Chapter 1: What insights does Katy Milkman share about making lasting changes?
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Imagine there is some chore that you are struggling to motivate yourself to pursue. In my case, when I started doing this, it was exercising regularly. I was just really dreading that, but knew I needed to do it. It was important for my mental health and good for me in the long run. And it felt great afterwards. It's just that at the end of a long day, that is not where I wanted to be.
Katie Milkman is an expert on change, but even she has trouble sticking with good habits sometimes. That's when she puts her social science tool set to work. I was kind of an audiobook addict, and I really enjoyed digging into novels that were lowbrow, and that wasn't the best use of my time.
So what I ended up doing to solve my own problem, and others have told me I did the exact same thing, was just engineering a solution where I only allowed myself to enjoy these temptations that I craved, these audiobooks, when I was at the gym. That was my role. And this rule really transformed my experience.
Suddenly I would start looking forward to going to the gym to find out what was happening to my favorite characters. The basic idea is called temptation bundling. It can be applied to lots of things in life.
Anytime there's a chore that you're dreading and some temptation that you maybe would feel a little guilty about indulging in, if you could combine those two things and only allow yourself access to the temptation,
When you're doing the chore, what it does, it changes the experience of the chore, and it actually changes the equation in terms of our impulsivity so that you look forward to doing that thing you'd otherwise dread. Bundling is a simple and effective tool for creating lasting change.
We're kicking off the new year with a whole episode of science-based insights like this one to make sure your resolutions stick. You've got to have incredible talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do.
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Chapter 2: How can fresh starts impact our motivation for change?
That's why we've asked Katie Milkman to join us. She's the author of the bestselling book, How to Change, and the co-founder of the Behavior Change for Good initiative at the Wharton School. Katie offers a brilliant distillation of the ways to approach making positive change in our lives and in our organizations. Katie, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you so much.
I'm really excited to be here. We're thrilled to have you. Katie, there are young people who grow up dreaming of being professional athletes or on stage or being firefighters or superheroes. You became a behavioral scientist. When does that become a career dream for you? Not when I was growing up.
In fact, I think when I was growing up, my most common answer when people asked was that I wanted to be a brain surgeon, which I had no actual aspiration to be. I think I just liked that it sounded impressive and it made jaws drop and I got that positive feedback like, wow. It still sounds impressive. It does, yeah.
And P.S., I don't like the sight of blood and I get nervous in intense situations. I would be a terrible brain surgeon. So thank goodness I found another calling. I didn't even learn this was a field or a possible path until I was a PhD student, actually, which is a little late in one's trajectory in academia.
So I got a PhD in computer science and business, thinking that this wacky thing called the internet seemed to be taking off and maybe learning something about that and how it would affect our choices. the organizations we worked in could be interesting.
And it was actually while I was there that during a required microeconomic sequence, I was introduced to the work of folks like Danny Kahneman, who's a founder of the field, author of the bestselling book, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, who very sadly passed in early 2024. So Danny founded this field of behavioral economics and essentially behavioral science is part of behavioral economics.
It's a field that focuses on the ways in which people make mistakes, even when they're trying to be perfectly rational. And specifically, it focuses on the systematic and predictable mistakes that we make with our decisions.
Things like our tendency to be impulsive, things like our tendency to find losses much more painful than we find gains rewarding, and so take steps to avoid losses that might look irrational. We do funny things when we evaluate probabilities. So I was really fascinated when I learned about this field and I decided that's what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
Were you more fascinated for yourself in terms of like, how do I make decisions and where am I making mistakes where I think I'm well-intentioned or more in terms of the effect you could have on other individuals in the world if you went into this field? I think initially I was just drawn to the truth of it, if that makes sense.
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Chapter 3: What is temptation bundling and how does it help with habit formation?
So certainly there was an element of me-search as opposed to just research. Like I saw myself in the models and in the research findings I was reading, which by the way, I'd never seen myself in sort of the social science coursework I'd been exposed to before. I ended up being an engineer as an undergrad because economics did not make sense to me.
I just thought, why would you possibly think that people are perfectly rational decision-making engineers agents and model the economy and their decisions that way. This is absurd. Have you met me? Have you met my roommates? So I was really turned off by social sciences initially.
And when I got to this understanding that actually there's a whole field trying to understand our imperfections, I was just riveted. And it was primarily, again, I just thought it was true. And I thought how powerful to understand how people make choices. I started out just being intrigued by the I'm curious though, as you were diving into this field, was there an inflection point?
Was there some moment where you were like, oh my gosh, this just clicks, this is for me? Yes, absolutely. The big moment for me was actually as an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. I worked at the Wharton School, which is the school of business at Penn. And we have a really amazing medical school as well. And I like talking to people from all different backgrounds.
Interdisciplinarity is sort of in my blood. So I started hanging out over at the medical school with a group of people who studied medical decision making just to learn what I could learn from them. And I was in a seminar one day where someone was presenting some of their research and they put up a graph.
And the graph was a pie chart showing the percentage of premature deaths in the United States that are due to various causes. So things like accidents, environmental exposures, genetics, etc. And one wedge in that pie chart was devoted to decisions we make in our daily lives that can add up.
So think things like getting a cancer screening, taking your medications, eating healthfully, avoiding cigarettes and alcohol, buckling your seatbelt. So this pie chart kind of blew my mind and changed my life because it showed that 40% of premature deaths are due to behaviors we could change. I was just blown away by the magnitude of our daily decisions on our longevity.
And when I learned that, it really changed my research trajectory because I thought, hey, I've been studying decision making, but doing it sort of out of curiosity for the most part, just trying to learn. And there's this opportunity to use this science to make a major dent in really important problems, like making people live longer, happier, healthier lives.
And what I love about it is it actually puts you in a position to save far more lives than you could have as a brain surgeon. For sure. I mean, if you think about that scale, that it's north of 40 percent of deaths are due to the choices we make in our daily lives. And you are helping understand what makes us make the better choices and not just toward them.
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