American Scientist

What does it take to change a mind?

In episode two of Wired for This, we’ll hear from Dr. Katy Milkman, James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and host of the behavioral economics podcast Choiceology. She cofounded the Behavior Change for Good Initiative and has advised organizations such as Google, the White House, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Her research on behavior change has been published in top journals and featured in her bestselling book How to Change. In 2022, Dr. Milkman was also named one of 10 Innovators Shaping the Future of Health by Fortune Magazine and won Penn’s highest teaching award,Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching.

TRANSCRIPT

MUSIC: Wandering by Nat Keefe

[Celia]
Welcome to Wired for This—a deep dive into how we think, believe, change, and connect. In this limited series, we explore the psychology of human behavior and neuroscience—what drives us forward, what holds us back, and how we navigate a world bursting with noise, contradiction, and complexity.

Today, we’ll hear from Dr. Katy Milkman, James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and host of the behavioral economics podcast Choiceology. She co-founded the Behavior Change for Good Initiative and has advised organizations like Google, the White House, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Her research on behavior change has been published in top journals and featured in her bestselling book How to Change. Dr. Milkman was also named a Top 10 innovator shaping the future of health by Fortune Magazine and won UPenn’s highest teaching award, the Provost’s Lindback Award for Excellence in Teaching, in 2022.

From American Scientist, I’m Celia Ford, and you’re listening to Wired for This.

[Celia]
I want to start by asking a couple of questions about you and your career, because you work with a wide range of people, including academics, business leaders, and podcast listeners. When it comes to the challenge of actually changing behavior, is there anything you find yourself explaining over and over again across all of these groups of people? Like, what seems to be the thing we consistently get wrong and struggle with the most?

[Katy]
One common misconception is that there is, sort of, a list of life hacks that science has developed that are universally applicable and that can help people achieve their goals and make the change they want to make. One thing I often explain is that there’s not universal solutions that are very helpful, for the most part. Rather, there are tailored solutions that are situation-specific, and specific to the barriers that are preventing change.

Everyone should have a clear goal, for instance. It’s good to make a plan. But for the most part we’re looking at, what is it specifically that is challenging you? Are you procrastinating because this is an activity that you despise engaging in that you need to pursue in order to achieve your goal? Do you have habits that are holding you back? Do you have a social environment that’s creating pressure to conform in a harmful direction? Each of those different barriers means a different solution will work. Often people want that one size fits all, tell me what the science says I should do, kind of answer. That’s just not the way that behavior change typically works.

[Celia]
Before we dive too deep into the behavioral science and psychology of all of this, I’m curious whether there’s been a big moment when you’ve had to change your own mind? Whether that was related to this line of research or something else in your life. What was that process like for you?

[Katy]
There have been many, and so now I have to pick one. But maybe a particularly relevant one to this audience had to do with my thinking about habit formation and how we could use scientific methods to gain insight into what would help people form durable habits. I had what I now know is a misconception, that we could find a solution that would help people build a habit over the course of a few months, say, or even a shorter time period. Then we could let go. People who had built a healthy habit around, say, exercise, would not really need support anymore, because they would have built that habit. It would be on autopilot. Forever after they would be able to do the thing that they wanted to do regularly.

What I’ve learned through my research on habits and behavior change more generally is that the barriers that get in our way for anything, whether it’s exercising regularly, eating healthy, staying focused at work and achieving our goals there, or in our personal lives–the barriers that might be a challenge, they don’t just go away if you build a habit. If you’ve used tools that are effective to build a habit, you actually need to keep using them in perpetuity, rather than one-off.

That was a surprise and a change that came to me after doing a lot of science, where we would test these approaches that we thought could help people ramp up, build a habit, and then we let go and watched what happened. Every time the habit would eventually and slowly fizzle when we let go. What it taught me was we should stop thinking about this as something where there’s a let-go point.

