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[Music] I called my friend Kevin Volpe a star Economist and medical doctor who helped
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build one of the most successful applied behavioral economics research groups in
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the world I wanted Kevin's perspective why did he think we'd been so unsuccessful at making Behavior change
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stick Kevin offered up some Unforgettable words of wisdom when we diagnosed someone with diabetes we don't
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put them on insulin for a month take them off of it and expect them to be cured in medicine doctors recognize that
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chronic diseases require a lifetime of treatment why do we assume that behavior changes any different welcome to the
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ripple effect the podcast that takes you on a journey through the minds of Wharton faculty I'm your host Dan Looney
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and in each episode we'll be diving deep into the inspiration behind the groundbreaking research that Wharton
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professors have conducted and exploring how their findings resonate with the world today we'll be covering a diverse
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range of topics bringing you the latest insights and knowledge that you can apply to your life into work so get
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ready to dive into new ideas with the ripple effect well great to be joined by Katie Milkman
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Wharton School professor of operations information and decision she's also co-director of the behavior change for
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good and author of the book how to change the science of getting from where you are to where you want to be Katie
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always great to talk to you have you been always great to talk to you too Dan I've been great I hope you have been as
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well I have been all right so take us first into the book itself and and really the kind of the Genesis of why
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you wanted to write about this yeah I'd be delighted to you know this has been the focus of all my research
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the the topic of how do we create positive behavior change it's the reason that Angela Duckworth and I co-founded
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the um Behavior change for good initiative at Wharton and Penn and at a certain point I felt look I've collected
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enough insights and knowledge that there's real value to share with the world if we can put it all together in a
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digestible format and explain here here are the things we've learned that can
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help people make the positive changes they want in their lives and that can help organizations steer their employees
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and customers towards positive behavior change and really we're talking about Behavior
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changes that can occur at any point in the course of the year in a course of a person's life it really kind of you know
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we're constantly kind of looking at these potential moments in our lives throughout the course of our our time
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here absolutely right so there there's everything from making a change related
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to my health maybe I want to get in shape or start eating differently uh maybe I want to quit smoking or I want
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to quit drinking right so those are all health behavior changes that are important uh to changes around my
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finance I might want to start investing I want to set aside something for retirement I want to cut back on
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spending so there's Financial changes and then of course changes with your productivity at work the way that you
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interact with your family uh every kind of change that you can think of really is what we study and this book is
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designed to help people achieve it for themselves or help others achieve those kinds of changes well obviously one of
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the ones that you talk about and a lot of people talk about ends up being around New Year's and the resolutions
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that we make uh that we're gonna do this we're gonna do that and maybe we hold
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them for a couple of days after and then things kind of dissolve take us into that mindset of of people making those
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resolutions and either following through the on them or not being able to yeah absolutely so first of all let me
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just say that I am actually a big fan of New Year's resolutions I think that that
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is that makes me unusual because most people write them off and say you know this is a whim most of them don't
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succeed uh why would we do this I've done research with uh former Wharton PhD
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student Heng Shen Dai who's now a professor at UCLA's Anderson School on
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what we call the Fresh Start effect along with Jason Reese also we're an affiliate and what we have shown is that
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there are moments in our lives like New Year's that give us the sense of a new
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beginning and a fresh start and that make us feel separated from our past failure so on January 1 you can look at
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things that you didn't achieve in the last year that you meant to get around
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to you know I wanted to learn Spanish I wanted to figure out how to really be on
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time regularly at my meetings I wanted to eat healthier and I didn't and I failed but that was the old me and this
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is the new me so they create this sense of dissociation and it's not just yours
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like I said that's the most famous but at the start of a new week the start of
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a new month um following birthdays following holidays that we associate with Fresh Starts so think Labor Day not
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Valentine's Day what we see in data set after data set is that people at those
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moments set goals more often but as you point out many of those goals fail and so I think while it's exciting and
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promising that these are moments when people will be willing to bite off and attempt at change that they wouldn't
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normally pursue and that could be useful especially if it's a one and done type
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of change right make that important appointment uh to get a mammogram for instance or set up an auto deduction
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from my paychecks to go put money straight into a 401k those kinds of things right you can have one moment
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where you're feeling ready and it can have long-term consequences but for most
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things a moment of motivation is not enough to carry us forward and that's really what the rest of my book is about
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is I think one of the key barriers to successful change is that most of it is I oh I have a goal I'll just get there
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as opposed to thinking strategically about what are the obstacles I might face and let me make a plan that can
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actually tackle those obstacles goals and that's based in science and the reason I wrote this book is we now have
