This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads

• The Importance of Ignoring Sunk Costs: A new episode of Choiceology featuring economics Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler on the sunk cost fallacy, or our tendency to let irrecoverable costs drive decisions instead of focusing on what lies ahead, and how to avoid it.

• 7 Secrets to Maximize Your Wealth: This article from Kiplinger’s offers advice on how to avoid biases that put your financial wellbeing at risk, featuring a tip from me.

• Wait…Where Did My Retirement Money Go?: I joined This Is Uncomfortable from Marketplace to talk about why we find it so hard to motivate ourselves to do financial “chores” like tracking down retirement accounts from old jobs.

• In A Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive is just out from UVA Design Professor Leidy Klotz (bestselling author of Subtract) and I can’t wait to read it!

Q&A: Advice for Living A Happier Life

This month’s Q&A from Choiceology is with UCLA Marketing Professor and bestselling author Cassie Holmes, who shares insights from her research on happiness and how to live a more fulfilling life.

Me: Could you describe your favorite empirical study that compares people’s happiness levels when they focus on time versus money?

Cassie: There are actually two studies that I love to show this point, and when you put them together, they make the point really well. When we ask people: Which do you want more of – more time or more money? – and we measure their happiness and satisfaction in life, you see a correlation between preferring time over money and happiness, controlling for demographic factors.

Me: So, the more I care about time, the more I am a happy person, even when you take everything else about me out of the equation basically.

Cassie: Yeah, but the question is what’s the effect there? Is it that happier people that want more time, or is it that drawing people’s attention to time versus money could also influence people’s happiness? And to look at that, we went to an environment where people both socially connect as well as spend time working: at a cafe. And what we did was as people were entering the cafe, we presented them with a survey, and asked them if they wouldn’t mind filling it out.

Me: I love this study. Am I remembering correctly that you randomly assigned some people to see a survey that drew their attention to money, some to see a survey that drew their attention to time, and others to see a survey that didn’t draw their attention to either time or money? Is that right?

Cassie: Yes. And I had a research assistant observing how people spent their time at the cafe – to what extent did they spend their time chatting with others or socially connecting, whether in line with the barista or with friends? And how much of their time at the cafe did they spend doing work on their laptop?

And what we found was that those led to think about time spent a greater proportion of their time at the cafe socially connecting than those who were led to think about money and those in the control condition. Then when they were leaving, we asked them to fill out another survey to tell us how happy they were feeling, how satisfied they felt with their experience at the cafe that day. Those who were led to think about time going in left happier because of that social connection.

Me: Those studies are so interesting, Cassie. I’m wondering if you could explain why you find these patterns of behavior?

Cassie: Well, it’s actually when people think about time, they become more deliberate with how they spend it – spending in ways that are more fulfilling, more in line with their values. And the reason is because they become more self-reflective. So how we spend our time is a direct reflection of who we are. How we spend our hours sum up to our days, our years, and ultimately our life. Social connection is an activity that contributes to happiness in the moment, as well as a greater sense of meaning. So it’s about being deliberate and thoughtful with this resource that makes people happier.

Me: So Cassie, you’ve just talked a bunch about the benefits of focusing on time. But are there any downsides?

Cassie: For a lot of us when we think about hours, we start freaking out because we’re like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t have enough hours in my day.” And this experience of time poverty is not positive at all. It’s actually quite negative. And we’ve been exploring the prevalence of time poverty. And so time poverty is this feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. And we find that in a nationally representative sample of Americans, almost half feel that they never have enough time to do everything they want to do.

And the effects of that are actually quite negative. When we feel time-poor, we are less happy or are less healthy. You also see that people are less kind when they feel time-poor. They’re less likely to slow down and spend time to help others. So between being less healthy, less nice, and less happy, those are really negative effects of time poverty. And that stress from thinking and being so absorbed with how few hours you have in the day.

The positive effects of time come from realizing that those hours are sort of pieces of your life overall. And when you think about your time in life, that’s where you get these wonderful effects where people become more deliberate and focused on meaning.

Me: Are there downsides to focusing on money, or is that just the equivalent to having no focus on time?

Cassie: My focus in my research has been the relative attention devoted to time versus money. There is other work that finds that being focused on money does have negative effects. There’s work that looks at the downside of materialism, where a feature of materialism is that their values are tightly tied to how much money they have, how many things they have. And research has showed that materialistic people are less happy.

Me: What does your research suggest people should do or think about differently in their lives to be happier?

Cassie: People should be more focused on time as the critical resource for their satisfaction in life, their happiness in the day-to-day than the typical attention towards money. And also, they should take away that, unlike money, where more is better, for time it’s not necessarily that more is better. It’s really how you spend the time that you have, both the activities that you spend it on, as well as your engagement and mindset when you’re spending that time.

Me: Cassie, are there better and worse ways to spend our money when we’re thinking about the importance of time and using it wisely?

Cassie: That’s a great question. There are ways of spending money that are associated with greater happiness. There’s a body of research that shows that investing money in experiences over material goods is associated with greater happiness and greater lasting happiness. And one of the reasons, actually, for that is social connection that is associated with greater happiness. Another way of spending money that is associated with greater happiness is actually spending on others. So, more charitable giving, which again – there’s a social value to that.

Me: When you reflect on all the research that’s been done on happiness over the years, research by yourself, research by others, do you have a few favorite science-based tips for how people can spend their time that would lead to greater happiness? And that might not already be completely intuitive to people?

Cassie: Count the times of something you love doing that you have to do it left. We found that when people recognize their time is limited, whether as they’re aging or they’re reminded, based off of situations in their environment or they continue to remind themself the reality that our time is in fact limited in life, people savor their simple moments, their day-to-day moments, more.

And I think it’s really powerful because there’s so much happiness available to us already in our lives if we just pay attention, and that we are not distracted during them, whether it’s distracted with our phones or even distracted in our minds, because we’re cycling through all the things we have to do. When we recognize that the time that we have in our life is limited, we pay attention to those moments that are so precious.

And so, if you sort of reflect back on your week, what are the ways of spending time that were most satisfying, most fulfilling, most joyful, I suspect that they required very little money, if any at all. But they do require attention, and they also don’t require a whole bunch of time. It’s not that you have to quit and spend hours upon hours on those activities. It’s just that when you do spend them, you’re fully engaged and you can anticipate them while you’re doing it, you can savor them, and then afterwards continue to reflect on them and feel grateful for them. Just those moments can have a profound influence on how much satisfaction we feel in our life.

Me: I love that takeaway. Thank you so much, Cassie.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Cassie’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into her research on the happiness, or order a copy of her terrific book HAPPIER HOUR.

Wishing you a happy end of April. See you in May!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of over 100,000 followers on social media, where I share ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / X / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

A New Season of Choiceology

We’ve just launched a fresh season of Choiceology! Below is a trailer for our first episode of spring, which is focused on algorithm appreciation. Be sure to listen soon, and let your friends know that we’re back with an all-new slate of episodes arriving every two weeks.

A Glossary of All the Topics We’ve Featured on Choiceology

With the support of two incredible undergraduate research assistants (thank you Vidya Pandiaraju and Katarina Siggelkow!), I’ve created a new resource to help you keep track of all the different topics we’ve covered on past Choiceology episodes. It’s an interactive glossary: you can click the name of any topic listed and you’ll be taken to a short entry providing a definition, where to find the relevant episode, and the expert guest(s) featured. How might you use it? If you’re curious about a particular bias or concept, you can jump right to the definition and find the episode and experts available to teach you more. And if you’re a longtime listener who’s wanted a handy crib sheet summarizing the decision-making topics we’ve covered that you can easily revisit, your wait is over.

Q&A: A Checklist for Making Better Decisions

This month’s Q&A from Choiceology is with Jack Soll, a professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. He offers a “checklist” you can follow to avoid some of the most common and harmful judgment and decision making biases.

Me: I’m hoping we could dive right into some strategies for better decision-making. I’m a big fan of checklists, so I’d actually love to get your list of the best advice in that format.

Jack: All right, a checklist. I have four pieces of advice here, which are probably incomplete. But here’s four.

So one is to be decision ready. So often, we fall back on our intuition and can be biased if we’re distracted, if we’re tired, if we’re hungry, if we’re really rushed, we don’t really have time to deliberate. And we often make better decisions if we actually: (1) know how to make the right decision — we know what principles to apply and (2) have some time to think about and apply those principles. So there are a lot of situations where we’re not decision ready. Maybe we’re angry at somebody, or maybe we’re trying to do multiple things at once and are distracted. And so at those times, it’s best to put off the decision to another time.

Me: That’s a great item number one. What else?

