Katy Milkman || How to Change

of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative. She has worked with or advised dozens of organizations in how to spur positive change, including Google, the US Department of Events, the American Red Cross, Twenty four Hour Fitness, Walmart, and Morning Star. Her research is regularly featured in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and MPR. Doctor Milkman, so great to chat with you today. So read a chat with you. Thank you for having me

on the show. It's my pleasure, It's my pussure. I've been willing to talk to you for quite some time. So we have a mutual friend, Angela Duckworth mutual colleague, and she described, yeah, we do. And she described you as a master of human nature. She says that you figured out how to align your action with your goals and dreams. Do you do you agree with that? No, we both know that Angela is much too kind, and I think she anyway, she may be right in this case.

I think she may be right. What is that? Well, let me start off by asking you what would that even mean to you know, wind one's actions with their goals and dreams? What would what would that look like? And I do think you do it, By the way, that's very kind of you to say. I suspect what Angela was talking about is I think she and I

both share a tenacity. She might even call it grit that drives us and we I think both have defined in the last decade very clearly what it is we hope to achieve with our careers and our lives, and we're both pretty focused on getting there. So I would say I suspect she wrote that because you know, we spend a lot of time together working towards those goals.

She knows exactly what my purpose is. And you know, when you know someone that well and when you see the way that they devote themselves to something, I think that that can make you excited. And I think she wrote lovely things, So why is changed so hard? That's the million dollar question. You have an interesting spin on it, you know, and arguing that you just haven't found the right strategy if you're finding it hard, Can you elaborate

on that? Yeah, absolutely so. When I was trying to figure out sort of what is the overarching theme of all of this work that I've been doing over the last two decades, roughly trying to figure out what creates change and what creates durable change, the one thing that really jumped out at me is that there are systematic barriers to change. They differ depending on what kind of

change you're looking to make. So whether it's that you're struggling to get started, whether it's that you know there's just a temptation you can't resist over and over again, maybe not to get off the couch when you want to go to the gym, or to spend on things when you should be saving, to yell at someone when

you should be patient. So there's temptations, there's inertia, sort of bad habits, laziness, I'd put all into that bucket, and laziness is you know, too unkind of a term for the efficiency we all have when we say I'm going to take the path of least resistance, but that's our that's our common term for it. So they are all these different things and they trip us up in

different parts of our lives. And I've seen so many times individuals and organizations that are trying to create change make the mistake of thinking they're sort of a one size fits all solution that they can grab off of a prepackaged you know, off the shelf, prepackaged and it's going to work for them, without thinking deeply about what

is the barrier to change in this situation. Is this person not taking their medication regularly because they forget, or is it because you know there's a nasty side effect and even though it's good for them in the long run, and that outweighs the discomfort they'll experience. If you are sort of an optimizer, if you give into temptation, you might choose not to take that medication. And depending on which of those is the problem, you need a really

different solution. So that's kind of the big takeaway I've had is too often people neglect to think carefully what is the obstacle, and instead they reach for the one size fits all, And that's a that's a mistake We can do much better if we're actually suiting our solutions to the challenge that we're facing. Yeah, And another way you put it is match your approach to your opponent, you know, with the Andrea Agacy example that you used.

So who are my opponents according to you? Their impulsivity, procrastination, forgetfulness, laziness, confidence, and conformity. Now, is that over confidence and getting started? Also getting started and getting started? Yes, that's that's funny that I left that one out. But yeah, by confidence, you mean over confidence, right, like it's okay? Is it okay to have a little bit of confidence. I actually

don't meet over confidence. I know most behavioral scientists get very excited about overconfidence, and I write about that a little bit. And I know you had Dany Connyman recently on The Five guest who's such a wonderful scientist and guest and has I think, on the record proclaimed overconfidence to be the biggest problem with human nature, are the one that he would most like to correct. But despite that, which I acknowledge in my book, I actually mean under

confidence as a barrier to change. So overconfidence has all sorts of problems, and it can it can relate to change issues too. Right, If you're over confident that you'll be able to just sort of push through and you don't develop strategies to overcome some of these challenges, that can be a major barrier. But another barrier is you don't believe you can, so you lack the self efficacy and that can be really important as well. So that's what I focus a chapter on in the book. Okay,

maybe we should let's get into some others goodies. Conformity is an interesting goodie because, you know, as a creativity researcher, I often talk about how conformity is the enemy to create at you know, how can it also be an obstacle standing between you and success? I mean use the word success, you know. And by the way, I want to know what you even mean by success. I really just mean achieving whatever goal you set out to achieve.

That's that's blocked by internal barriers, right, and like really importantly right, I'm not talking about the things. This book is not about the societal obstacles that can stand in our way. It's about, you know, imagine a world. Well, you don't have to imagine a world. The world has put up other obstacles to this book will help with the obstacles that are inside you. I can't. I unfortunately

don't have the solutions for all the world's obstacles. But when it comes to conformity, the barrier there is really that our peers shape our decisions more than we appreciate that. You know your college roommate, whether you're randomly assigned to a roommate who did well on the verbal SATs turns out to predict your grades. And so there's the peer

groups you surround yourself with. They help us define what's normal, and we think, oh, you know, this is how much I should study, or this is how much money I should make, or this is how much I should give to charity, or how hard I should work, or how fit I should be. And so that can be a barrier if if your peer group is not aligned with your goals, and if they're sending you the message that people like you can't achieve the kinds of things you want to achieve. So that's what I mean really when