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a lot of evidence-based solutions that need to be tailored right if the reason you're for instance not going to the gym
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is you find it absolutely miserable then you need a different solution to get you
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there than if the reason is your life is too crowded to fit it in right so depending on what the barrier is you
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need different solutions but we have a lot to say about that and so once people start using the evidence they can make a
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lot more progress with those Fresh Start moments how much concern is there though
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if people try to make a change and don't succeed and they give up that that becomes kind of the pattern that they
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fall into more so than as you said kind of looking strategically at ways to be able to make sure that you do complete
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the task yeah it's a great question and I think it's a thing that we often worry about
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is sort of if you um look at you know what people say commonly they'll say things like oh you
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can't teach an old dog new tricks which might suggest that over the course of a
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lifespan it becomes harder to make change maybe after multiple failures we give up on ourselves for what it's worth
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in our research studies we always look at things like um you know we've we've developed an
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intervention to try to help people make this positive change and we look at does
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uh the effectiveness vary as a function of age and we very rarely see that it does we we rarely find actually a lot of
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we call it moderation a lot of variables a lot of features of a person that seem
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to say oh shoot this intervention only works for this type of of person so I actually am very optimistic that if
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people are willing to stand up and try again um they will they will be able to make
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progress and the Fresh Start effect does seem to apply pretty broadly as opposed
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to narrowly it's not as if it's only a phenomenon we see in our 20s or our 30s
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women once we've been fooled by enough New Year's resolutions that didn't work
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out we stopped making them so humans are shockingly optimistic and good at I think that's what the Fresh Start is
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really about right we keep telling her so we're good at sort of tricking ourselves into this time will be
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different but that probably is an Adaptive trait to be that optimistic and ready to try again all right I'll get up
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and start but I'll wait till after I do the interview before we start to do it
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all right I promise fair enough you talk also in the book about uh kind of the Mary Poppins approach to behavior change
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meaning what exactly one thing that I think is really fascinating and that that leads to this
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name is that uh this comes out of research by islet fishbach the University of Chicago and Caitlin Wooley
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at Cornell um what they've found is that most of us when we pursue change are our intuition
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is we should just take the most direct approach um the most effective efficient path to get to where we want to be so
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say you want to East your math test the first approach you'd take would probably
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be to say you know I'm just going to sit down and study and I'm not gonna I'm
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gonna block all distractions I'm going to do nothing else for the rest of the
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day that's how I'll get there or if you want to get in shape you'd say let me
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find the most painful workout I could do with the gym that will maximally burn calories but
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interestingly what they've shown in the research is this is a mistake a small
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subset of people take a different approach which is to actually try to find the most fun way to study for their
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math test maybe quizzing themselves with a friend or uh you know hopping it into
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a Zumba class and it while it may get you closer to your goal at a slower rate it
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actually ends up being better because you persist because you go back to the gym after a positive experience you'll
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study for the next test too after an enjoyable um first few minutes study or you'll
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you'll keep the studying going even late into the night if you found a way to do
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it that isn't miserable so this persistence is a really important part of success and we neglect
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the importance of fun so the Mary Poppins effect is really just a description of what Mary Poppins sings
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about in the in her famous um versus saying a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down she
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understood and communicated this when it comes to children that we actually need
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to find a way to make it enjoyable to pursue goals but it turns out that adults are wired the same way as kids
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maybe a little bit less uh it's a little bit less extreme we have a little bit
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more ability to exert self-control or prefrontal for uh cortex is more developed but just like kids we are
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present biased which means we care more about instant gratification than long-term rewards and rather than trying
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to work against that what we need to do is lean into it and try to find ways that we can make it more enjoyable in
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the moment to do the things that are going to help us achieve our goals in order to serve um the long-term benefit
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so it's a mistake to constantly be looking for the most efficient path to achieve your goal because you will quit
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at a higher rate than if you look for a path that you will find pleasurable and we've done research on a topic called
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Temptation bundling which is uh when you find a way to link something you find tempting with a chore that you
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would otherwise procrastinate on this is a way of using that Mary Poppins Insight a spoonful of
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sugar makes the medicine go down for instance you only let yourself exercise while indulging and watching your
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favorite low brow TV show on Netflix that's an example of Temptation bundling
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or you only um let yourself listen to your favorite podcast while you're doing household
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chores or you only get to eat a really unhealthy but delicious meal when spending time with a difficult mentee at
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work so those would be Temptation bundles and we found in our research that through Temptation bundling we can
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help ourselves achieve more it's another way of using this Mary Poppins effect so