Jack: Yeah, sometimes we miss opportunities because we didn’t think broadly enough. And so a second piece of advice is to broaden the frame. A lot of biases actually could be attributed to thinking too narrowly. Maybe we’re only thinking about the one option that’s in front of us. Should I go to this college? Should I rent this apartment? And when we do that, we only have one objective in mind. We’re not thinking about all the things we care about. So imagine a student choosing a college who wants to be a software engineer. They might focus on which school has the best computer science department, and that might turn out to be the best choice for them. But if they stop and think about it, they might realize, “Well, in the future I might prefer a different career path” or “There’s other things I care about for choosing a college, like social things.”

So, try to think more broadly about what can happen, how might our preferences change, what can happen in the world? At the end of the day, decisions are limited by the option set. A lot of research has shown that people aren’t necessarily great at choosing well, or they might be OK at choosing between A, B, and C, but sometimes none of those options are the right option. Sometimes what you actually ought to do is throw out all those options and invent some new ones. And so that’s what I mean by broadening the frame.

Number three on the checklist is to take advantage of the wisdom of others. Seek advice. And when doing this, make sure to get independent advice. Meaning, don’t tell the other person what you think the answer is because this is going to influence what they tell you. They’ll either think that you’re asking for confirmation (and they’ll tell you what they think you want to hear) or their thinking will be influenced by your thinking.

Me: And what’s the fourth item?

Jack: Fourth: experiment. Try things that you think won’t work. Do this in a low-cost way. The idea here is to try to generate dis-confirmation, try to prove yourself wrong. One way to do this is empirical. So if you think you know what a website should look like, you could do some A/B testing, and you could create variations that are different from what you think are best to kind of test whether or not your idea is correct. But in other situations, experimentation is difficult, and there we have to rely on the wisdom of others. And one way to do this is to have a devil’s advocate, have somebody argue for an alternative point of view.

Me: Yeah, I love that. I often tell my students to try to find somebody who will play the role of devil’s advocate and just argue the opposite, too, when I’m worried that I might be too attached to a given path or argument and not thinking broadly enough.

Jack: Oh, for sure. You want to think about reasons why you might be wrong. We often think about why we’re going to succeed or why our answer is right. But consider why the answer might be much different from what you thought. Sometimes we’re all on our own, so this is a little bit challenging, but ask yourself why you might be wrong.

Another way to seek dis-confirmation is to tackle the same problem but on different occasions. Actually, this is a trick that a lot of professors use when they’re grading papers. They do it twice. And it takes extra time, but often what happens is, at any given moment, there’s some noise in our judgment, or we have different things in mind. And so if we look at the same decision problem twice or are grading the same essay twice, we might come up with different answers. And in those cases, if the answers are different from each other, you could either, if it’s quantitative, you can average the grades together. If it’s more discrete, or if it’s categorical, what you can do is look at it a third time or have somebody else look at it. There’s a lot of work along these lines in medicine where if you ask a radiologist to look at the same x-ray on multiple occasions, they might come up with different answers. And this isn’t really a critique of their expertise. This is just symptomatic of how difficult the task is. But for those tricky ones where they’re giving different answers on different occasions, then maybe a third look or bringing in another expert can be helpful.

Me: I love that, Jack. And P.S., it also makes me feel better about the fact that I’m that dissertation advisor who after six months reads a new draft from my student and says, “I really don’t like the third paragraph of the intro. You should cut it.” And they tell me, “Actually, I added it because you told me to.” Anyway, I’m often inconsistent in my advice to my students, but then I say, “Well, you’re getting the wisdom of the crowd within.”

Jack: Exactly.

Me: It’s like two independent perspectives. Aren’t you lucky? Anyway, that’s my framing trick.

Jack: There’s more than one Katy Milkman.

Me: That’s right. That’s right. Jack, this has been so enlightening and helpful, and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me and share these insights. Thank you so much.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Jack’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into his research on debiasing or check out our HBR article “Outsmart Your Own Biases“, which we co-authored with John Payne.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in April!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I share ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / X / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

Currently, Star Wars reigns supreme in my household!

In honor of Luke Skywalker, this month, I’m bringing you a Q&A with Ohio State psychology Professor Kurt Gray about the storytelling formula that underlies Star Wars and every other incredible adventure mentioned above: the hero’s journey. What’s most interesting to me about Kurt’s work is the insights he has uncovered about reframing your own life story. Thinking about your life as a hero’s journey following a protocol his team developed can increase both your resilience and your sense of meaning.

But before we get to that Q&A, here are my monthly recommended watches and reads…

This Month’s Recommended Watches and Reads

• An Interview with Emily Oster: I recently co-hosted a Zoom conversation with Emily Oster, the bestselling author, Brown professor, and CEO of ParentData. We discussed how to communicate successfully about science. The event attracted over 400 live attendees, and now you can watch our conversation on YouTube.

• January and February brought a slew of great new books by my friends and colleagues. I highly recommend picking up a copy of Maya Shankar’s THE OTHER SIDE OF CHANGE, Leslie John’s REVEALING, George Newman’s HOW GREAT IDEAS HAPPEN, Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow’s HOW EQUALITY WINS, Zeke Emanuel’s EAT YOUR ICE CREAM, and Tom Griffith’s THE LAWS OF THOUGHT. Oh, and Sunita Sah’s DEFY has just been released in paperback!

Q&A: A Surprising Way to Build Resilience

This month’s Q&A from Choiceology is with Ohio State psychology Professor Kurt Gray. He explains what a “hero’s journey” is and how understanding this concept—formulated in the 20^th century by a mythologist named Joseph Campbell—can help you build resilience and find more meaning in your life.

Me: Could we start with a description of what a hero’s journey is? I know your research team boiled it down to seven key elements.

Kurt: Yeah, so the concept of “the hero’s journey” was originally formulated by a mythologist named Joseph Campbell. And he had an archetype of, I think, 22 steps that heroes went through in epic journeys, from Beowulf to the Ramayana. My research team thought that was too many, and some of them were too weird, like “the magic flight” – that seemed not so applicable to the real world. So, we narrowed it to seven steps. So, you have your hero, and (1) they shift their surroundings (in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, they find a wardrobe and go through it). (2) They go on a quest. (3) They have a goal. (4) They find allies. (5) They face a challenge. (6) They transform themselves. And (7) they leave a legacy to the world.

Me: You mentioned a couple of famous stories in that answer. What other stories would people be familiar with that follow this formula?

Kurt: So many of the stories people care about follow this structure. In fact, George Lucas, when he came up with Star Wars, got a copy of Joseph Campbell’s book and explicitly made Star Wars a hero’s journey. So, Luke Skywalker is the protagonist. He has a shift in surroundings when he leaves his home because he meets the droid who says “Help me, Obi-Wan.” Now he’s on a quest to help Princess Leia. He finds allies in Leia and Han. He faces a challenge, notably Darth Vader. He transforms himself by finding the force and becoming a Jedi, and then he has a legacy in that he saves the whole universe. And we have this in The Hunger Games. We have this in The Lord of the Rings. Comic books. It doesn’t matter the genre; they all basically follow this script.

Me: Thank you for mapping that out. It’s helpful and fun to see how this formula shapes so many of our favorite stories. In your research, you’re focused on what it means for a person to see their own life in terms of a hero’s journey. Could you explain that idea?

Kurt: The whole core of this research idea is, one, we tell stories to each other to entertain, but we also tell stories about our lives to make our lives seem meaningful and coherent to ourselves. So, thinking about your life as a hero’s journey is just taking a series of events and constructing a narrative around them. For me, I grew up in Canada, and I had a shift when I came to America. I had a challenge in grad school, and so on. Anyone can do this. You can see your life following the seven elements of a hero’s journey, and once you do that, then you begin to see yourself as a hero, and that makes your life more meaningful and more like an epic tale of excitement rather than just a series of events that happened to you.

Me: That’s a great summary and nicely hints at a key point of your research. Can you describe some of the studies you’ve run about the impact of getting a person to see their life as a hero’s journey?

Kurt: Of course. We ran a bunch of studies to get at this idea. Before I start, I want to take a step back and say that the realization we had when we came into this project was that anyone’s life can be made more heroic or interesting or meaningful depending on the shape of the narrative that they tell themselves. Early on, we just wanted to show and test whether people who saw their lives as more akin to a hero’s journey felt like their lives were more meaningful. So, we developed a scale that tapped each of the seven elements. One question that might tap the shift is “I frequently have new experiences.” We found that the higher you rated your life in terms of a shift, or challenge, or legacy, the more meaningful you felt your life was and the less you felt depressed day-to-day.

Me: I remember your first couple of studies focused on that scale, but then I think you went beyond just measurement of how people perceive their lives and tried to actually change the way people tell their stories, right?

Kurt: Right. We know that correlation isn’t causation. And so, just because you see your life as a hero’s journey and that is connected with your sense of meaning, it doesn’t mean the perception of a hero’s journey caused those feelings. So, we developed something we call a “re-storying intervention,” which involves encouraging people to see their lives as more like a hero’s journey and testing if that shifted their feelings of meaning. We gave people those seven elements, encouraged them to see their lives along those elements, and then stitched it all together into an overarching life narrative. And then we had them rate their feelings of meaning in life.