I say conformity can be a barrier to change. Good good good. I like this. Okay, laziness, let's talk about laziness. Let's talk about laziness. Oh man, I do feel like that could be a book. That's a title through a book let's talk about Yeah, yeah, I mean that's a That's a big one for me during COVID is that

it's it's easy. It's easy, so easy to be lazy when you're at home all days, all the time to be But you're right, it's totally easier now because yeah, and partly because there's not as much social pressure not to be lazy, and there's where are you meant to be? Yeah? Absolutely, I think it's a big barrier, you know, I do. I have to say that I have a lot of respect for the design of the operating system we've got up here that you know, prioritizes taking the path of

least resistance and being a bit lazy. You know, it's very efficient and it makes a lot of sense, but it can be a barrier to change when the path of least resistance is not the one that's going to get you whatever it is you hope to achieve. So what I suggest in the book or talk about in the book is sort of two strategies. One is, I think you know, has been written about really extensively. It's not all that novel. In fact, my editor at one point was like, does this really have to be in

the book. It's so everybody knows it, and I was like, I don't care this. I want everything in this book that's useful, and this is really useful. So the first one is just setting defaults wisely right, So it's been talked about a lot. It's probably the number one trick and the behavioral Scientist's handbook for changing behavior. Right. If you default people so when they join a new employer, they're automatically saving for retirement and they have to do

nothing magically, about forty percent more people save. And you can set to faults for yourself or other people that are wise and lead to better choices, including you know, stacking your fridge with healthy food so the default snack is something that's good for you radical right, Or you know, if you if you spend too much time on social media like me, you know, make sure that your default websites and so on are maybe maybe the New York Times or your work email as opposed to Twitter or Facebook.

So there's all different ways we can set to faults that are useful and productive. So that's one way we can harness laziness, because then the path of least resistance, the thing that happens if you don't lift a finger, is the thing that's sort of in your long term best interest. But then the second answer, which I think is a little bit more useful, and again a lot has been written on it, but I hopefully have some

new things to say, UH is through habit. So being deliberate about forming habits because in essense, those are sort of the default settings for for the behaviors that require a little bit of effort and volition but but not a lot, and sort of the that are repeated, and so thinking about how can we use what's known from research on animals, from research on people to build habits that are lasting. UH is a big bonus. I'm happy to get into that. But let me like pause and

give your chats to get a word and actualise. No, I mean I would like you to elaborate on that a bit. Actually, I mean, I mean this is this is I'm interviewing you here, so you have all sorts of fascinating ideas and I want to make sure that I'm giving you space to add them. Okay, who knows, maybe that can be on choiceology someday, but I would love that. That would be amazing. Is really different, really different. Yeah, but and no pressure of course. But I'm saying, but

for now, you're the star. So yeah, go on, are you telling me I'm trying to be thost? Okay, fair enough, I'll try to do that, Okay. So habits, So the really basic stuff about habits that's been written about extensively in books, like you know, atomic habits and the power of habit. It's right, and we know which is like, you know, what's the cue that triggers the behavior that

then creates a reward and then repeat. And if you can build that cycle and do it enough times and nobody knows the magic number of times, by the way, that's like a hot debate and working on a paper about them right now, but it's a lot of times. Uh, then you can start to put something basically on autopilot so that it becomes like second nature. You're not really deliberating,

you're just acting. Oh like I make the coffee and the more without even thinking about shampoo my hair, without thinking that I can't remember it I shampooed my hair, not because I wasn't even paying attention, right, So that that's sort of the basic process for forming habits. What I think is a bit more interesting is something I

read about called the power of Elastic Habits. And this is based on some research I did at Google with a couple thousand of their employees who wanted to form exercise habits, and we teamed up to try to figure out if we could develop a better methodology for habit formation, like what technique could we use to get people to form stickier habits? And we ran a test and we had two different ideas. And I'm actually going to ask

you your intuition on this because I'm really curious. So we had two strategies that we were going to use. Strategy one was we just sort of used the old fashioned like reward people for repeating the behavior. So the people make a plan. They tell us the ideal time for them to work out each day at the Google campus gym, and we tell them we're going to send you a reminder at that time, and then we tell them if you work out any time that day, you're going to get paid a few dollars. Okay, So that's

group one, Group two, same startup. So you tell us the time you prefer to work out. Well, we're going to send you a reminder right before that time encourage you to do it. But and you'll also get paid, but you'll only get paid if you start your workout within the two hour window you define as best for you. And both of these programs last for a month, and at the end of the month they're over. And what we really care about is what happens next. And we

actually did it. We randomize the amount of money in both groups that we were rewarding people with so that we could We wanted to isolate basically two types of people who had gone to the gym at the same frequency, but in different ways. One group had gone basically verily consistently really at the same time of day almost always, and the other group who had more variability in when

they went. And the question was which group would then have the more durable habit the variable visitors or I think that that probably the first one showed the better effect, even though the intuition from people might be that the second one would be correct. Am I correct? Tell me why you think that? Is it? Is it the complete opposite? Well, I don't even remember which one I said first. The consistent that the same time. The consistent one was the first one. I think that I think did better. I

think you probably got a better effect there. So that's what we thought. That's what seventy seven percent of psychologists we serve it. You're totally you're normal. You're totally normal. And like me, I I was like, let's show that this sort of really consistency of this routinization is the key to habit. And you know, there's theories of that, but it hadn't been tested. And we said, like, let's turn into a let's turn it into an intervention, because

we knew it correlates. Right, people who have really consistent like pill taking routines they do at the same time of day or exercise, tend to exercise more, take their medicines more. So we thought, like, can we convert it into a Okay, so we were wrong. Both of us were wrong. But here's why it's I think it's really interesting. We weren't totally wrong. So the people who were rewarded and built this habit around going out exactly the same time.

