Katy Milkman, a professor of How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, is a pioneering scientist in the field of Behavior Change for Good Initiative, a research center at Penn that works to advance the science of lasting change. Your approach is to conduct mega-studies with large organizational partners. What does that work look like?
Dr. Milkman: The Behavior Change for Good Initiative was founded by myself and Angela Duckworth about six years ago with the goal of accelerating the pace of discovery around positive behavior change research. How can we use the science of behavior change to help individuals and organizations achieve goals that are good for the world? It has a double entendre – we’re also interested in durable change. Some of our work is on short-term change, but a lot of it is also on durable change. The biggest part of the mission is for the social good.
How do we do that? We bring together a team of about 160 scientists from around the world who are leaders in their fields studying behavior change from different perspectives and with different lenses: economists, psychologists, computer scientists, medical doctors, sociologists, a lawyer or two. It’s a mishmash of people interested in change at the individual level. We unite them in this goal and we specialize in what we call mega-studies, which are really massive experiments, as opposed to simple A/B tests to figure out if a hypothesis is true about behavior change. We’ll actually test dozens of different interventions simultaneously in the same populations in order to vastly accelerate knowledge generation. We partner with really large organizations, like Walmart, that have really large customer bases. We think it’s powerful to bring all of these different minds to the table together to try to answer and tackle the same question. We almost force them to rub elbows because now they’re best ideas are in a tournament-style runoff or race with other scientists. For example, economists and psychologists are submitting their best ideas and they’re all being launched simultaneously and they see how they all turn out. We’ve been pioneering this methodology since our inception. We’ve done mega-studies with 24 Hour Fitness, Walmart, Learn Math, Penn Medicine and Geisinger Health, a large Nature a couple of years ago. It’s catching fire. We feel that was a major contribution in the way science is done and how we can accelerate things.
Wharton Global Youth: Can you tell us more about the Walmart study?
Dr. Milkman: It’s universally agreed-upon among scientists and policymakers and most business leaders that vaccines were an enormous success story that helped us get back to close to normal [during the pandemic]. Vaccines are only useful in society if people adopt them. You can’t just make them and then hope for the best and hope you can reopen businesses. You’ve got to get them in arms. My team, knowing something about how we encourage behavior change, did a bunch of work to try to help figure out what’s the right way to communicate with people and encourage vaccine adoption as efficiently and effectively as possible. One of our projects was a Source link