Me: It’s such an interesting study, and I know you found that this intervention increased people’s sense of meaning and their resilience. What do you think is driving the effect here? Why does seeing your life through the lens of a hero’s journey increase a person’s sense of meaning and their resilience in the face of a challenge?

Kurt: I think there’s a boring answer and a heroic answer.

The boring answer is: The elements of a hero’s journey are things that we have long known to be tied to a meaningful life. Allies: People with friends feel their life is more meaningful and feel less depressed because loneliness is really bad for your mental health.

But the heroic answer is: That the framing of a hero’s journey makes your life seem culturally meaningful. Now, what does that mean? Well, we all live in a culture, and cultures make meaning by telling stories. We can go back to Joseph Campbell and say that the most meaningful stories are those with a hero’s journey. So, it stands to reason that making your life a hero’s journey resonates with our cultural ideals of what a good life is.

Me: What advice or recommendations do you have based on this research?

Kurt: I think there are two things you can do differently. One is just changing your mindset. If you’re thinking of yourself as a hero on a journey, that alone can give you more meaning. The second is making choices that make it easier to see your life as a hero’s journey. We can all agree that if I climbed Everest, that’s a little more hero’s journey than if I binge on Netflix shows. So, try to think about which choice you would include on a hero’s journey. It doesn’t have to be physically heroic. It could be that I’m volunteering. I’m helping people. I’m building a legacy, right? I’m rescuing a cat. Just something where there’s some legacy and allies and challenges.

Me: That’s great advice, and I think it’s a good place to wrap up. I’m so grateful for your time and your wonderful research, Kurt.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Kurt’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into his research on the hero’s journey, or order a copy of one of his excellent books OUTRAGED: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground or THE MIND CLUB: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in March!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I share ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

One highlight of this year’s media tour was recording an episode of The Mel Robbins Podcast in Boston. The resulting episode, “Change Your Life This Year: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be,” was released in the final moments of 2025.

I’ve done hundreds of podcast interviews since publishing How to Change in mid-2021, but working with Mel’s team was a unique experience. Their approach combines curiosity-driven storytelling, an unusually personal tone, and a palpable sense of joy. I had a blast getting to be part of this show, which was the #1 most shared podcast of 2025 and a top-5 most downloaded podcast.

Here’s a short clip from the episode:

A Roundup of New Year’s Press Coverage

• Here’s how to make resolutions stick, according to a behavior change scientist The Washington Post

• Why do so many people ring in the new year on Jan. 1? NPR

• How to make New Year’s resolutions you’ll actually stick to GQ

• Want to make your resolution stick this year? Behavioral science has the answers Scientific American

• The 5-day brain health challenge, Day 3: Do a brain-boosting workout The New York Times

• How to stick to your personal goals WHYY

• To make New Year’s resolutions stick, science can work in your favour CBC

• How to make New Year`s resolutions that you’ll actually stick to WGN Morning News

• Change your life this year: How to get from where you are to where you want to be The Mel Robbins Podcast

• Are you ready for a fresh start (update) Freakonomics Radio

Q&A: What is Naïve Realism and How Can Recognizing It Help You Disagree Better?

This month’s Q&A from Choiceology is with Harvard Kennedy School Professor Julia Minson, author of the forthcoming book How to Disagree Better (which I highly recommend!). Here she explains what naïve realism is, how it shapes our judgments, and why it can prevent us from fully incorporating insights from people who see the world differently.

Me: I’m excited to talk about naïve realism. Let’s start at the very beginning: what it is, exactly?

Julia: Naïve realism is basically the belief that most of us have that our perceptions of the world and the reactions to the things we see are reasonable and objective. That “I see the world as it really is.”

Me: Are you telling me that my perceptions of the world are not correct? Because I’m going to have trouble with that.

Julia: It is funny, right? So, we kind of stole the idea of naïve realism from philosophy. We process all of our encounters with the physical world through a set of perceptual organs, so what we experience in our brains is not actually what’s out there. So, when you and I look at a couch of a particular color, we’re actually seeing slightly different colors because we have slightly different eyeballs. And so, in a physical sense, we don’t perceive reality as it really is. We perceive a version that’s funneled to us through our organs. And then that’s even more true when we think about our social reality. We think that we understand what’s just, or fair, or reasonable, and we don’t account for the filtering that happens through our background, our ideology, or our level of education, or whether we’re tired or cranky. We generally don’t stop to consider how all of those factors influenced what we think of as the completely unmediated perception of how the world is.

Me: Where does naïve realism become a real problem?

Julia: Well, first, let me say that naïve realism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just the way we relate to information in the world. If I’m walking around the world assuming that I’m a rational, reasonable person, that saves me a lot of time. Where naïve realism tends to become more problematic is when we are dealing with more contested opinions and issues. Ironically, the first big thing that naïve realism tends to do is make us not anticipate disagreement. A closely-related bias called the false consensus effect says that because I think I’m a rational, reasonable person and I see things how they really are, I expect other rational, reasonable people to agree with me. So, people tend to overestimate the proportion of people who share their tastes and preferences and attitudes. But the bigger problem is when we see clear evidence of disagreement and rationalize that the other person must be unreasonable. It might lead us to think, “I’m seeing the situation in an objective way, and you disagree with me, ergo, you are not being a reasonable person in this situation.” And then because humans are very good at making up stories to explain the events around them, you can spin up a whole story about what exactly is wrong with the other person that’s making them so unreasonable.

Me: It sounds like anytime I’m interacting with someone who has a different background than I do, and we’re talking about our opinions on, say, which stocks are good buys or how to raise children, these are going to be situations where naïve realism could cause conflict.

Julia: Exactly.

Me: Got it. Could you tell me about some of the research you’ve been involved in proving naïve realism exists?

Julia: There’s a study I love that was conducted by Lee Ross, who came up with the idea of naïve realism in collaboration with Andrew Ward. When I was Lee’s research assistant, he taught an applied social psychology course at Stanford, and so we had this large room of undergrads who were all in this class, and we asked them to fill out a survey about their opinions on a bunch of different policy issues that were at play at the time and you had to say whether you agree or disagree with a bunch of different things. And then we collected all these surveys, basically shuffled them around, and then passed out the surveys back to the students, so you ended up with the survey of some other random student in the class. So you no longer have your own survey. You are looking at somebody else’s responses.

And the question before you is: Consider your own responses that you just filled out and now the responses that you are looking at. How much do you think you overall agree or disagree with this other student’s worldview? And so they respond on this seven-point scale of how much they agree or disagree. Then they answer a bunch of questions about what is driving your own views versus this other person’s views. And we give them sort of this set of considerations about normative facts, normative considerations that could influence your beliefs. So things like a good understanding of American history, engagement in world events, the desire for fairness and justice. Those are things that ideally should influence policy opinions. But we also gave them a list of things that might influence beliefs that we thought of as biases – things like political correctness, the self-interest of the group you belong to, exposure to partisan media and so on.

What we find is that people generally say their own views were more driven by normative considerations than biases, and if their counterpart disagrees with them, this other student whose questionnaire they’re looking at, to the extent that they see that questionnaire as reflecting a different view of the world, they think that worldview is primarily driven by biases rather than normative considerations. And what’s interesting is that it’s not simply: “I think that my views are normative and other people’s views are biased.” It’s that other people’s views are biased if they happen to disagree with mine.

Me: That’s really interesting, and I know you have a great paper looking at how naïve realism affects the way we change our views after exposure to other people’s opinions. Could you describe that work?

Julia: Absolutely. This was work with Lee Ross and Varda Liberman, who is a researcher in Israel, and it involved making quantitative estimates. The great thing about quantitative estimates is that there are lots and lots of them to make in the world, and there are correct answers, so you can actually measure what strategy would be more effective if you’re going for accuracy. Like how many people would support this particular policy or how many inches of snow will fall in Boston next year, and therefore, how many snow plows do we need to prepare?

We make quantitative estimates in the real world constantly. And the thing that’s interesting is that we often make quantitative estimates with the input of other people.

So I have some estimate about the world, and you might have some estimate about the world, and if I have invited you into a conversation about what the right answer is, the question that is interesting from a naïve realism perspective is: How much weight am I going to give to your estimate? If I made an estimate independently and so have you, and we’re equally informed, I should average those two estimates.

What we find instead is that people pretty consistently give more weight to their own judgment than the other person’s judgment, and in fact, they do to such an extent that it’s tantamount to saying that I am twice as knowledgeable about this thing that I really have no idea about as you are. So we have people estimate all kinds of things that they know nothing about, and they very consistently give twice as much weight to their own judgment as they give to the other person’s judgment. So we know mathematically averaging works better. The question is why don’t people do it? An explanation that you would get from naïve realism is that the further away you are from my estimate, the more I think that you’re just wrong.

Me: That’s fascinating. What do you do differently because you know about this research?