Once the reward period ends, they do actually go a bit more at that time, so they've formed something of a habit around that sort of sticky, magical time that they'd told us was best for them. But the thing is, if they don't go at that time, they don't go at all. Say where's the other group? They go a little bit less consistently at that sort of magic time, But if they miss that time, they still get to the gym and at a higher rate and net they

go more often. Right, So one group I call them sort of like rigid instead of routine, right it's eight am or bust. And the other group has figured out, like, you know, eight am is my best time, I'll mostly go then, but if I miss eight am, I'll go

at five pm. And so that ends up being a more stable and consistent It may not be sort of like the automaticity of habit that actually we typically think of that we've built, rather than more of a sort of like no matter what routine that I just I make a priority to figure out a way to fit this into my day, and I've learned different ways to do it. But that turns out to be what's more robust.

So anyway, that was kind of one of my favorite projects I worked on because it was such a surprising result, and I think it's really an important insight in general about change, because I think we tend to underappreciate how hard it will be to sort of stay on that perfect path, and we don't build in enough flexibility for the obstacles that will get thrown at us. And when we do build flexibility in various ways, and there's other ways.

I talk about flexibility and how important that can be in the book, but this is one way that kind of flexibility actually turns out to make us stronger and have more robust habits. Nice. Nice, I should have gone with my gut, because my gut did say number two then, But I was like, I was, I was. You know sometimes when you have these illusionists, like these these magicians, you overthink it. You're like, oh, is it this hand or this hand? And you're like, well, well, I didn't

even remember what one and two were. When I was like, wait, did I give them numbers? Twitch was witch. I was so into the example. But that's super interesting. So how does this over how does this relate to, as you talk about in your book, overcoming flaking out? You know, because it's so easy to flake out, right, I mean, it's just a matter of like a squirrel and then you and then you forget that you had a whole things lined up to go to the gym. I didn't know you knew me so well. We only talked a

couple of times. Do you know about myself? But that means we must have things in common. But yeah, it's so easy. So this is the flakeout? Is this really different challenge? But really, I actually this is another thing that I think we tend to underestimate people tend to think they won't need reminders, for instance, and undervalue them.

And one study that I ran with Todd Rogers, we like offered people the opportunity to pay for reminders for something that would be lucrative and then they were like, oh, I got it, I'll remember it. And then and then if they had just paid for the small fee for the reminder, they would have made more money because they would have remembered to do the lucrative thing. So reminders are really important, and we flake out a lot because

we forget. But you can't always time a reminder perfectly, and research actually shows that if a reminder doesn't arrive like right at the minute when you need to do something, it's pretty useless. So I love there's this study I absolutely love that involved valets giving people their cars back after they they're like leaving a hotel, and they were

reminding people to buckle up. And there's a control condition that gets no reminder, and then there's a basic reminder condition where the valet says, hey, don't forget to buckle up when they're dashing off to get your car, so like five minutes roughly before you're actually going to get in the car and be able to put your seatbelt on.

And finally, there's a third valet group that or excuse me, a third experimental group where the valley tells you right as they bring the car back to you, like two seconds before you're going to step into it, remember to buckle up. And the reminder that comes two seconds before

you can act on it has this huge effect. Like eighty five percent of people buckle up in that condition, but the other two conditions basically look the same, Only about half of people buckle up because four minutes is enough time for you to completely forget what it was you intended to do, and so that there's like, you know, it's important to know that, and if you can schedule timely reminders, like I live by my calendar. I suspect you do too, and technology can help. Great, that's the

solution to flake out. But often we can't because not everything in life is like a time. Sometimes it's like, oh, when I'm next to this place, I need to remember to do this thing, or when I next talk to this person, I need to remember to say this thing, and I don't know when that will happen. And for those things, or when I when I'm at the doctor's office, there are all sorts of things where if we could figure out how to embed our plans more firmly in memory,

we could make more progress. And so I wrote about work by folks we both know, Peter Golwitzer being sort of the lead on it at NYU, who's done all this research on the power of I call them planning prompts. He calls them implementation intentions, but I just anyway, he's brilliant. Implementation intentions are brilliant. I find planning prompts a little

bit easier to remember. As in terms of terminology, the basic idea is that can you make exactly exactly easier to implement if you make a concrete plan that has a trigger queue. So not like I will practice Spanish on duel lingo more because I want to learn Spanish, but rather I will practice Spanish on dueling go every evening at six pm when I get home from work. Now you have a trigger, and that moment triggers oh ohh, this is what I'm supposed to be doing now, So

it's embedded in memory. Associated with a queue. You also have other things going on, right, like commitment and consistency to this very specific rather than vague plan. There's many benefits of implementation intentions but or planning prompts. But they also can help with flake out. So that's another thing I focus on, and I could sort of go on more, but but those are sort of a couple of the key things that I think our tools behavioral science can

offer that help a lot with this. Many and many an implementation plan has gone so you know, like we can we can we can have like the best implementation plans in the world and still get distracted at any moment, you know, So safeguarding against that seems to be just as important as having the implement and the impleta plan itself. Yeah, absolutely, I totally agree with that. And then the chapter on procrastination.