A key conversation that helped me with this was with one of my colleagues at the medical school, who I shared some of our findings with. He’s an amazing medical researcher named Kevin Volpp. Kevin said, Katy, it seems like you’re thinking about this as a temporary fix. Someone comes to the doctor and they have a temporary issue. They have a rash. They have a headache. We give them a prescription and that fixes it. But why would it be the case that behavior change would be temporary and need those temporary fixes? Why not think of it more like a chronic disease? If you’re diagnosed with diabetes, you don’t get insulin for a week. You get it for the rest of your life.

The idea, I think, of thinking about behavior change as a chronic challenge, as opposed to a temporary one, where we need a quick fix, is so important. And it’s not that I thought it would be a quick fix. It’s just that I believed very much that we could find a formula that would help people build a habit, and then we could let go. I’ve let go of that vision.

[Celia]
You’ve done some research a while back on something called the fresh start effect, which basically shows that temporal landmarks that the start of a new year or a new month can help us give ourselves permission to say, you know what? I messed up before, but it’s the beginning of June or whatever month it is, so I can start being better now. Why does that work?

[Katy]
Yeah, it’s such a great question. It’s such an interesting phenomenon. This is work I got to do with Hengchen Dai of UCLA and Jason Riis, who is affiliated with Wharton, about a decade ago. We started thinking about this question in the context of New Years, which is the ultimate fresh start, and wondering what it was about New Years that made it so powerful, and what were other moments that might have a similar power to give us that clean slate, fresh start feeling and motivate us to make a change.

And what we learned is that there’s actually a large literature on the way people think about their life stories. We think about our lives not in a linear way, but like we’re characters in a book. There are chapters in that book. We think about time with respect to those chapter breaks. Those chapter breaks feel like big discontinuities in our life story, much more so than other moments. Chapter breaks are moments like, I moved to a new town. I started a new job. I became a parent.

But there are also sub-chapter breaks, like a year passes. I get to flip the calendar over. It’s a new month, a new week. I’m celebrating a birthday. There’s a major holiday on the calendar that I’m marking, whether it’s religious or a holiday that’s more state-sanctioned.

Those moments make us feel like there’s a break in that story. That break gives us the sense of discontinuity that creates a sense that what happened before, that was almost a different person. That was the old me. This is the new me and the new me is going to be able to succeed at things that maybe the old me struggled with. Last year I didn’t get in shape like I planned to. Last year I wasn’t really performing at the top of my game at work. But that was the old me. The new me is going to be different.

First of all, there’s that optimism that comes with this segregation of your view of yourself, and then second, these moments can also lead us to step back and think big picture. They disrupt the flow of our normal lives. Those disruptions that cause big picture thinking can lead us to set goals we wouldn’t necessarily step back and set on any other day. Our research shows across many different data sets, both experimentally and correlationally, that people use fresh start moments to make change.

[Celia]
We'll be right back.

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[Celia]
Many of us have probably said something like, “It’s a new year! I’m a new me! I’m going to work out every day!” And by mid-February, that gym membership is already going to waste. It’s a classic. So, to what extent does the fresh start effect actually help us form lasting habits, and to what extent is it a little delusional?

[Katy]
The fresh start effect is only helpful if you use it to make some other change that will create a sustained difference in your life. It’s not going to propel you forward for long enough to do much on its own. Let me give an example. We did one experiment where we invited people to sign up for a 401K savings plan at their organization. They were working for an employer that offers this tax-benefited way of saving. Put money in a tax-free account, save for retirement. They also offer a match. We tested whether encouraging people to begin saving at a fresh start date was more effective than encouraging them at another time.

Why choose this as opposed to just encouraging people to go to the gym? The answer is, you only have to make one decision to have a massive impact on your future. Once you sign up for this program, a portion of your paycheck is automatically set aside and sent to savings thereafter, every month. It happens automatically. In a moment when you feel motivated to make a change, taking a single action is very impactful for your whole financial future.