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also take a little time and talk about this concept of the flake out that you talk about and really I I mean how you
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can try and go about combating it yeah flakeout I think is a vastly underestimated problem a lot of our
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goals they just don't stay top of mind and as a result we flake out on doing
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things that are are really important to us uh because we haven't structured Our
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Lives properly around them so we tend to underestimate the importance of this issue I'd say it's very closely related
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to forgetting um simply you know you meant to vote but oh my gosh it slipped off of your to-do
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list or um you meant to get uh That vaccine or get your annual checkup or take care of this important issue with
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an employee who's been struggling at work but you just flaked out on on bidding it into your schedule often it's
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one time but highly impactful decisions that we flake out on with major consequences and uh in general we find
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is that people underestimate this as a barrier to follow through on key goals but we can combat it using pretty simple
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tools from you know of course the most obvious being things like digital reminders and calendaring but some of
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the less obvious which I think are also important you can um actually get better results and there's
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wonderful research by Peter goldwitzer of NYU on the fact that simply making if then plans where and he calls them
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implementation intentions dramatically increase the likelihood we follow through so not just saying I plan
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to go to the gym or I plan to schedule this meeting but saying if it's 4 P.M on
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a Thursday then I'll be at the gym or uh every day after work I will schedule
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time for meditation by having the if then component we actually end up seeing dramatically higher follow through and
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there's some really wonderful research studies that have been done showing that
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we can use this as a tool to nudge people towards follow through on important behaviors like voter turnout
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vaccination I was involved in one effort about a decade ago where we ran a randomized controlled trial with a
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company that was trying to encourage people to come to an annual flu shot clinic where they'd be giving free
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on-site vaccines and what we found is sending a reminder that let people know the dates and times when they could come
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and the location of free vaccine clinics that is useful but we at no cost uh increase the effectiveness of that
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reminder by adding a simple prompt for people to write the date and time when they intended to show up and that that
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simple prompt to make a concrete plan led to about a four percentage Point increase in vaccinations and these are
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the kinds of things that I think organizations and individuals tend to think you know I don't need to write
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down my plan or prompt someone to Think Through the date and time why would that
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matter and yet making it more concrete works because um first of all that's the way memories
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are stored we need a cue that triggers the memory so the date and time serves as a cue when you see that date and time
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now you're much more likely to realize oh this is when I said I would do X because this is how memory is stored
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it's also more likely you literally put it in your calendar and you now get a
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digital or electronic reminder but again these are the kinds of things we've done
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experiments where we said to people will you pay us to get a reminder for instance to follow through on a behavior
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you intend to do in fact we even tried things where they were behaviors people would get paid to do and people said no
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no I don't want to be paying for a reminder and yet when we automatically sign people up for reminders and charge
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them for them we see higher earnings and and better follow-through than when people have the optionality because they
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underestimate the value of such tools and then there is the problem of laziness which I think we all at times
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kind of fall into for at least a little bit yes so we all have this issue and I actually like I like to say that it's a
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it's a a pro of the human operating system rather than a con so my background is in computer science and
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computer scientists know that the best algorithms are efficient lazy algorithms that take shortcuts rather than
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searching every possible solution so laziness is a good feature for a system to have built in that you look for the
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passive least resistance but when it comes to achieving goals it of course can be a problem if we are looking for
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the the fastest route to success um or the the simplest path so there's sort of two ways that laziness I think
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comes up in the human operating system and is important to keep in mind and think about if you want to build
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solutions that will help people achieve their goals the first actually has to do
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with a well-studied and pretty well known phenomenon which is that we succumb to defaults we are very
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susceptible to whatever is automatic so if you get a new computer it comes with a whole bunch of default settings right
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a default background default fonts size and so on and most of us just accept those and move on and PS that means it's
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important to set them wisely in ways that will set people up for Success um one of my favorite studies showing
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how important it is to set defaults that people will just passively accept because they're a bit lazy wisely was
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one that was done here at at the University of Pennsylvania in our medical system and it involved changing
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the way that drug prescriptions were automatically sent to pharmacies to prioritize sending
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generic drugs so that actually doctors if they wanted to prescribe a brand name drug let's say Lipitor which is
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chemically identical to its generic cousin um but much more expensive because it's
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a brand name drug if you want to instead see a higher rate of prescribing generics which all doctors and insurers
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agree is better there's higher compliance by patients when their drugs are cheaper and every and everyone saves
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money so what they did is they just made that the default so instead of the doctor having to remember to prescribe
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the generic they remember the brand name they type in Lipitor but unless they check a box saying no I really mean