I think in many ways sort of addresses those issues because it talks a lot about commitment devices, which is basically creating teeth when you make a plan or have a goal or commitment, so that when that moment comes, if you don't follow through, there's some consequence that you have set up and in order to ensure you won't procrastinate if you don't want to. So so I do think, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of things that work together in the book, even though they

sometimes attack different challenges. Often those challenges are known to come in pairs or sets. For sure. Did you say something about teeth? Did I hear you right about teeth? I'll just say I have teeth on the mind because my five year old lost a second baby tooth this morning. Songs. I remember when I I remember when I lost mine. Yes, I it's so it's such a like, it's such a sailing thing. He left his first one earlier this week

and second one today. They go in pairs. Speaking of things going in pairs or sets, anyway, yes, I did say teeth, probably because I was primed to be thinking about teeth. But by teeth, I mean some consequence, right, So if you say like, oh, I'm going to try to achieve this goal or I'm going to try to follow through on this plan and you want to and that's all, there are no teeth because if you fail to follow through, you know, when the moment comes you

let it pass. You're like, well, I said i'd practice on Dueling go to nine at six pm, but really I feel like putting on Bridgerton. So if that happens, right, there's no consequence except maybe maybe feel a little guilty. But commitment devices are tool you can use to create consequences or teeth so that if you want to make sure you won't watch Bridgerton at six pm, you can set up some sort of constraints that prevent your future

self from slipping and making a bad decision. So you could do something like make a cash commitment, like you can literally put money on the line that will be sent to a charity you hate, uh and to find a referee who will tell tell your commitment device organization. There's a number of different companies that offer these sorts of devices online. You can have a referee then report

back and say you know, uh, Scott watched Bridgerton. He didn't, and you know you're gonna you're gonna be called out and so you're gonna lose a hundred bucks. And so that can make it so that the plan has teeth and you're gonna feel like, Okay, I really need to sit down and do my deal and go practice, or else I'm gonna spend one hundred dollars in supporting a

cause that I hate. You know, I never heard that expression before, so I'm glad I double clicked on it, as Angel Duck with coming double click on that says that. But but uh, yeah, so I'm stealing in angela quote right now. But are freeze? There are a lot of good ones. Yeah, there are so. So not having teeth is like not dealing with the consequences, Is that right? That's right. I already use that. I'm going to use that consequences. I get it. I get now, well, I

mean now I get it. I didn't get it five minutes ago, but now I get it. Okay. In your book, another aspect I really found, really it really resonated with me. It was this idea of the importance of timing, timing and and and how a fresh start can be like such a great motivator for two seconds, right, for two seconds, which is why it's the first chapter. This sold me. This is so me. I get so excited about something and oh my god, and then forever I'm going my butt.

And then like five minutes later, I'm like, wait, what I forgot about it? But you're back to flake outs. See they come in sets. I'm not alone. Good to know I'm not alone. Yeah, so what are some other kind of fresh starts? And how can we even create our own fresh start even if it doesn't coincide with a new year, new job, or new relationship. Yeah? Absolutely, Well, so the research that you're referring to is was actually inspired by talked about Google already, but I want to

talk about Google again. I've worked with Google a bit. I went and visited Google. This is before I ran that gym study. I went to a conference. I was sharing some of my research on how you could encourage behavior change, and I got this great question from a leader of their human resources, one of their human resources teams, who said, Okay, totally sold that we should be providing these kinds of tools that would be helpful and allow employees to change. But like when when should we deploy them?

Is there some good time? Are people more open to change at sometimes than others? And that's what set me off on this path where I started studying how timing can be really important and uncovered this connection between moments that feel like new beginnings on the calendar, from the start of a new year or new week or new month, celebration of her birthday. Those are the kinds of things

that I have primarily studied. But we've also found that you can actually highlight certain dates and you can make people more attracted to starting a fresh set of goals on those dates. So if you, for instance, label the first day of spring on the calendar as the first day of spring instead of the third Thursday in March, and then say, you know, pick a date on this calendar when would you most like to start pursuing a goal, It's much more attractive when people recognize it, for the

as the first day of spring. Same with sort of pointing out that a month is when your birthday will take place. Say do you want to do it after your birthday? Is more attractive than say, I don't know when your birthday is, but let's say it's February like mine and saying do you want to do this next February, or even I don't even know how many months from now February is because ten months from now roughly month,

it does all run together. So so these moments both naturally attract us as when we're more likely to, for instance, set a goal on a goal setting website, go to the gym at a higher rate. We're more likely to

search for the term diet on Google. And there are also moments that if we highlight for people, especially the ones that are subtler that feel like new beginnings, we can see that there's an attractor effect and people are more willing to, for instance, sign up for a four oh one K when they're invited to start saving following their upcoming birthday or following the start of spring, rather than just labeling that date as however far off it is in the future. So there's other fresh starts too.