Julia: I recognize that in reality, most of us are being naïve realists almost all the time. So, it’s incredibly important to keep in mind that when you disagree with a smart person, you are wrong 50% of the time. You would do well to remember that, especially in either marital arguments or business partnerships.

I would also advise people to actively seek out people who you expect to disagree with you. We have such a strong bias against it, that unless you make it a point to look for those people and get their input, you’ll either avoid it or discount it when you come across it.

Me: That’s a great place to wrap up, Julia, because I think most of us find it uncomfortable to disagree with other people. But recognizing that disagreement can offer a lens into important things we’re missing rather than signaling another person is wrong and biased and we’re right highlights the importance of collecting different perspectives.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Julia’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into naïve realism, or pre-order a copy of her excellent book coming out in March, How to Disagree Better.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in February!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I share ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

This month, I’m thrilled to share a Q&A with USC psychologist Wendy Wood who is the world’s leading expert on habits. I last featured Wendy in this newsletter back in 2020, when we talked about how habits are formed. In our new conversation, we focus on one powerful but often overlooked tool for shaping our routines: friction.

But before we get to that Q&A, here are my monthly recommended listens, watches, and reads…

This Month’s Recommended Listens, Watches and Reads

• Use the “Great Lock-In” to Achieve Your 2025 Health Goals: I spoke with CNN about how the “great lock in” trend on social media can be helpful to anyone with goals left to achieve in 2025.

• Understanding Self-control: In the season finale of Choiceology, I spoke with my close friend and collaborator Angela Duckworth about the science of self-control. As a special bonus, Charles Schwab made a video of our complete conversation available here.

• An Interview with Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and Alex Imas at Wharton: Angela Duckworth and I hosted Richard and Alex for a conversation about their new book, The Winner’s Curse, in front of over 300 Penn students, faculty and staff, and now you can watch our conversation on YouTube.

Q&A: A Tool for Breaking Bad Habits and Building Good Ones

This Q&A from Choiceology is with emeritus USC psychology Professor Wendy Wood, who is the best-selling author of Good Habits, Bad Habits. Here she discusses how we can use friction to our advantage when we want to break bad habits or build good ones.

Me: Wendy, to start, could you define “friction”?

Wendy: In physics, friction is what stops motion. For behavior, friction is what gets in the way of us doing a certain thing.

One example is distance—when things are further away from us, we’re just less likely to act on them. And that’s great for when you’re trying to stop yourself from eating donuts. Just don’t keep them in your house. But it’s a problem when you’re trying to get to the gym. People are less likely to go when the gym is far away. Usually, we don’t think about distance in terms of friction, but it is a determinant of our behavior.

Another example is time. Online sites know this well—they know that reducing the amount of time it takes to buy something is an important way to control friction. That’s why it usually only takes one click to make a purchase. If you have to click a couple of times, they lose customers.

Effort is also another kind of friction, and that’s sort of obvious. When something takes much more effort and energy from us, we’re less likely to do it.

Me: That was so clear, and I love those examples. Could you describe some of your favorite research showing that friction changes our decisions?

Wendy: Yeah, I have a couple. One is a study from the 1980s. The focus of this research was to control elevator use. It was in a four-story building, so most people could take the stairs, but most used the elevator instead. The researchers were trying to figure out how to stop people from taking the elevator so often. So they did what most of us would think of first—they put signs all over the elevator and around the stairs that said “Take the stairs. It’s healthier for you.” Or “Take the stairs. It’s good for the environment.” It had no effect.

So then, the researchers slowed the closing of the elevator door by 16 seconds. Remember I said that time is an important component of friction. Well, that delay cut elevator use by a third. And the great thing was that when the researchers put the elevator back to its original speed a month later, people kept taking the stairs because a month had been long enough for them to form that habit. So that showed us that friction can help people form long-term habits.

Me: That’s such an interesting study. I also really love the recent work you’ve done with Asaf Mazar. Could you describe that?

Wendy: Yeah, we conducted a survey of U.S. voters before and after the 2020 presidential election. And what we found is that when people were asked what would either help them or get in the way of them voting, they described a lot of personal things. Like, “I’m really a strong Republican. I really hate this candidate. I think it’s my civic duty.”

They described a lot of beliefs about voting that they thought would motivate them to vote. Very few people described what you’d think of as friction, like whether they needed to get childcare in order to vote, whether they owned a vehicle so they could get to the polls, or how much time they thought it would take for them to vote.

So people mentioned beliefs, but they didn’t mention friction very often. And then we assessed them after they had voted. And it turns out that beliefs and friction were about equally important in determining whether people voted. We think of voting as this thing we do because we’re committed, either to our country or to a political party. But friction is really important in determining whether people vote. We just overlook it. All of this speaks to the fact that we tend to overvalue agency and underestimate the influence of difficulties in our environment, like barriers that can stop us from doing things.

Me: I’m curious, what first got you interested in studying friction, especially given that we tend to underestimate its power intuitively?

Wendy: So, I study habits. And habits are notoriously difficult to change. You can change your attitudes; you can change your preferences. We’ve all had the experience of deciding we’re going to start eating more healthfully, we’re going to start saving money, or we’re going to start exercising. But these involve changing our habits. And changing intentions doesn’t change those behaviors very effectively. So, in trying to figure out how to best change well-established habits, friction is a great alternative to the kinds of change strategies we typically think of. Friction works directly on the behavior itself, and it works on habits just like it works on other behaviors—it makes them less likely. So one of the best ways to control your unwanted habits is to add friction, set some barriers in the environment. And probably the best example of this is the anti-smoking campaigns.

Since the last century, we’ve gone from 50% of Americans smoking to only 15%. And certainly, part of that is people’s understanding that smoking causes cancer. That became clear around the middle of the last century. But even more important is that the government instituted policies in the U.S. to make smoking more difficult.

They started putting taxes on cigarettes. They banned smoking in public places. They made it so you couldn’t pull cigarettes off the shelf at a store. You have to ask someone for them. And sometimes also show your ID to prove that you’re old enough to purchase cigarettes. So all of these things make purchasing and smoking a little bit more difficult. Not impossible—we’re not removing people’s ability to make choices—but we’re encouraging them to make a healthy choice, which is “don’t smoke.” And that has had tremendous impact, even on something that is as addictive as nicotine. So it’s a very broad influence on behavior, and it’s very powerful.

Me: What do you think our listeners should do differently now that they have a better understanding of how much friction affects our decisions and our habits?

Wendy: Be aware of the importance of the barriers and forces around you that affect doing what you want. To control behaviors sometimes involves controlling those forces. Think about how to make behaviors that you want to perform easier. And how to make behaviors that you don’t want to do a little bit harder. Adding friction won’t take away your ability to do the unwanted behaviors or force you to do the wanted ones, but it will influence the likelihood that you might.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Wendy’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into sludge and friction, or get a copy of her excellent book Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes that Stick.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in December!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I share ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

Subscribe now

I still have the book on my office shelf. It was the first academic book I truly couldn’t put down. I even read it at the gym! And it changed my life: it convinced me to shift my research focus from technology to behavioral economics.

Fast forward to today: The Winner’s Curse, first published in 1992, has just been re-released in a brand-new, updated edition. Co-authored by Nobel laureate Richard Thaler and rising behavioral economics star Alex Imas (both at the University of Chicago), the 2025 edition comes with fresh material and a new subtitle: Behavioral Economics Anomalies Then and Now. Below, you can see me holding my well-worn original alongside the brand-new version!

In this month’s newsletter, I’m thrilled to share a Q&A with Richard and Alex about the new Winner’s Curse. Who knows — reading it might just change your life!

But before we dive into this month’s Q&A, I have a few recommendations to share…

This Month’s Recommended Listens, Reads and a Challenge

• The Power of Adopting a Growth Mindset: A new episode of Choiceology featuring Indiana University Professor Mary Murphy explains the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset, why it matters, and the evidence that mindsets are malleable.

• A Two-Step Plan to Help You Save More: I recently spoke with CNBC about two particularly useful behavioral science insights that can help you achieve your savings goals.

• Boost Your Health IQ: If you like Duolingo, you’ll love HealthDaily – it’s a program my research team built to help you upgrade your knowledge about healthy living in 60 seconds a day for 30 days that we’re offering in partnership with CNN for a limited time. Are you up to the challenge?

• Congratulations to my friends and fellow behavioral scientists Judd Kessler (author of LUCKY BY DESIGN), Michael Hallsworth (author of THE HYPOCRISY TRAP) as well as Richard Thaler and Alex Imas (authors of THE WINNER’S CURSE) on their new books, pictured below.

Q&A: Behavioral Economics Anomalies Then and Now

This Q&A is with Richard Thaler and Alex Imas. Richard won the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics, is the former president of the American Economics Association, and is the international bestselling author of Nudge. Alex is a rising star in the field of behavioral economics and the Roger L. and Rachel M. Goetz Professor of Behavioral Science, Economics, and Applied AI at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Me: This is a somewhat unusual book in that it’s a compilation of essays about ways humans predictably deviate from behaving perfectly rationally (it’s not a single narrative). Could you explain the motivation for writing these essays?