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Lipitor not the generic the generic was automatically sent to the to the um Pharmacy that was filling the drugs and
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this overnight made ensured that Penn Medicine was one of the best hospitals in the area on generic
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prescriptions they went from something like 75 percent of drugs being prescribed as generics to almost 100
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percent and there was one um One Drug where this didn't work and was actually
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a drug where the generic and the uh and the brand name were different and there were chemical differences so you didn't
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see this bomb it's a really nice illustration but it basically says any time you can set a wise default that's
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really important for setting yourself up for Success so this for an individual could be something like I stock my
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pantry only with healthy snacks so that the default snack is something that's
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easier I set my um default website to be the New York Times as opposed to Facebook so I spend
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less time on social media so those are sort of personal defaults or organizations can have wise defaults
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that they set to try to support success in the workplace whether that's we by
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default don't have meetings from nine to ten you have to override something in
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order to make that possible so everyone starts with focused work um or or settings and computers settings
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with in terms of retirement savings defaulting everyone into enroll in a 401k so that that would be the first way
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so the other way in which defaults are I think important is that um we are have habit creatures of habit we build habits
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in order to um essentially short circuit having to think deeply about decisions right so
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it's very helpful not to have to think every morning about shampooing your hair
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brushing your teeth what you'll eat for breakfast you form some habits around
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that and as a result you just have a shortcut you don't have to process deeply oh what what will I do but habits
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can be harmful if they're not supporting your goals so there is a whole large
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literature on how do we intentionally form good habits and I think there's been some wonderful books that that
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cover this quite nicely like um the The Power of Habit by Charles duhigg Atomic habits
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um by James clear and good habits bad habits by Wendy wood the simple story is that as with animals humans are um sort
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of repeat when we repeat a behavior and are rewarded for it over time it becomes
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more habituated the more frequently you can repeat the set of actions it's almost like practice right this is how
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you learn the piano you sit down you practice you repeat we can do the same thing with habits trying to save or form
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a habit around exercise research shows that if we pay people to go to the gym eight times in a month as
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opposed to just once and then take payments away and look what happens after now there's no reward we see the
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people who are paid to go repeatedly habituate and continue to exercise at a higher rate than people who were only
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rewarded for going once even though there's no longer any reason to do it so
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the key idea here is if you have um the desire to form a habit you want to think
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of it like practicing a new skill you want to try to repeat it as frequently as possible find a way to reward
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yourself that might be through Temptation bundling making it fun or it might be by announcing to friends that
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you're doing this simply tracking your progress and and over the course of that
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repetition you're going to build something that starts to feel more habitual and become more natural you may
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want to piggyback it on something you already do having a a time for instance you know there's research showing that
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if you piggyback flossing habits on after you brush your teeth that's actually more effective than just saying
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I'm going to floss or trying to floss before you remember to to brush your teeth so tying it to something you
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already do can other also be a useful tool final question for you what areas then with all this work you've done in
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your career around Behavior change what still is out there what what are you looking at next that is kind of the next
00:21:04
Hill to climb some of the most exciting work I think and behavior change that we've done and
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that others have done shows the power of our social networks and influencing our
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behaviors the people around us show us what's possible they show us how to achieve
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um and Signal what's appropriate there's some really wonderful research that's
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been done by Scott Carrell at the University of California showing that uh for instance the randomly assigned
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college roommate you get affects your grade because the person if if you end up with someone who is essentially a
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better student you end up hey they don't go out on Thursdays and Fridays they study like this and and you
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do too but someone who was less studious oh they do go out and party and maybe that's what I should be doing so we're
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really shaped by these random allocations of our compatriots and what I am looking at at the behavior change
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for good initiative in collaboration with Angela Duckworth who's my key partner in crime on this is how can we
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use that insight to build better social interventions that that help connect people with peers who have shared goals
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and help facilitate um pure interactions that that increase success so we're doing work right now in
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the space of Education around this to try to see if we can leverage purefx to improve student outcomes and reduce
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student Dropout from school um at the college level but we're also interested in in workplace pure effects
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and generally leveraging this power of of groups as opposed to Simply studying individuals and how we can help people
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um in isolation Katie always great to talk with you thanks very much for your time today
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thank you so much for for taking the time to speak it's always a pleasure on
00:22:48
my end as well you got it Wharton's Katie milkman thank you for listening to the ripple
00:22:53
effect we hope you found this episode informative and engaging don't forget to
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subscribe and leave us a review so that we can continue to bring you the best Insight from the warden School