That’s what the fresh start effect is great at—if it propels you to do something that has long—term consequences and can make your life better. You enroll in an educational program, and now you’re committed to doing something for the next six months, 12 months, two years. You enroll in a 401K savings plan. You sign up for lessons with a personal trainer that are weekly for a certain length of time. These kinds of decisions that you make in that moment–you get a colonoscopy, which you’ve been putting off, but it’s important to do that for your health once every decade. That’s what the fresh start effect is best for. It’s for starting you on a path. But it’s not going to keep you on that path. You need the path you choose to be one that has its own strategies built in for keeping you successful.

[Celia]
Sometimes, I imagine, we may not even recognize that we need to change our behavior, or it’s hard to tell whether that habit we’ve adopted is actually serving us. How can people create systems that can help them notice whether a change they’ve made is really helping them?

[Katy]
If you’re thinking about how to measure the success of a change, then I think there’s a number of strategies that can be useful.

If you define in advance what your goals are and set up a measurable way to say, I will feel that I’ve succeeded if X-Y-Z – measurable outcomes, objective, not subjective – and then you check back at a fixed point in time and say, how have I done? That’s a really useful strategy for avoiding self-trickery that we can engage in when things aren’t working.

If you have somebody else who is in your life, who can be an accountability partner, and who can be the one who helps you measure success, that can be even more effective. Now you’re outsourcing the challenge of that moral wiggle room that you might engage with. I really want to say it was a success, even though these outcomes I originally wanted to achieve haven’t been achieved.

Sometimes it’s someone else, whether that’s a partner, a manager, or some other person in your life, who can help hold you accountable to whatever measurable and effective goals you’ve set. That can be another strategy.

[Celia]
It reminds me of preregistration in psychology research: like, publicly committing to a hypothesis and a plan before you get started, right?.

[Katy] Absolutely. It’s really the same concept. Pre-commitment is the underlying concept behind both of these strategies. It’s as old as the Odyssey, in which we know the sirens were a danger to Odysseus on his journey around the world.

The story of the sirens in the Odyssey is that every prior ship that’s gone by this island with the sirens on it has met shipwreck and doom, because they’ve been lured too close and they’ve gotten trapped in the rocks and had their ships destroyed. Odysseus learns this and he pre-commits. He says, bind me to the mast so that I can’t adjust the course of our ship. He has all of the men on the boat plug their ears with wax. He says, keep rowing no matter what. He’s able to avoid the danger while still hearing the sweet sound of the sirens’ song.

That’s the original example in literature of pre-commitment and we use it today for so many different things. We can use it to assess whether we’ve achieved our goals. We can use it to make sure, as researchers, we don’t fudge at all, even with the best of intentions, and report data that isn’t quite up to the standard it should be in terms of the original goals of the research. And it can be used for many more things, to solve many more problems.

[Celia]
Another theme of the Odyssey is temptation. You’ve also written about the concept of “temptation bundling,” which you say came from tricking yourself into going to the gym by making that the place where you could indulge in TV. I absolutely did the same thing my first year of grad school, listening to my favorite podcasts while running. How did you turn that first moment of realization into a formalized theory?

[Katy]
I love that you’re a temptation bundler as well, and that you did it innately. I think lots of us do this in different parts of our lives where there’s some chore we know is good for us in the long run, but we’ll be tempted to avoid it in the short term. This comes up constantly, whether it’s getting your homework done or going to the gym or cooking a fresh meal for your family.

There are so many things that we say, yeah, that’s important to me, but I’ll do it later, not today. When procrastination and temptation are in your way, what you have to realize is that you need to find a way to change the equation, so you actually enjoy, in the moment, the thing that used to feel like a chore.

How can you do that? There are many strategies, but one of them is, find something tempting, find something instantly gratifying that changes the equation, so you can only enjoy that temptation while you’re pursuing the chore. I realized in doing this to pull myself to the gym that this is a form of commitment device. Using a lure — in that case TV shows, in your case podcasts — to change the actual experience of pursuing a goal, so that it became more pleasant and became something to look forward to.

We ran experiments and have shown that this is an effective strategy. People have some ability to self-impose it, though if it’s imposed by a benevolent outsider it can be even more effective, as is the case with many types of tools. It’s harder to self-impose than to have someone else help you.