Richard and Alex: Once upon a time, Richard had just returned from spending a year in Vancouver with his friend and mentor Danny Kahneman. The American Economics Association was starting a new journal that would have a few regular features and he agreed to write one on Anomalies–stuff that economic theory says will not happen. These columns were designed to be pokes in the eyes of the economists of the day. (Now we might call them nudges.) Many were co-authored including two with Danny Kahneman and one with Amos Tversky. After writing 14 of these he collected them into the book called The Winner’s Curse, published in 1992. This was before Freakonomics blazed the way for economics books to reach a general audience, but it attracted a cult following among young economists that we are presumptuous enough to think included you, and later Alex. The topics covered were the basic building blocks of what became behavioral economics.

Me: You are not being presumptuous to think this included me. You are 100% accurate. Go on…

Richard and Alex: Sometime around 2020, Richard realized the book was out of print and was given the chance to “update” it. He called Alex, who had just joined the University of Chicago to see if he’d want to work together. Seemed like a quick and easy task. But we both quickly realized that this gave us an opportunity to do a lot more–it gave us an opportunity to take stock of the field. Our goal with the book was to review the 20+ years of research that has followed the original Anomalies columns and show readers (both old and new) what has held up and what hasn’t. What we highlight is that behavioral economics has moved from what was largely a lab-based field, where studies used mostly student samples with simple low-stakes choices, to one that is very much focused on the real world. Field experiments are now the norm, as well as careful analyses of observational data sets. The last 20 years have seen demonstrations of behavioral economic anomalies amongst professional athletes, professional investors, and CEOs of major companies. This research shows that the original anomalies were not due to “confused subjects”, which many economists had claimed at the time, but had real economic consequences for economics.

Me: What’s new in the 2025 version of the book that wasn’t in the original 1992 edition?

Richard and Alex: After the book came out, Richard kept writing those columns off and on. So for this book we had those to draw upon in addition to what was in the earlier book. We picked the topics that we thought would be most interesting to a general audience. Then for each one we (here meaning mostly Alex…) added sections addressing how the research on a given topic has evolved in the 20+ years since the original book was published. When we took stock of it, about two thirds of the book is brand-new.

We discuss the move to the field in the question above. As you know, there has been what has been called a “replication crisis” in some subfields of psychology, so we wanted to see whether the ideas from psychology that we used in the early years of behavioral economics had similar problems. Spoiler alert: all of the topics addressed in the Anomalies columns are highly robust and replicable. And you don’t have to trust us, we (same usage) provide the instructions on how to do your own replication in the online materials.

Me: The title of the book is “The Winner’s Curse”. Could you describe what that is exactly?

Richard and Alex: You can demonstrate this idea easily. Find a decent-sized group of people, a class or a bar. Fill a jar with coins and count the value of the contents. Then auction off the jar with the winner getting the value, not the coins themselves. As long as you have enough people you will almost always find that even though the average bid is below the value of the jar, the winning bid is above that value–meaning that the winner loses money. The more bidders there are, the more likely the winner loses.

Me: In other words, the winner’s curse is that the “winner” in an auction where the highest bidder pays their bid is that the winning bidder almost always over-pays. But how do we know the winner’s curse exists and also that it really matters and isn’t just a cute edge case that can be demonstrated in laboratory experiments with undergraduates?

Richard and Alex: The winner’s curse was actually discovered in the field! Some engineers at a big oil company noticed that when they were bidding for the rights to drill in a specific spot, there was usually less oil down there than their highly regarded geologists had predicted. Their big insight was that the auctions that they won were not a random sample of their bids; those were their winning bids. Naturally, you are more likely to win an auction if you bid high!

It was only later that folks like Max Bazerman and William Samuelson demonstrated the same phenomenon in the lab.

Me: Reflecting on what we’ve learned about behavioral economics anomalies since 1992, what do you think are some of the most important new ideas that you’ve been able to cover in this revised book?

Richard and Alex: To us, the most exciting development is showing that the anomalies which were first demonstrated in the lab actually show up in real world, consequential decisions. Not only that, but people who should be least likely to display “anomalies” such as loss aversion, limited attention, and the endowment effect are indeed prone to these biases, in some cases even more so than the students in the original experiments. This is a big deal for economics. When Richard was first trying to publish behavioral economics papers, the biggest pushback (aside from “I don’t believe it”) was that these phenomena would not show up in the real world. Sure, college students may make mistakes when they’re making low-stakes or sometimes even hypothetical choices. But smart people making consequential decisions would be rational. The last three decades have shown that this is not the case, which we believe is the main reason for the success of behavioral economics within the broader field of economics.

Me: Why has the rational actor model of standard economics been so hard to displace? That is, why aren’t humans always modeled by economists as loss-hating, instant gratification-seeking decision makers with limited memory and various other real human features?

Richard and Alex: We think there are two main reasons. First, the math for fully rational actors is just simpler. Second, status quo bias–when you’re an applied economist thinking of what model to use for your new labor economics paper, the simplest thing to do is to use what everyone before you used as well, which happens to be the rational agent model.

Me: Who do you most hope will read this book and why?

Richard and Alex: We wrote this book to appeal to anyone interested in economics or understanding how people make decisions. If you’re interested in economics, this book will show you all the interesting ways that people actually behave in economically important situations. If you’re interested in the psychology of human decision-making, our book goes through the economics and psychology research on how and why people make the choices that they do. Finally, we hope that the book is used as a learning tool. We cover the bedrock topics of behavioral economics, both the seminal and current research, and include teaching slides and replication materials for those who want to design a course around both lectures and running experiments.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I highly recommend picking up a copy of Richard and Alex’s new edition of THE WINNER’S CURSE, but you may also want to listen to Richard talking about the endowment effect on Choiceology or Alex talking about the realization effect on Choiceology. If you happen to live in the Philadelphia area, consider coming to Wharton on Thursday, October 23^rd to watch me interview Alex and Richard live about their new book (for those who can’t be there in person, a recording will be posted to the Behavior Change for Good Initiative’s YouTube channel later in the month).

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in November!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I share ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

Subscribe now

This month’s Q&A is a conversation about selection bias with Brown economics professor Emily Oster—one of TIME’s 100 most influential people of 2022 and a bestselling author who’s built a career helping parents separate real evidence from misleading claims. Emily is exceptionally good at explaining how selection bias can trip us up in ways we don’t anticipate, and I hope you’ll enjoy learning more about this pernicious problem from our conversation.

But before we dive into this month’s Q&A, I have an invitation and some recommendations to share…

An Invitation: Come See Me Off Broadway in NYC on Saturday, October 4th

Get Your Tickets: Following the 2 pm showing of “This Much I Know,” a play inspired by the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel Laureate Danny Kahneman, I’ll join Director Hayley Finn onstage at 59E59 Theaters for a Q&A about behavioral science and its role in the show.

This Month’s Recommended Listens, Watches and Reads

• What Makes Teams Great: A new episode of Choiceology featuring University College London Professor Colin Fisher explains the ingredients that scientists have determined help ensure teams excel.

• A 30 Day Challenge to Boost Your Health IQ: My research group at the University of Pennsylvania has teamed up with CNN to share a 30 day online challenge we created to upgrade your health IQ in 60 seconds per day. Are you up to the challenge?

• An Inspiring TED Talk: Former Wharton MBA student, fellow Penn professor and past Choiceology guest Dr. David Fajgenbaum shares his incredible story about how nearly dying helped him discover his own cure (and many more).

• Congratulations to my friends and fellow academics Colin Fisher (author of THE COLLECTIVE EDGE), Corinne Low (author of HAVING IT ALL) and Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman (author of THE DOUBLE TAX) on their new books, pictured below.

Q&A: What Is Selection Bias and How Can It Trip Us Up?

This Q&A from Choiceology is with Brown economics Professor Emily Oster, who was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine in 2022 and is the best-selling author of numerous books about pregnancy and parenting as well as the CEO of ParentData. Here she discusses selection bias and her research on how this pernicious problem with data can prevent us from making wise decisions.

Me: I want to start really basic. Can you define selection bias?

Emily: Sure. Let's say you were interested in the average height of the population. If you took a bunch of random people and measured them, that would be a good method. But let's say you only selected men. Well, then your heights would be too big for the average because men are on average taller than women. That's a form of selection bias. In this case, we've selected a group that is not representative of the whole population.

Me: I want to try playing a game next if you’re willing.

Emily: Is it poker? I'm so good at that.

Me: It’s not poker. I just made it up and it’s called "Name the Potential Source of Selection Bias in That Claim."

Emily: That sounds like something I would be better at than poker.

Me: Ha! Me too. I'm going to make up some headlines. These aren’t true statements, but they're plausible. And I think you're going to be like, "Here's what I'm concerned about in terms of selection bias" right away.

