooking, monitoring the cooking, serving and eating. There is also cleanup afterwards. Eating out substitutes those preparatory cooking steps and the post-meal cleanup with the difficulty of choosing and traveling to the restaurant. Ordering in (delivery) is perhaps the lowest biocost method of getting food, as we eliminate all steps but ordering and paying.
Biocost is related to nudge in that if a person is nudged toward a specific choice outcome, choosing the nudged or incentivized outcome has a lower biocost because of the effort expended by the system to nudge the less aware user towards a specific outcome.
When people walk in counterclockwise circles in Stephen Neely’s eurhythmics classes, they are reducing biocost. Most people are right foot dominant, and tend to take slightly longer steps with the right foot. To walk in a straight line would take paying slight attention and correcting stride length in concordance with their goal. The rest of the people follow the flocking behavior and also walk in counterclockwise circles to avoid bumping into others. Lost in the woods, walking in circles…