And of course it can be applied to many more things than exercise. You can think about temptation bundling strategies that can help you with any chore, whether it’s studying at the library – you only get to pick up the frappuccino you’ve been craving when you’re heading to hit the books, and you only get to drink it while you’re actually doing the work – or think about household chores and saving favorite music playlists or podcasts that you can only listen to when you’re folding laundry or making a fresh meal for dinner.

Whatever the thing is that feels dreaded, can you combine it with something that is a source of pleasure and instant gratification, so that you’re changing those utility flows, to use nerd speak, into a set of flows that actually advantages doing the thing you know is good for you in the long run and overcomes that challenge of present bias? Where we overweight the instant gratification we’ll get from an activity and undervalue the long-term returns we’ll get from it.

[Celia]
I absolutely do the “buy yourself a little treat while working” trick, but sometimes, I cheat and get the treat when I’m not working. Sometimes the temptation bundles un-bundle!

[Katy]
That’s the nature of self-imposing. Some un-bundling seems to happen. When someone else is in charge and forces this on you, it’s going to be more effective. That’s true of almost all rules. But the fact that we’re able, to some degree, to benefit from these tools is pretty amazing. We’re very good at this mental trickery. It does seem to benefit people to have these rules of thumb and to realize, if I restrict enjoyment of X-Y-Z TV show to the gym, or X-Y-Z treat to the library–at least some of the time. Maybe not 100 percent of the time. But I know I can guilt-free indulge in these contexts. That’s enough to move the needle on behavior change.

[Celia]
More after the break.

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[Celia]
You’re listening to Wired for This.

[Celia]
Once we’ve theoretically committed to changing, what can get in the way of making that change happen?

[Katy]
This is where I focus. I wrote a book called How To Change. In thinking about how to structure that book, I realized what would probably be most useful would be to delineate the common barriers that prevent people from achieving the change that they seek once they’ve decided they want to make that change, and then talking through the science that shows what we can do in the face of each different barrier.

The ones that I focus on are internal, because I study decision-making, as opposed to external. There’s lots of external barriers to change that are super important. Things like, do I have the financial wherewithal? Do I have the good health I might need? And so on.

But internally the most common barriers that my research and the research of others in this field have identified–first, just the challenge of getting started. Deciding that now is the time. That can be a barrier. And we’ve already spoken a bit about the fresh start effect, which can be a solution there, identifying moments that give you a sense that now is the right time and it’s a feasible moment. That’s one.

There’s also the barrier of impulsivity, which we also talked about. Temptation, present bias, these are all different names for impulsivity. If it’s not instantly gratifying to make the change, I may not make it.

The flip side of impulsivity that can look a little different is procrastination. I think of that as its own challenge that we have to think about sometimes with a slightly different set of tools than impulsivity.

There’s forgetfulness, which a lot of people forget about. It doesn’t seem like–if it’s a priority, why would I ever forget? And yet if it’s not top of mind at the moment when we can take action, sometimes we fail to follow through on important changes simply because of that issue. Forgetting is underappreciated as a challenge that can get in the way. It relates to planning and making sure you’ve facilitated time and schedule arrangements that allow you to focus on the change you want to make.

It can also be a barrier if you have habits that are standing in your way. I write about this barrier as laziness, which sometimes people take issue with, but I actually–I’m a computer scientist by training. I think of that as a positive term. Good algorithms are lazy. So are good humans. We’re built with a good operating system that looks for shortcuts and routines that we can repeat.

But that can be a barrier to change if you have a set of habits and you fall back on the easiest solution, even though it’s also a really nice feature of our operating system in terms of saving energy and capacity.

Confidence is another challenge. If you don't believe you can make a change, if you think you’re not up to it, then that can be a major barrier to success.

Very related to confidence is conformity. This starts to bridge between the internal and the external. If the people I surround myself with show me one path, and it’s not the path that’s aligned with change, that can become a barrier to making a change. It can change my self-confidence and my concept of what is feasible.