Emily: All right, I'm ready.

Me: OK, here we go: “A Survey of New Yorker Readers Found that Most Americans Read at Least 10 Books Per Year.”

Emily: Concern: The New Yorker is basically a book. So, you're taking a bunch of people who are already reading books and asking them, "How many books do you read a year?"

Me: “Kids Who Spend More Time in Front of Screens Score Lower on Their SATs.”

Emily: Concern: There’s an education confound. Parental education is highly correlated with screen use, and it’s also correlated with SAT scores.

Me: OK, great. So basically, the kids who are not being allowed much screen time have parents who are better educated?

Emily: Exactly.

Me: “Intermittent Fasting is Great for Your Health.”

Emily: The kinds of people who choose to do intermittent fasting are also doing all kinds of other things that are good for their health, like exercising and eating well when they are eating. They're also more educated, and so they have more resources and more access to medical technology. So that’s responsible for their good health, not the intermittent fasting.

Me: All right. This one is going to feel close to home: “Moms Who Breastfeed have Dramatically Smarter Kids, So You Should Never Feed Your Baby Formula.”

Emily: So, we know for that statement that the confound is largely with education and parental family background. More educated, wealthier moms have more resources and are more likely to breastfeed. Those characteristics are independently associated with child test scores, and it's very hard to separate them out in the kinds of analysis you're talking about.

Me: All right, this is my last one: “Everyone Who Eats Quaker Oats Loves Them.”

Emily: That's amazing because a lot of ads are like this. So, let's say everyone tried Quaker Oats, and half the people liked Quaker Oats and half the people didn't. Well, people who didn't like Quaker Oats, just wouldn’t eat them anymore. And so, then you come back later, and you ask the people, "Do you like Quaker Oats?" But the people who are eating them are the people who like them in the first place. There's such a direct selection problem there.

Me: Thank you for playing my silly game. Now I want to get into some of your research. A lot of the papers you've written are about rooting out sources of selection bias in data to find answers to practically important questions. Could you tell me about a favorite paper on this topic?

Emily: Yeah, my favorite paper is about the dynamics of this process. The leading example is vitamin E. There's a lot of selection with vitamins. If you link them with health, you're concerned that the kinds of people who take vitamins are different from those who don't. I was interested in how that relationship evolves as we tell people different things about the value of these vitamins. In the mid-1990s, people were told that vitamin E was really good for heart health and preventing cancer. The idea was that vitamin E is this magical thing you should be taking a lot of.

And when you look in the data, you can see that, at that time, people who are also doing all kinds of other stuff for their health start taking vitamin E. It's the people who exercise more, the people who don't smoke, people who eat vegetables, people with more education. There's a whole range of things that are predictive of adopting vitamin E when we tell you it's good for you. And as a result, if you look at the link between vitamin E consumption and mortality over time, actually, before we told people it was good for you, there's a little bit of a link. And after we tell people it's good for you, there's a much stronger link. So, if you only look after it's like, "Wow, vitamin E really makes you not die!" Then in 2004, they realized not only is vitamin E not especially good for you, but actually, if you take too much, it can kill you.

So, then there's a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials, which says actually in high doses vitamin E is really bad and in moderate doses it doesn't matter. Then all those people who started taking it before, stopped taking it. And the link with mortality goes back down. So, it's an example, I think, which really problematizes some of these observational studies and just digs into, "What are the actual mechanisms by which this is happening?"

Me: I really love how that research illustrates the problem. When do you feel like our tendency to be naive about selection bias is most problematic for people in their daily lives?

Emily: I think this can become quite problematic when it causes people to make choices that are otherwise very difficult for them or make them upset. Something like breastfeeding, which I write a lot about, where I think we spend a lot of time telling people about benefits of breastfeeding that aren’t supported in the data. Many of the things we say, like that breastfeeding will make your kid smarter, thinner, or healthier later, are just not supported in the best data. Because breastfeeding is hard for a lot of people, and because it doesn't work for a lot of people, and because it can be a source of tremendous shame, I think we should try to move away from telling people things that aren’t supported by data, when they’re going to feel bad about them.

Me: So, like, I feel like I can't go back to work or I spend six hours a day pumping because I believe not breastfeeding will destroy my child’s future. That's costly.

Emily: Or I sink into postpartum depression. Actually, one of the things I heard from a lot of people's spouses was "My partner is really depressed about this. It's not working, and she's killing herself to do this. And she's really sad, and I just think if she could let up the pressure with some better evidence, she would feel better." And I think that's a real cost to people.

Me: What should people do differently in their lives now that they know a little bit more about selection bias?

Emily: The most important thing is don't lurch. When you see new studies about finances, health, or whatever, there’s a strong temptation to change your behavior based on that. Occasionally, some new finding is very believable and reliable, and you should change your behavior. But most findings are not that good. So, don't change what you're doing based on one headline or one study. Try to think about everything together.

Me: That's great advice in general.

Emily: Just take a deep breath.

Me: I love that. Thank you so much for your time today, Emily.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Emily’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into selection bias, check out her website ParentData.org or get a copy of one of her outstanding books EXPECTING BETTER, CRIBSHEET, THE FAMILY FIRM or THE UNEXPECTED.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in October!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I share ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

Please let your friends, family, and colleagues know that Choiceology is back and better than ever! And it’s available wherever you listen to podcasts (Apple | Spotify | YouTube).

Listen to Choiceology

Happy Listening,

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

And this year, one book really stood out. It’s a book called “After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People” by two economics professors at the University of Texas at Austin named Dean Spears and Mike Geruso. Here’s what I said in the book endorsement I offered them:

“AFTER THE SPIKE is the most interesting and important book I’ve read in years. Spears and Geruso explain why Earth’s population is headed for collapse if we don’t make dramatic changes, and they do it using rigorous analyses, compelling data, and striking visual evidence. After debunking common myths about why this crisis might not be bad news, they offer thoughtful, research-backed guidance on how humanity can respond. Packed with eye-opening graphs and surprising facts, AFTER THE SPIKE is a must-read for everyone on our soon-to-be lonelier planet.”

Today, After the Spike is officially on sale and available to the world. You may see excerpts in The New York Times or The Atlantic this summer, and while both will be worth a read, I’d strongly encourage you to invest in the whole book. This newsletter is devoted to a Q&A with Mike Geruso, who kindly offered to share his insights with all of you.

Q&A with UT Austin Professor and Economist Mike Geruso (co-author of After the Spike)

Me: First, could you briefly explain the premise of your excellent new book? That is, what is “the spike”, and why are you so sure that we should be concerned about it (and what comes after)?

Mike: Birth rates have been falling everywhere around the world. Not just the rich parts of the world or in a handful of countries in East Asia, but almost everywhere. Two thirds of people today live in a country with a birth rate too low to sustain its population over time—meaning fewer than 2 kids in the next generation to replace 2 adults in the last. Within a few decades, that will be true for the worldwide average. And so the global population will begin to shrink. All of the major institutions that make population projections agree on that future in their centerline projections.

Once the decline begins, it could be very fast. Consider a global average birth rate of 1.5 kids for every 2 adults—which is between the current birth rate in Europe and the current birth rate in the US. In that scenario, the global population would decline by half every 60 years or so. If that is indeed the future we’re heading towards, it would be an unprecedented change with sweeping consequences.

To zoom out and get a sense of just how fast things could change, here’s a plot from a 2024 paper we wrote with Sangita Vyas and Gage Weston. It shows population paths in different scenarios for global fertility. The world wouldn’t need to converge to very low fertility for a big world to be a short blip in history. Anything much below a total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.0 would yield a pretty sharp decline. For reference, a fertility rate of 1.6 is the statistic for the US today. 1.8 is the present average over all of Latin America. 1.2 would be China around 2020; it has fallen since.

In the book, we dive deep on the idea that there are no “automatic stabilizers” that anyone should rely on to kick-in and halt the decline. Even after the world has been shrinking for decades, people could continue to decide that choosing a family size similar to what people choose today works best for them. That means a lot of families with two kids, some with one or none, some with three or more, all averaging out to a total fertility rate below 2. And if they did, the decline would continue decade after decade. So if there is going to be any offramp to global depopulation, it will have to mean that individuals and societies have chosen to make a change. We wrote the book to start a conversation about what sort of future we should all be hoping and working for.

Me: As someone who studies judgment and decision making, I found it fascinating that despite the incredibly compelling data you share that birth rates have been dropping across every culture and continent for as long as we’ve been keeping track, scientists hadn’t fully appreciated the long-run implications of this for our society until quite recently. Could you talk about why so many people overlooked the crash that’s now clearly up ahead?