Those are the ones I find most interesting because they're

purely psychological. They're just in our head. They're sort of related to this concept of time we have, where like we think of our life in chapters, and that new beginning makes us makes us feel like we have a fresh start and a transition, but they're actually they can be more powerful if it's not purely psychological, if you also have literally some kind of clean slate, because you say, start a new job or move to a new house, and some of the routines or the cues that were

maybe associated with not such great habits or patterns are gone. Like oh, the dunkin Donuts where I picked up my unhealthy breakfast every morning on the way to my office. Well that's no longer part of my routine because I'm going to a new office. So not only do you then have sort of the psychological fresh start, but you actually may have a tabula rasa to work from when it comes to things like resisting temptation and building better

patterns of behavior. Totally, totally. Yeah, it's like it's arbitrary, like like the day after my birthday has no intrinsic meaning. But actually this happens to me every time I do my laundry. Every time you do your fresh shart prone No, I just I just don't do my laundry that often. You're like, I only do it once a week, and once a week. Well, mondays are one of the strongest fresh sharts and every day is that we look at

even though they're frequent. So it's clear that like it doesn't it doesn't have to be a really low frequency event to give you some sense of renewal. And like, Okay, I've got this, let me sit back. I'm gonna do better this time that like that was last week. Last week, I blew it, But I'm gonna have a good week this week. Well, can we even like what if we had like a zen mindfulness person here in this conversation, wouldn't they say, like every every time I returned to

my breath, I start anew. I mean, this is what they say in my mindfulness classes. So why not even the religions have this the most level. You know this this because like if I listen to these meditation apps like you know, like Sam Harris will be like return to your breath and start again, you know. And I feel like that, you know, kind of relates to what you're saying. No, absolutely, I think it really does. And I really do think this that freshharts are built into

so many religious practices. I sort of started seeing it everywhere when I started studying this from you know, really obvious examples like Easter and yam Kaport to like Subtler. Maybe examples like uh ceremonies where you're absolved of sin or where you you know, repent and then your given forgiveness.

Those are also really fresh start ceremonies and ways that we give people an opportunity to start over and feel like they can shed that baggage and shed the negative identity and be more optimistic about what they're going to achieve in the future. I think I think it's like really fundamentally important to human nature. I have no data to back that up, but it's my sense eternally does seem true. I resonate with that from personal experience. But in what ways can a fresh start be a setback? Yeah,

it's a great question. This is so my My brilliant former student Hanschendi, who's now professor at UCLA's Anderson School, focused on this question. She she and I worked on on the fresh start studies that I described already, and for her dissertation work, she wanted to look at a situation where she suspected she might be able to study sort of an under an ugly underbelly of the fresh start effect. The dark side of the dark side, the dark side of the fresh start effect. Yes, there are

no teeth involved, thank goodness. The whole analogy freaked me out, like I feel like I'm gonna have nightmares tonight about teeth, about teeth and goals, goals with teeth. She was interested in this question. We talked about it a lot before of whether you know, most of the things that we were studying originally related to fresh charts were sort of goals that most people keep falling down and trying to pick themselves back up and do better on, from going to the gym to UH to starting a diet and

so on. But we were thinking, like, what if we could look at a population that was actually really excelling and see if fresh darts are still good? Do you still want to clean slate when you're sort of really doing well? And the interesting she studied this in the lab and found that fresh starts, while great for people who are underperforming, are not so great for people who are doing really well because they want to maintain their momentum.

And my favorite study she did is actually a study in the field of professional baseball players, and when she found this really cool natural experiment where she looked at players who get traded to a new team in the middle of a league. Excuse me, she looks at players who got traded into a new team in the middle of the season. And she compared two types of trades to have a really beautiful experiment. One was across leagues. So if you get traded across baseball leagues, all of

your season to date statistics get wiped clean. You don't get to hold onto any of them, and you have to start again. And she compared that to players who are traded within league, who are again like moving to a new community. They probably have a sense of a fresh start, so'st they both are really similar, but they get to hold onto their season to date statistics, so they're not having sort of a reset of their performance.

And this was a really nice test because it deals with a lot of issues you'd have if you just looked at people getting traded, like, you know, why were they traded world and a funny trajectory, will there be

regression to the mean? But these are two people basically otherwise identical records and they just have different types of trades that they experience, and one gives more of a fresh start than the other and what she found is consistent with what I just described, that people who were top performers going into this trade and they get traded across leagues versus within leagues see a bigger slip in their performance than the people who get traded within leagues

and don't have that performance reset. They don't have their record white clean. So that that sort of white clean, clean slate coming with a trade help was harmful to people who were doing well. But on the flip side, people who are underperforming, they were having a rough season. They needed a start. I mean, they needed a new start, they needed to exactly exactly. And so I think most of our studies had been to date about people who needed a fresh start, and I think most of us do.

We were, like most of us are kind of looking for that in some part of our lives. And so I do think they're probably mostly useful, but that they are something you want to at least approach with care and caution when it's it's potentially disruptive. Right Like, if you're on a role, I don't think you have to worry about every Monday because really the benefit of Monday is psychological. It's like that opportunity that you feel to begin again. So I think those kinds of fresh starts

are probably not so dangerous. But if you're on a roll and you move to a new job, or you move to a new city, and your social life had been, you know, doing great, and you felt like you had everything in step, like, those are the kinds of fresh starts that may not be so good when you're doing well. When they're not purely psychological, they come with some other challenges as well. This is wonderful nuance. Thank you. You must be an academic studying this topic. Must be an academic.