Conformity can be a solution if you surround yourself with peers who show you the way, but it can also be a challenge if the people you spend time with demonstrate a lack of commitment to whatever change it is you want to make.

[Celia]
As you were talking about laziness, you mentioned that you were trained as a computer scientist. And in the past, you’ve said that you approach problems “like an engineer.” What do you mean by that?

[Katy]
I think of an engineer’s mindset as solution-focused, and extremely analytical, and focused also often on what are the structural barriers to a shift. If you think about how you might, for instance, engineer a skyscraper, you’re going to have to think about all the forces that are trying to bring it down. You have to think about wind resistance, gravity, what are the things working against you , and recognize how to design with that set of constraints in mind. To me that’s kind of the way an engineer approaches the world. I want to find solutions to the barriers and efficient paths to achieving my objectives.

That’s really what the science of behavior change, I think, is all about when it works right. It’s understanding what is the thing standing in the way, and how can we engineer a solution that circumnavigates it? We talked about temptation bundling. To me that’s very much an engineered solution to present bias. It’s not instantly gratifying to do this thing I need to do. Let’s engineer a solution. Only allow me to have this thing that’s very instantly gratifying at the moments when I’m doing the chore, so that the chore becomes rewarding when it needs to be rewarding. That’s an engineered solution, and that’s what I mean when I talk about thinking like an engineer.

[Celia]
I don’t think I asked you earlier. How did you transition from being an engineer, a computer scientist, to being somebody who studies behavior change?

[Katy]
Inelegantly. I had never heard of the field I am now in. The graduate degree program I was in was in computer science and business. I thought–I was really interested in massive data sets and the way that Silicon Valley was changing how people made decisions, the data we collected about people’s choices. Maybe I could combine business and computer science to learn interesting things about the world.

But it was actually in a required microeconomics graduate course in my degree program that I discovered behavioral science, behavioral economics. I learned about things like present bias, people’s tendency to struggle with temptation. That was being modeled systematically by economists. You could analyze these kinds of questions in big data sets. I thought, this is the most interesting thing in the world. I don’t know how I could possibly do anything else with the rest of my life but study these questions.

In the middle of this graduate program in a very different field with a different typical path, I was lucky to find some mentors who were willing to let me pivot and still graduate while studying what I was passionate about. I’m very grateful to the folks who said, sure, Katy, that sounds close enough to what you’re supposed to do, and it sounds like good science, so go right ahead.

[Celia]
Honestly, bless the graduate advisors who say, you know what, close enough.

[Katy]
They were happy that I was doing science that was rigorous and publishable, and not too concerned that it was a bit of a deviation from what was supposed to be happening in that program.

[Celia]
And now you do run these large-scale mega-studies that test behavioral interventions. On the order of hundreds of thousands of people, which is very different from how a lot of scientific experiments are usually run, with relatively small groups of people in controlled lab settings. Can you tell me more about how you go about studying behavioral change with big data sets and big groups of people?

[Katy]
We’ve even had projects with millions of people. I’m proud to be able to say it gets even bigger than hundreds of thousands. But the answer is that it’s just a scaled-up version of what people did in the 1950s in laboratory experiments, except we do it in the wild with much larger samples.

Let me give you a more concrete example. One of our studies, actually our very first study that was called a mega-study, was done with 24 Hour Fitness. We built a little digital app to help people build workout habits. It was science-based. We invited people to sign up. You could go into a 24 Hour Fitness gym and scan a code or visit a website and sign up for our exercise program that was linked with your visits to the gym, so that we would know when you were going and we could reward you accordingly.

That program was science in action. I think we had about 63,000 people sign up, which is still a lot bigger than the 100 people in a typical laboratory experiment. When they enrolled, they’d sign up for the program, give us their phone number, their email, and consent to the program terms, which is also consent to being in the research. We randomly assigned them to one of, in this case, 54 different versions of the program built by different teams of scientists with different theories of what would create the most compelling behavior change and help people be motivated to exercise more regularly.

