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my research looks at how people can overcome Temptation and how they can achieve their goals particularly in the
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domain of health so how can people do things like exercise more eat healthier food and make and keep the medical
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appointments that they know are in their long-term best interest so let me give you a little bit um more specific
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information about what I study uh first study I wanted to mention to you is a study I did to look at um the power of
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planning prompts or prompting people to form a plan about exactly when they'll
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follow through on and engage in a good behavior like getting a flu shot or a colonoscopy and we found that when
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people are prompted to just write down the date and time when they'll get a flu
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shot we see dramatically higher rates of follow-through this also works with colonoscopies so one of my studies shows
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the power of planning prompts I have another study that I really like that looks at the power of Fresh Starts what
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do I mean by a fresh start well there are moments in our lives that feel like the start of a new era the start of a
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new cycle like the beginning of a new week the beginning of a new month the beginning of a new year following a
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holiday or following a birthday and following those kinds of Fresh Start moments people actually are more
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motivated to follow through on their goals so we see that people search more for the term diet on Google we see that
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people go to the gym more frequently following those Fresh Start moments and we also see that they create more goals
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both health and health irrelevant goals on a goal setting website and then a third study that I think is sort of
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Representative of of this line of work looks at an idea I call Temptation bundling the idea is simple um imagine
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that you really struggle to go to the gym you don't have the willpower at the
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end of a long day and imagine you also have a thing for a trashy TV show let's
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say Breaking Bad um well you feel a little guilty watching Breaking Bad when you should be doing other things so how
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do you solve these two problems well what if you only let yourself watch Breaking Bad while you were exercising
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at the gym you'd stop wasting time at home watching this TV show that you feel
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guilty about and you'd start craving trips to the gym at the end of a long day to see what happens in the next
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episode not only that you'll enjoy your workout and You're Breaking Bad episode
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more combined because you won't feel guilty watching that episode and time will fly while you're exercising at the
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gym so those are three representative examples of my work on how we can get people to achieve their goals and
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overcome Temptations the key takeaways are sort of a number of tools that you can use to
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try to help yourself or help others follow through on their goals so one key takeaway is that whenever you want to
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help somebody follow through on a goal um one thing you should do is actually prompt them to think about exactly when
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and where and how they'll accomplish that goal by prompting them to think through those things even if they do it
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privately and don't ever tell you their plans you can help them reduce the likelihood they'll actually forget to
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follow through because now there's this cue embedded in their memory that's
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going to trigger the recollection oh this is when I'm supposed to this is the
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moment I said I do it this is when I'm supposed to go to the gym and also makes
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it harder for them to procrastinate because now they're putting off something they explicitly said they do
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rather than kind of a vague intention so planning prompts are one way um people can really help one another uh increase
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goal follow through another practical implication of my work is it suggests that you may want to encourage people to
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follow through on their goals at Fresh startart moments if you're thinking about when should I remind my employe
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about this objective that she wanted to meet for instance or he wanted to meet um the best time may be after after a
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fresh start so at the beginning of a new week month year following a birthday a work anniversary or even at a moment you
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could frame to them as a fresh start for some reason it's the start of a new
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project for your team for instance so those are a couple practical implications and then Temptation
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bundling of course suggests that you can just encourage people to bundle their Temptations with things that they know
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they should do so for instance as we talked about earlier um you know bundling and engaging audio novel say or
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TV show with exercise or you could only allow yourself to say get a pedicure when catching up on over do work or to
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uh watch your favorite TV show at home when catching up on some household chores or listening to your favorite
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music while catching up on chores so those are a bunch of different practical implications of my
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work one thing I found really surprising was how huge the demand was in a study I
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ran for Temptation bundling so in this study we asked participants in our study if they' be willing to pay us um to take
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away a possession they could otherwise use freely an iPod we'd given them as
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gift that was pre-loaded with ATT tempting audio novel of their choice and lock this possession they could
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otherwise use freely at the gym so they could only access it when working out so
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we thought you know not that many people will find it attractive to pay us to take away something they could otherwise
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use whenever they want and in fact more than 60% of our participants said oo sign me up that sounds great and they
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wanted to give us money in order to take away this tempting possession so it could help them exercise more so that
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was one really interesting I thought and surprising and exciting finding I have another one that's kind of funny my
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other surprising finding is actually in the research I did on Fresh Starts also in a study looking at gym attendance and
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what we found in that study one of many things we found in that study is that people are more likely to go to the gym
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in the months following a birthday than in the months preceding it so following this fresh jart event now interestingly
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that's true for every birthday that was in our data set except one notable birthday and that's the 21st birthday uh
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you know when we first found this we were a little surprised and then pretty quickly we realized maybe there's a
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reason for that maybe that's not so bizarre after all but that was that was something that stuck out at us as
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interesting in our findings well one thing that organizations could do is simply use
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planning prompts whenever they want to encourage follow through and a good behavior so they could prompt people to
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Think Through the where when and how of engaging that behavior and that's likely
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to increase takeup another thing they could do is try to provide tools to facilitate temptation bundling so for
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instance at their gyms they could offer to um have a subscription available to Netflix that you could log into and
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watch your favorite show pick up where you left off they could hold your iPod and a locker for you so that you could
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pick up listening to your favorite audio novel where you left off on your previous visit those would be a couple
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of examples of things organizations could do well one story that's been in the
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news quite frequently is America's obesity epidemic and a lot of my res Arch provides tools that people can use
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to try to overcome The Temptations that often lead us to gain weight like failing to exercise frequently enough or
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eating healthy foods I think one of the main misperceptions these studies topel is
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that there's not a lot you can do if you're say overweight or in debt or
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haven't achieved the educational goals that you hope to achieve what these studies say is that there are indeed
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tools you can use and strategies you can employ and that your friends can actually help you as well and your uh
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your colleagues as well as your family by uh using those tools providing those tools to help motivate you to achieve
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your goals a lot of This research that I've done and that I've described to you
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today is actually really new so no one had ever looked at Fresh Starts before so that's sort of wildly new no one had
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ever looked at this idea of Temptation bundling um the one set of studies that uh that overlap a little bit more with
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past work are the studies on planning prompts so people had looked at the power of planning prompts in the F in
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the past and what sets our work apart um is sort of two things one a lot of past
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studies involving planning prompts actually involved um face-to-face contact or contact over the phone with
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someone who asked you to walk through a plan and what we actually did is sent a simple mailing you never interact with
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another person you're simply prompted to write down the date and time when you
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plan to engage in a given behavior and so there's no social pressure that might
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be increasing the power of the planning prompt and we still see huge benefits so
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one of the things that we do is sort of isolate the fact that it's not something
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about social pressure it's just the act of forming a plan privately that can
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really increase and follow through we also do that study with a very large real population thousands of people
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looking at real flu shots whereas a lot of past Studies have looked at hypotheticals or
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self-reports I'm doing a lot of research right now looking at other ways we can
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encourage people to follow through on their goals and overcome Temptation one study that I'm particular excited about
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is a large field experiment looking at encouraging people to save more for retirement so we have about 30,000
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people and in our experiment we're encouraging them all to sign up to take money out of their paycheck and send it
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to their 401K now some people are offered the opportunity to do that to start having the money move in the
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future at a fresh start moment so say following a birthday or following New Year's whereas other people are also
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offered the opportunity to do it in in the future but at a fairly arbitrary date and what we're hoping oping is that
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um our hypothesis will be confirmed which is that people will be more motivated to save and enroll in these
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retirement savings programs following fresh start dates and that that will be a strategy that can then be employed
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more [Music] widely