Oh could you tell? This is wonderful? This is wonderful, delicious nuances That makes me feel like there should be a game show like talk to somebody for fifteen minutes about a topic that they claim to know a lot about, and then like you have to guess who's the academic. Very challenging Exactually, it's such an academic thing to say, to be like, you know, we we didn't realize there

was you know, a control. You know, we didn't realize there was another condition that when we looked at the condition, we realized that there was more than meets the eye. I mean, like, you know, that's how scholars talk. Yeah, so we have our own specific we have our own language and our own it's good. It's good. There's some

parts of it. Oh yeah, yeah, too esoteric. Yeah, but I mean in this context, I mean, I mean as as a compliment, because it's really important with this topic in particular, to not prescribe, like you said, one size fits all. I mean that this is the point that I think you're bringing such important nuance and uh, you know, a fresh start to the whole habit literature. Well, thank you. That's such a nice way of putting it. I appreciate that. Yeah,

well that's true. What is temptation bundling? Oh yeah, I'm glad we're going to my favorite topic. Temptation bundling is a solution to the worst problem I faced in graduate school, which means, actually, my graduate school days were not so bad. But my problem in graduate school was that at the end of a long day of classes, I was an engineering student, and I would be like just beat from sitting there in computer science classes trying to follow what

the heck was going on. Uh, And then I had to, you know, turn to my problem sets, and I'd get back to my apartment, and all I wanted to do was like binge watch TV or curl up with a novel and just like totally indulge in. I you know, I love fiction, fictional content of all kinds, so I wanted to like immerse myself in some other world and have nothing to do with my problem sets. On the other hand, I also knew that to stay motivated and keep my stress under control, I needed to exercise regularly,

and I could not drag myself to the gym. So I had these two problems. I was wasting time at home on all this entertainment, and I wasn't getting the exercises I needed in to stay sane. So I actually came up with a solution for myself that I then ended up studying and other people too because it worked so well for me. So as me search, my solution was I only let myself and I got I got

really into audio novels. I only let myself listen to audio novels while I was exercising, and I like listened to all the Harry Potter novels and all the Alex Cross series and all the Twilight books and all the Hunger Games. You know all of it only at the gym, and I I love this stuff. So I would find myself suddenly coming home at the end of a long day and all I wanted to do was get to the gym to hear what happened next in my latest thriller. And time would fly at the gym because I was

enjoying what I was listening to. I did and even noticed that I was exercising. I'd come back energized and ready to do my work, and I wasn't going to waste any time at home because I'd gotten my fix of fiction. And it was the sort of marvelous cure for this temptation challenge I'd had before. There were two self control problems I wasn't winning, and then I came up with this hack that helped me solve them both.

So I've since studied this. I've run a couple of experiments showing that this kind of technique, teaching people about it or giving people temptation bundles with exercise substantially increases their likelihood of going to the gym. I l At Fischbach, who's a brilliant professor at the University of Chicago, along

with her former student Caitlin Wooley, who's at Cornell. I have done some neat work suggesting it can also help kids be more effective when they're doing math problem if they're able to temptation bundle things that they enjoy, like listening to fun music and working with markers and enjoying snacks they like while they're doing their problem sets. Even though their teachers were very worried that this would be distracting, it actually leads them to persist longer because they're enjoying it.

So I think this technique can be used in all sorts of different ways I tell my students about, you know, like consider only letting yourself pick up your favorite coffee drink that's maybe not super good for you when heading to the library to hit the books, or listening to your favorite podcast while doing household chores. Some people only let themselves drink their favorite red wine while cooking a homemade meal for a family. So there's all different ways

that we can temptation bundle. But it all began for me as a graduate student trying to solve these do well power problems. I love that. I love that whole concept that's really going to be helpful for me. Thank you.

It's been really helpful for me. Yeah, you really have changed my mind about a lot of things when I when I was reading your book, and you know, one topic that is definitely a topic of mutual interest and but for both of us is this question, are some people are they just kind of born with this supernatural self control capacity? And are some of us not born with that? You know, there's some days I'm wondering, you know, what, what the what I was born with? What? What you know?

But what you know, whatever is going on here, I'm wondering what that is all about? But what you kind of dispel that notion a little bit that that that's the right way to think about it. Yeah. Well, first of all, I should say that everything I know about individual differences I learned from Angela Duckworth because it's not my area of expertise really at all. I was trained

as an engineer. But but what Angela tells me and she and I'm sure you know this better than I do, is that, Yeah, of course there's some it seems like there's sort of a genetic component to just about everything,

and probably self controls in that category. But but a lot of it is learned, and a huge part of it is strategic that if we build good habits, if we use uh creative hacks like temptation bundling, basically to just take self control out of the picture, that's when those are the people who looked most self controlled to us, because they're actually not having to exert self control at all.

Another interesting thing Angela told me that has stuck with me is that even if you're self controlled in one domain of life, it tends not to be highly correlated with self control in another area, which also resonates with me, Like I'm really quite self controlled when it comes to my work, which is probably why Angela seems to think