To look under the hood a bit, what are the different theories of change being tested? How are they being tested? Some people are being prompted to make a plan, schedule dates and times you intend to work out. We’ll send you reminders at those times. Maybe get points that are convertible for gift cards if you show up at certain times versus others, or if you show up consistently, if you don’t have misses.

Some people are teaching strategies. We had a version where we taught people about the idea of temptation bundling and gave them a free Audible audiobook. There were versions that showed people videos to try to change their minds about whether or not exercise should be fun versus efficient, to see which was more effective. We had one version that just shared information about how much more popular exercise was getting in the United States, to communicate that strong social norm.

Then we tested all these different programs, because it was a massive randomized controlled trial. We flipped a coin to decide which of the 54 versions you’d get, and then we could just compare the average gym attendance in each version of the program. What was most effective at creating exercise patterns in our population?

That’s kind of what we do. We run these large trials. We partner with organizations like CVS pharmacies or 24 Hour Fitness or Zearn Math.

Right now we’re in the middle of a trial in partnership with more than 30 colleges and universities around the United States, where we’re helping with a digital orientation program. We’ve created different versions to help smooth the transition to college for students who might struggle. Well, it’s for all students, but all students might struggle. There will be about 100,000 students who go through that programming over the next six months. We’ll be able to measure whether it helps them do better in their first semester in college and helps them stay enrolled.

[Celia]
It’s cool that you get to see some of the real-world consequences of people changing their minds and changing their behavior. But in certain settings, admitting mistakes and changing can feel risky. In your research, have you learned anything about how organizations can create environments where people feel safer acknowledging error and changing course?

[Katy]
You’re making me think about the amazing work that’s been done by Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School on psychological safety.

The key idea behind the work, the key insight, is that the teams where their leaders make it feel comfortable to come forward and say I’ve made a mistake – that you won’t be reprimanded or rebuked, but instead that leader will work with you to fix things – those are the teams that have the best outcomes. You don’t want to be too punitive if somebody acknowledges an error. You don’t want your culture to be one where people feel it isn’t safe to speak up, because that’s actually when errors really get out of control. Errors can balloon into disaster.

Amy learned this lesson initially by working with hospital teams with different styles, some of which really created a culture of psychological safety. Come to me right away if anything goes wrong and we’ll solve it together! Versus, you will not make mistakes, we are a team of perfectionists, we have high standards. You might think the latter would be more effective, but it was actually the former that was.

There are things you can also do in meeting culture, acknowledging that even as a leader you have a lot to learn and we’re solving challenges as a group. Trying to avoid an advocacy position and focusing more on inquiry. How can we collaborate, work together, and figure things out, as opposed to, it’s my way or the highway. Those kinds of things create more psychological safety, and more psychological safety is key to acknowledging error and growing from mistakes, as opposed to clamming up and covering up and not learning.

[Celia]
I know that you said there aren’t any universal life hacks, but for somebody listening who might realize they’ve been wrong about something important, but feel paralyzed by the thought of doing anything about it, what would be some of your advice?

[Katy]
It’s important for us to be a little kind to ourselves. There’s a lot of really wonderful work that comes out of Carol Dweck’s research lab at Stanford on the importance of a growth mindset, as opposed to a fixed mindset.

[Celia]
Paul O’Keefe and I talked a lot about mindsets in the previous episode of Wired for This. If you missed it, go ahead and add episode 1 to your queue! Basically: someone with a fixed mindset assumes that they’re born with a certain fixed set of abilities, while someone with a growth mindset believes that with hard work, abilities and interests can be developed over time.

It’s worth noting that the “growth mindset” has been criticized by some scholars for its ties to meritocracy and privilege. Of course, having a growth mindset alone can’t remove all of the barriers in place for people learning and working in systems that were not built for them. Sometimes, systems make growth impossible.

With those caveats in mind — back to Katy.