Mike: Yes, this is super interesting. Depopulation – and especially the fact that so many smart, informed people didn’t see it coming – looks like a case of what judgment and decision-making psychologists call “stock-flow failure.” That term comes from Matthew Cronin and coauthors in a 2009 study. For centuries, the size of the worldwide population has been growing. That’s the stock. But for the same centuries, the global birth rate has been dropping. That’s the inflow. That’s an unintuitive situation because the inflow was declining even as the stock was increasing fast. Meanwhile, it has been the outflow that has been determining rapid population growth: death rates have been falling, especially for children and babies. Kids are more likely to survive to adulthood than before, and that improvement has meant population growth.

But now the inflow (birth rates) has slowed so much that it’s about to cross below the outflow (death rates), causing populations to begin shrinking. In fact, all the way back in 1980, one-fifth of people already lived in a country with a birth rate below two. Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Cuba, for example, all moved below two in the 1970s. So we had some strong signals, even decades ago, that depopulation was the world’s most likely future. But the stock was still rising—so as Cronin and colleagues might predict, that misled us about what was coming next.

Me: I found the evidence you presented that we’re about to see massive global population decline incredibly compelling. But I was even more fascinated by some of the arguments you made about why this is bad. Could you talk about some of the key reasons you think we should be worried, as a society, about exponential population decline (rather than complacent)?

Mike: One reason to not be complacent is to understand that Progress Comes from People (that’s the title of our chapter 6). There’s an old Malthusian idea that more quantity of life means less quality of life. But that’s not what today’s macroeconomists who study growth and progress think. Over time, living standards are improving because new people keep adding to our species-wide, shared stock of know-how, creativity, and understanding.

Once humanity breeds some new sweet apple variety, discovers that soap can reduce infections, develops a statistical technique like ANOVA, or learns to efficiently harness solar power into electricity, others can put those ideas to good use and make lives better. Ideas are an endlessly renewable resource. And not just in high tech. Tailored gene therapies come from human innovation, but so does the technology of how to organize a construction crew or a legislature in a representative democracy. The accumulation of non-rival ideas is the reason why billions of us today can live healthier, safer, longer, richer lives than kings and queens of old. And here’s the key: all of those ideas come from other people. We benefit gorgeously from sharing the planet with many others and getting to live in a time after many others have built the progress that we get to enjoy. We shouldn’t be complacent about upsetting that applecart!

Me: As someone who’s very concerned about global warming and other ways humans are harming planet earth, I was surprised to learn that depopulation is unlikely to stop climate change. Could you explain why environmentalists should not be rooting for depopulation?

Mike: We’re concerned about these issues too. It’s exactly because environmental problems like climate change and habitat loss are so urgent that environmentalists shouldn’t count on population decline to bail us out or offer a reprieve. Once we turn the corner from population growth to population decline—which could be in the 2060s, 2070s, or 2080s, depending on which projection one considers—decline will be fast. But in the meantime, the population will still be growing.

By the time of the 2050 climate goals laid out by the Paris Agreement or the IPCC or the Biden Administration, the global population will be larger than today. That means the only solution to getting a problem like greenhouse gas emissions under control is to actually get per capita greenhouse gas emissions under control. Population decline that starts a few decades from now is just too little and too late to do much good for any urgent environmental challenge. We may succeed or fail in avoiding the worst climate disaster, but that success or failure will depend on policy and technology and individual attention that supports these. Focusing on population is worse than no help. Hoping it may come to the rescue is a distraction from any real solution.

Me: What got you interested in learning and writing about the coming population crash?

Mike: What got us started on writing research papers, op-eds, (and eventually the book) was how compelling the basic facts of population change were. Today there are 8 billion people. But for most of humanity’s hundred-thousand history there were only a few million. So much of the shared prosperity that has swept over the world during the past few hundred years—so much of the material and social progress—happened in the same centuries when the population was growing fast and became large. That is a reason to take seriously the question of what the shape of the world will be when the size of the world becomes so much smaller. Birth rates have been starting to get attention, but most of that attention has been missing this big picture. So we wanted to bring our perspective, grounded in social science, to this issue.

Me: I want to turn to solutions. You write about some of the places in the world that are already dealing with incredibly low birth rates, like Japan and South Korea, as harbingers of what’s to come for the rest of us. What can we learn from the policies that have failed to reverse low birth rates in those societies?

Mike: The biggest lesson from the places where fertility has been low for a long time is that nobody has this under control. Governments—and researchers, for that matter—don’t know how to turn things around. There has been plenty of interest in raising birth rates to replacement levels in South Korea, Japan, Europe, and elsewhere. But in no case has any country succeeded in doing so. Sometimes people think that governments have a lot of power to change this. We dismantle these myths in our book, where we analyze Romania’s policy to ban birth control and abortion (and in the other direction, China’s one child policy). Neither has had the big, durable effects they’re often credited with.

The things that liberal democracies have tried haven’t moved the needle much either. For example, free high-quality universal child care would be a boon to parents, but countries with the strongest pro-parent support don’t have above-replacement birth rates either. Researchers estimate that giving parents cash, setting up quality, affordable daycare, mandating parental leave, and the like have had at most small effects on fertility. The clearest lesson for us is that policy researchers and social scientists are at the very beginning of understanding the social and economic determinants of low fertility and how to reverse it. So a top priority for now should be more investment in research and learning.

Me: If you were given the power of a dictator to solve this problem with any policies you felt would be fair and effective, what would you do?

Mike: I wouldn’t trust anyone to have dictator-like power on any issue, and especially not this one! The question, though, really underscores that a big part of the challenge here is that no one person (or one country or one generation) decides the birth rate. Instead, raising the birth rate would be a positive long-term global externality. This is similar to the way that greenhouse gas emissions are a negative long-term global externality. There is a misalignment of incentives.

Really supporting parents, in proportion to the tremendous social value of children, would mean reforming our economic and social institutions. We don’t know what that looks like, but we do know that it would be a big change from the present, where we ask parents, and particularly mothers, to shoulder a large share of the costs of making the next generation, while the world as a whole benefits from that labor.

Society probably won’t decide to really shift priorities to address this as long as most of us carry around the doomer, Malthusian view that people are bad—for the planet, for one another. So the one thing we most hope for is a new orientation: that we all begin to better understand that the people around us are a source of abundance, not scarcity. That’s a conversation we hope our book starts.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

To learn more, pick up a copy of the book After the Spike wherever books are sold.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. I’ll be taking the rest of the summer off from Milkman Delivers, but I’ll be back with new interviews in the fall, so stay tuned!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I share ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

But of course, the saying is less about actual books and more of a warning against the instinct to let superficial features like appearance guide important decisions where those features are irrelevant. It’s a tip not to hire someone because you like the way they look, which may unwittingly lead you to assume you’ll also like their work. And it’s an admonishment for the stock you might not buy because its name sounds silly (so you assume it couldn’t turn a profit).

This tendency to let one standout trait—like attractiveness or a catchy name—shape our broader judgment is what behavioral scientists call the halo effect. It’s a bias that can quietly influence choices in domains ranging from hiring and dating to shopping and investing.

This month’s Q&A dives into the halo effect with University of Warwick Professor and behavioral scientist Daniel Read. Read explains what the halo effect is, why we fall for it, and how we can make better choices once we understand it. I hope his advice leaves you thinking twice the next time you're tempted to judge a book—or anything else—by its cover.

But first, here are a few listens and reads I’ve enjoyed recently that I think you might like too.

This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads

• Little Bits of Happiness: Our spring 2025 season finale of the Choiceology podcast focuses on how your happiness is affected by the separation between life’s highs and lows, featuring an interview with UC Berkeley Professor Ellen Evers.

• The Attack on Harvard is Deranged: Harvard Professor Stephen Pinker’s balanced piece will help you see why defending valuable but imperfect research institutions like Harvard is well warranted.

• Unforgiving Places: University of Chicago Professor Jens Ludwig’s important new book on the origins of American gun violence received a rave review from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker earlier this month, and I also highly recommend it.

Q&A: What is the halo effect and why does it matter?

In this Q&A from Choiceology, University of Warwick Professor and behavioral scientist Daniel Read explains the halo effect and how it skews our judgment—whether we’re evaluating people, essays, or companies.

Me: Let’s start with a description of the halo effect. What is it exactly?

Daniel: The halo effect says that when we make multiple judgments about any person or object’s quality—like whether they're good or bad—those judgments tend to be more highly correlated than is warranted.

One of the areas where it has been studied the most is in judging people based on physical attractiveness. It turns out that if people are perceived as physically attractive, then their personality is judged as being nicer, they tend to be assumed to be more successful and so on. But it's been looked at in a lot of other contexts as well. For example, when people mark student essays, if they mark, say, two in a row by the same student, and they see the first essay is good, they're likely to be quite charitable towards the second essay. Even if the second essay is not a great essay. But if it's ambiguous, they'll be quite generous toward it. Similarly, if the first essay is not good, they won't be as generous towards the second essay.

Me: Could you describe some early research on the halo effect?