I'm a superhuman. It's much too kind. But like you know, she hasn't seen necessarily how poorly I can keep my temper with my five year old when he's driving me nuts, right like, and so there's other there's other ones, or how much trouble I have resisting like a really delicious chocolate dessert. So there's a lot of There's a lot of variation in like where is it what part of your life? But in general, the point of my book is sort of like, let you know, down with exerting

self control and other sort of forms of like superpowers. Like, let's not just say like I'm never going to forget, I'm never I'm always going to exert self control. I'm always going to have the confidence I need. Like, let's dispel the notion that that's even possible or a good ambition and instead recognize, Okay, these are some things that

are hard and that they make change hard. And then let's figure out what are the strategies that sciences can actually help us not have to face these demons and be able to overcome them without so much effort. Yeah, you talk in the book about how you can channel the power of social forces to boost self control, capacity and even self confidence. Dare I say, like, maybe it's not such a bad thing to boost self confidence a little bit? Yeah, what are these social forces that you

speak of. Well, we touched on this a little bit earlier because you're to go out no more, you know, related to conformity and the power of right, the roommate, the roommate you get assigned, and how how much that matters. So there's those kinds of social forces like who you surround yourself with and whether or not they're role models and supporters who make you believe in yourself and show you ways to be sort of a better version of

who you want to be. And I will say that, you know, one of the best things in my life actually has been getting to hang around with Angela because she's a great example of the kind of person. Yeah, exactly,

we have that we have that shared luck. Good luck right when you have someone who you spend a lot of time with who lifts you up because they believe in you and because they're a good role model and they're achieving the kinds of things you want to figure, you know, and you can learn from them and say like, oh, how did you do that? That was really great and that is really powerful. And that's what I primarily mean by social forces, and that we can be thoughtful about

who our peers are. Try to, especially when we're trying to achieve a goal in particular, try to surround ourselves with other people who have a similar ambition and are maybe maybe a little ahead of us, not so far ahead of us that it's demotivating, which is also important, right, Like if you if you have an outrageously uh you know, far ahead of you type around that can be really demotivating, right, Like, if you're starting you're trying to start yourn entrepreneur and

like you hang out with Jeff Bezos all the time, it might not go that well. But someone who's maybe a little a little bit ahead of you, or a group of people that include some people who are a little bit ahead of you, that can be really motivating and you can pick up a lot of insights from being in that company. So that's one thing I mean by social forces. So what you're saying is, choose people and friends who have teeth. Don't hang around British people.

If you want good dental hygiene, hang around other people have nice teeth. Yeah, that's basically what you're saying. That's in a nutshell. Yes, they'll be a good model for you. Got it? Can we for ten minutes do some Twitter Q and A. We got a lot of questions on Twitter, but some of them were like, oh my gosh, I don't know the answer at all. Yeah, big big meaning of life type question totally And we only really have time to get to a couple today. But let's uh,

are you okay doing a couple? Yeah, let's do it? Okay, be kind though pick ones that I might have a chance at answering for sure, for sure? Okay, let me do that on the spot. Then, like miss Mo says, can positive behavioral interventions and support help create conditions from meaningful change? Or does it make meaningful change more difficult? That's an interesting question because I wonder like how it could make it more difficult. Sorry, I gave you a

difficult question. Did give me a difficult question? I mean, there's there's this large, I think like belief out there because of a couple of studies that got a lot of attention that intrinsic motivation crowd out. Is this like really awful monster lurking in the closet behind every intervention that you'd ever try to help people that you know that somehow, if if you've offered a tool or a crutch, people will no longer be motivated once that tool or

crutch is removed. In fact, they'll like their motivation will crumple and they'll be worse off than they were before.

So that might be what it means. That's like one idea, just because I hear that a lot that people get really worried, for instance, about incentives when if you pay people to do something, and a lot of habit researchers will pay people to do something for say a month, and then remove the payment, and generally what you find is that there's some persistence in the behavior that people were paid to do repeatedly because there's some kind of

habit that forms. Normally, it's like, you know, maybe thirty percent, it persists, but it doesn't get wiped away. And there's this fear, because of a couple of studies done a long time ago, that that any kind of reward will extinguish intrinsic motivation, so once it's removed, it'll be a problem anyway. So I don't agree with that, and it's generally not what my read of the literature suggests happens. So I think I think these kinds of interventions add

value rather than having a big downside. Cool, I hope, So, I hope so too. Other words, I've been spending my career hurting people. But yeah, what are we doing? What else are we doing here? Jim McGhee, I thought this was an interesting question. Any findings on willingness or ability to change versus age stage of life. Conventional wisdom is it's harder to change in middle old age. Yet we sometimes make major life changes in mid life crisises crises. Yeah,

it's really an interesting question. I don't know a lot about how age relates to ability to change. My funniest age comment on change, which is not an answer to this question but will make you smile, is that we did find birthright birthdays are a big moment when people are motivated to change. We've seen in multiple dating data sets that people are more likely to create goals around birthdays. They're also more likely to go to the gym at birthdays.

But we had one birthday that was a notable exception, actually depressed gym attendance. Every other birthday showed you a positive association, like after the birthday people the same person goes more twenty first birthdays. However, for reasons that listeners will surely appreciate immediately. They're not associated with fresh charts. They're associated with drinking, and so we see Jim Dunnant's

goes down. It's not an asing question, it's just the only data I have on age that's a little bit amusing. It's a really good question, don't I don't know if it's true that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. But I'll certainly say that in in research studies I have done around habit formation. For instance, when we look at ageency, is it a moderator, meaning like, does the effectiveness vary if we just put in age and look at it, we don't tend to see anything, but we don't.

You know, we don't have eighty year olds in most of our samples, but in the range of ages that I've often studied, so say eighteen to maybe fifty or even sixty. I did one big project with twenty four hour fitness gyms, and we had considerably older participants in that. I do a lot of things on college campuses, so that Skew's younger. I haven't seen age mattering for how

well an intervention works that's designed to help with change. Wow, Because I mean in the personality literature, we know that conscientiousness does show an increase as we age, not decrease, increase. So maybe that maybe you you know, you build more habits, but you're more conscientious and the thing's cancel out or something like that. I feel like there's a dissertation to be written here, But there's something there's something to you.