[Katy]
When we adopt more of a growth mindset, we’re kinder to ourselves when we face setbacks, because instead of interpreting them as diagnostic of a fixed set of abilities, we interpret them as an opportunity to learn and grow. We can forgive ourselves for that.

The growth mindset work would suggest that you need to give yourself a little more grace and recognize that we’re all works in progress. Having made a mistake or thought about something the wrong way doesn’t mean that you’re defective. It means you’re on this journey like the rest of us, getting better at being a human.

Think about it that way, as opposed to a diagnosis of something that was wrong with you, and then it will be easier for you to grow and learn from that opportunity and take advantage of the possibilities that opens up to you, as opposed to being paralyzed by it.

[Celia]
Before we wrap up, are there any big open questions in the decision-making universe that you’re especially excited about?

[Katy]
There are so many, which is wonderful. I’m excited about so many things these days. AI has opened up all sorts of interesting questions about how people make choices when interacting with these AI systems. Do they suck us in and reduce our need and capacity for interactions with others? Are they complements or substitutes for human interaction? To what degree? There are so many questions that are interesting about AI.

I’m doing some interesting work on the best way to pursue multiple goals simultaneously, led by an amazing PhD student named Sophia Pink. There’s a lot more that’s unknown about how to achieve the most we can when we have multiple, sometimes competing, difficult goals, compared to what’s known. Many open questions there that I’m excited about.

I’m doing some reading and thinking about how the way we tell stories about ourselves and others can shape our decision. I think of the fresh start effect as an example of that. It’s the life story that we have in mind that leads us to feel that certain moments are new beginnings and fresh starts. There’s a lot more about the way we tell our life stories that shapes our decisions, that we haven’t uncovered fully. There’s a lot of interesting questions around that.

Many things to be excited about at this moment. There’s so much more we don’t know than we do know about decision-making. It’s an exciting time to be in this field with the growth of data and opportunities for doing interactive, massive trials to learn more.

[Celia]
You mentioned AI in passing, and I’m kicking myself for not asking you about this earlier, since it’s such an obvious new variable being thrown into the mix. How is AI changing how people set goals, stick to new habits, and change their minds?

[Katy]
I think it’s an amazing support system. If you think about the importance of reminders and accountability, one of the reasons that we can be more successful in certain situations is because we have someone who’s there to nag us at the right moment, make us feel accountable, and keep track of our success. Those kinds of tools, though, are often not available to everyone. Maybe you don’t have a person in your life who can serve that role. Maybe you can’t afford a personal trainer or a nutrition coach or a work coach.

Now, with AI, there’s an opportunity to start creating systems that have that flavor, but are much more accessible to a wide set of people. That’s a really exciting opportunity in the behavior change space. We’ll also be able to start experimenting and understanding what are the features that make those kinds of tools most effective. That’s one big question on behavior change that we’re trying to figure out.

Dialogue is also just so much more engaging. One of the challenges we often have when we’re trying to test new ideas at scale is, how do you get people’s attention and focus? How can you change the way they’re thinking? It’s much easier to have that happen in dialogue than if we send a text message or a letter or an email, which is so easy to ignore. I’m excited about the scalability of it, and I’m excited about the democratization of access to coaching tools.

[Celia]
Before I send you off, is there anything that you’d like to plug? I know that you have a book, How To Change. I know our listeners can’t see this, but your book is literally just sitting perched in the office you’re sitting in right now.

[Katy]
If people are excited about behavior change, I hope they’ll check out my book. I wrote it so that it would be an accessible resource for a wide audience interested in understanding the science of change.

Other things that listeners might find exciting–I have a Substack called Milkman Delivers. I really enjoy sharing interviews I do with scientists about different behavioral science topics once a month. I also host a podcast called Choiceology that I love. The Choiceology interviews are what get repackaged in my newsletter, so that’s two different ways to access that content. One in a storified podcast form and one is through monthly newsletters with little tidbits from scientists. Those would be things I’d suggest listeners might want to check out.

[Celia]
Amazing and thank you so much. And yeah, thank you, Katy, this was so fun.

[Katy]
Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.