In here, Daniela Chah asks when, how and why should we focus our attention and behavior on change rather than acceptance. Now that's a good one. That's a good question. A good one. It's a good one. I will say. I'm gonna but I'm going to take a cop out answer. One of the things that I struggled with in this book was, you know, should I should I say anything prescriptive about whether you should change? And I decided that, like, that's just that's not my lane, Like my research is

really about. Okay, I'm going to assume you've decided that you want to change something, and I'm going to offer you all the tools and knowledge I can to help. But I don't. I don't take a stance on whether you need to change. Uh So, but okay, let's see if I can say two slightly more thoughtful things about that. I do say at the end of the book. And I very strongly believe this. You know, if something is really not working right, you're like, you really want to

become you know, you really tried to build it. I keep going to the gym route, So I'm gonna you stick with the gym example. You really wanted to build a gym routine, and it's just like not happening for you that you know, and you've tried all the tricks, like literally in my book, and it's not working, Like you can't You've thought you diagnosed the obstacle. It's just you're not getting there. I think it can be helpful

one to like be a little more forgive. Forgive yourself, yeah, be compassionate to yourself and then ask yourself, like, what's the higher order goal that I'm going for here? And is there some other way to get there? Like the gym may not be the thing. Is it that I'm trying to be healthier? Is it that I want to be fit? What is it? And like is there some

other path to that goal that I could take? And maybe I should like take a different route because this route isn't working, so that this may just not be an end that's going to happen for me. So if the gym is just never going to work for you, is it, like, well, maybe there's enough maybe like you should join a club soccer team and that would get

you to your goal. Or maybe it's you don't care as much about physical fitness as you do about health, and you could take up meditation or improve your sleep habits or your diet, and there's some other way again to achieve it that might be more feasible to fit within your life. So I do think you know, if you've tried everything and whatever it is you set out as your goal, isn't there like rethinking do you have the right goal goal, what's the what's the superordinate goal?

And can you get there some other way is really important. I really like that. Thank you for taking the time to actually think that through and offer a good a good one because I'm really interested in humanistic psychology and like Carl Rodgers talked a lot about acceptance as well. His phrase, his quote is the curious paradox is that once I've accepted myself, then I can change. That's his quote. That's his quote. So that is a curious for and

actually I should use that quote. It's such a wonderful quote for the book, right because yes, the book basically says once you accept that there are these obstacles and figure out you like and have the self awareness to figure out which one is blocking you, that is what allows you to change. So there has to be that degree of self awareness and acceptance as opposed to just believing I'm a superhuman and I can like pummel through any problem exactly exactly. I'll send you the exact quote.

I think I got it one hundred percent right, but I'll double check. It's one of my favorite It's one of my favorite quotes, Ethan. You might see it on Twitter, attributed to you as the source who taught me. I'd be honored if you quoted the Carl Rogers and attributed it to me or attributed the source to you, not the quote. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I mean? Here's the quote, and here's the person who gave me this great quote. Okay, last question.

I want to be respectful all your time, but I think it's kind of a funny question. Ethan says, entirely selfish question, what behavioral changes makes one a better academic? Oh? Wow? How do you apply it within that? To mean? Well? Okay, Actually, I'm like, oh, this one's easy. I thought it was hard to know. I'm like, oh no, it's not. It's not hard. Okay. And we haven't talked about this, so it's one of my favorite topics in the book and

it's so well suited to academia. So Lauren Estris Winkler, who is one of Angela Duckworths do another mutual friend, had this brilliant insight, and I got to work with

her a little bit on research on this topic. That we so often when someone is struggling to achieve a goal, we sort of put our arm around them and give them some advice, and that that can be really demotivating and de moralizing, and that a better way to help people might actually be to ask them for advice because people generally are actually she discovered and conducting many interviews, even if they're struggling to achieve a goal, they're often

quite sophisticated about some things that might help. And it's a matter of having the self confidence and the motivation to actually take action on those insights or even dredge them up. So if you're asked to help someone else, you're going to feel more confident, Okay, like someone believes in me, I must be able to do this. You're going to come up with insights that maybe you wouldn't have been motivated to dredge up if you've just been

thinking about yourself. And once you sort of say them to someone else, and you're in this position of a role model, you're going to feel like a hypocrite if you don't actually take action on them yourself. So I think this is a really powerful insight, and I actually think it can help academics tremendously. We're already in the

business of teaching. But I actually the thing that has improved me the most and made my career both most fulfilling and frankly advanced it in terms of the sort of objective stuff like publications and a complishment has been mentoring great students. When you mentor other people and you teach them the tools of the trade, you actually learn yourself more than you appreciate, and it builds up your confidence.

It helps you recognize some of the consistent and most important sort of rules and patterns and achieving and doing good science. And so I think mentoring is probably like the best thing, and mentoring, you know, with your whole heart in it is probably the best thing that you can do as an academic if you want to make more of yourself in that domain. Yeah, with genuine intentions. Yes, well that's great, great advice. Graavis, Thank you for being

good sport and answering the Twitter questions. You never know what you're going to get with the Twitter questions. There are a lot that I saved you from. Thanks for that. But Katie, thank you so much for being on the podcast today and for being such a bright light in our entire field. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, and likewise to you, thank you for making this amazing podcast and thank you for having me on it. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast.

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