Daniel: The very first study of the halo effect was from 1920 by Edward Thorndike. He looked at many, many different ratings of soldiers on a number of dimensions. What Thorndike observed was that the correlations between all of the ratings were much, much higher than they should have been, and even correlations between things that probably shouldn't have been correlated at all were actually quite high. For example, intelligence and strength. These were soldiers. Intelligence and strength, which probably are not correlated particularly strongly, in fact, perhaps not at all, were correlated at 0.7 in these ratings.

Me: Which is really high, right? Because correlations range from zero to one, and 0.7 is…that's about as much correlation as you ever see between traits in the natural world.

Daniel: Exactly, yes. He said that the correlations were three or more times as high as they should have been. There is another classic study on essays that's pretty interesting. They had male raters look at essays, and the essays were rated in advance as either good or poor. The male raters were also given a picture of the person who had written each essay and who was either attractive or unattractive. What they found is that the poor essays were rated much more highly if the writer was attractive. And also, the ability of the writer was judged as being much greater if they were attractive than unattractive.

There’s another study I find kind of cute in which a person came to a classroom, and they gave a little discussion, and then they left the room, and the teacher asked everyone, "Well, how tall was the person?" Now this person was either described as being a postdoc or an assistant professor or a full professor, and what they found is that the estimated height of this person went up with the person's status, where the full professor was judged as taller than the postdoc and the postdoc less tall than the assistant professor and so on.

Me: Incredible. Can you explain what we know about why the halo effect arises?

Daniel: I think the main cause is that most of the time when we’re making judgments about two traits of a person or thing, they tend to be a bit correlated, and we know that they're related in some way. This is a conscious effect: we know that, say, attractiveness might indeed be correlated with personality on average because an attractive person may have different experiences and so forth. But how big is that correlation? Well, it's probably pretty small in reality. Most correlations in the world are pretty small. But how do you, in your judgments, express a small correlation? It's quite hard to do.

I don't think that it's necessarily that the halo effect is always wrong, but the halo effect itself is an extreme response when we should be giving perhaps a moderate response in most cases.

Me: That makes a lot of sense. I know you've done some really interesting recent research on the halo effect in the domain of corporate social responsibility, or CSR. Could you talk a little bit about that work?

Daniel: Yes. This work was done with Sofía López-Rodríguez and Craig Smith. We did a series of studies where we described companies to our respondents—either a company which had undertaken some kind of positive CSR initiative or had not. An example would be a company which had an ambitious recycling program for printer cartridges. Then we asked whether people assumed this company had done other things, and we asked both about specific actions and more general things like: “Does it do things that are good for the environment?”, “Does it do things that are good for its customers?”, and so forth.

First, we found that the company that was recycling printer cartridges would be evaluated very positively for all types of other environmental activities, but in addition, there was a generalization to other domains of activity. It was expected that the company would also treat its customers better. It would also do more for the community, and so forth. We got a halo effect within the domain, but in addition, it was cross domain. It shows that one action for a company can have quite an impact on how people judge it.

And those inferences are perhaps not fully warranted. The company is probably not doing all these things. There's no real reason to assume it has, yet, nonetheless, we make these positive judgements.

Me: I have to say, as a woman, it makes me think a lot about makeup and all the attention that's paid to physical attractiveness in our culture, and it makes me sad because it seems to suggest that those kinds of investments are wise as opposed to unnecessary.

Daniel: Yes, I'm afraid that does seem to be what it suggests.

Me: I guess there’s also a positive spin, which is to recognize that when you do things that are genuinely good, you really put in effort and score well on a test or give a great presentation or put together a fabulous podcast, that not only will you incur benefits in terms of how you're assessed on that activity, but you'll actually get spillover benefits. So all good actions may do us even more good than we appreciate objectively. Maybe that's a nicer way to think about it.

Daniel: That's absolutely right. We can think that whatever we do, we're creating an impression on people, and that impression is going to be generalized, so you want to make a good impression.

Me: Do you have any advice for how people can improve their everyday decisions now that they better understand the halo effect?

Daniel: Well, you can approach decisions differently. If you have to make multiple assessments, let's say you need to evaluate an employee, and you have to evaluate the employee on several different dimensions, either don’t make all the evaluations at once, or try to find objective criteria by which to make the evaluations, or you can even have different people make evaluations of different dimensions.

Me: That’s excellent advice. As many independent judgments as possible and as much objectivity as possible to protect against bias from the halo effect. Thank you.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Daniel’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the halo effect.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in July!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I share ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

But first, here are a few listens and reads I’ve enjoyed recently that I think you might like too…

This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads

• Hooked on Streaks: A new episode of Choiceology featuring University of Delaware Professor Jackie Silverman explains why we’re so motivated by maintaining a streak of consecutive achievements and demotivated by breaking a streak.

• Tips to Get You Moving More: NPR's Life Kit offers evidence-based advice for fitting exercise into your busy life and staying active (featuring some of my work).

• Reminding Women of Gender Gaps at Work Can Be Motivating: Fortune magazine summarizes new research led by Wharton PhD student Sophia Pink, showing how reactance can be harnessed to motivate more women to defy harmful stereotypes by competing for top corporate jobs.

• Baby Healed with World’s First Gene-Editing Treatment: The New York Times shares an incredible story of what science and medicine can accomplish when we throw our support behind research universities.

Q&A: What Is Reactance and How Can It Be Harnessed for Good?

In this Q&A from Choiceology, University of Texas Professor and psychologist Christopher Bryan discusses his research exploring the negative reaction we exhibit when we feel constrained or controlled and how it’s possible to harness that “reactance” to promote better choices.

Me: I want to just start by asking you to define reactance: what is it?

Christopher: I guess the way I think about it is that reactance is our natural instinctive impulse to reassert our autonomy when we feel that our choices are being controlled by something or someone on the outside in a way that we don't believe is legitimate.

Me: So it's sort of saying: "I'm going to buck what I'm told to do."

Christopher: Yeah. Absolutely. So classic examples are the ways in which teenagers respond to their parents' authority or other adults' authority. You'll get kids saying, "No, I'm not going to clean my room." Or, "No, I won't eat that." Right? And I think those are really classic cases of reactance. I think another really prominent example is a lot of the opposition to big government in American politics, which really comes from a place of reactance. It comes from feeling that the government is trying to, or in fact is, constraining my options in ways that I don't believe are legitimate. And to some extent, just on principle, that upsets me. It's closely related to the desire for freedom. If we feel that our freedom to make choices is being constrained, that's deeply upsetting to us.

Me: I want to talk about your recent amazing research on how reactance can be harnessed to improve decision-making. Could you describe that work?

Christopher: Absolutely. I should say this all started when my close friend and frequent collaborator, David Yeager, and I did some consulting work for Disney. We were trying to help them design an attraction that would make families want to make healthy choices, like eat healthy foods, drink lots of water, that sort of thing.

And so we were discussing this and we were thinking, the problem is that we want to eat a bunch of junk food, and we want to sit on the couch instead of going out and playing a lot of the time. And how do we encourage young people and their families to reject that strong temptation? And one of the first thoughts we had was, if it doesn't feel like it's coming from within – if it feels like it's something being imposed on us from the outside – we won't feel like we have to defend it. Not only will we not feel like we have to defend it, we may feel like it's some outside influence constraining our choices. And so if we can successfully help young people to see temptations as being triggered in us by crafty villains—in this case it was a fantastical Disney scenario—then that might just do the trick. That might just get them excited about fighting back against it.

And we found that doing that, even in this obviously and clearly fictional, fantastical scenario, got kids excited about healthy choices. They were more likely to go and buy a fruit cup and a bottle of water than to go buy an ice cream sandwich and a soda. And so we thought, ‘Well, what if we just did this outside of a theme park context? Could we just tell adolescents about all of this stuff, tell them about the ways in which food marketers are manipulating them into eating junk food and causing very real harm in the process?’ And might that be enough to get adolescents to think, ‘Well, I don't want to be a part of this. I don't want to be a pawn in these guys' game. I want to make my own choices.’

Me: If I'm remembering correctly, you pitted that against a more traditional way of convincing kids to eat healthy foods.

Christopher: Yeah. We conspired with an incredibly supportive and helpful middle school principal to use one of the food giveaways that he already does regularly, giving kids a party or a snack pack as sort of a celebration/thank-you for all the work the students were putting in to prepare for the state tests.

Two days after the kids had been exposed to all this information about the controlling manipulation of food marketers, we had homeroom teachers distribute an order form where kids were asked to circle two out of five possible snack options, and one out of four or five possible drink options. And the options included really unhealthy things, like Hot Cheetos and Doritos, and healthy things, like cut fruit and trail mix and that sort of thing. And the drink options included really unhealthy things, like soda or heavily sweetened fruit drinks, and they included things like regular bottled water or bubbly water.

And what we found was that kids who had been exposed to what we called the "exposé" treatment—the one that explained to adolescents all the ways in which the food marketers were trying to control them and others—got kids to make significantly healthier choices on average than, instead, being exposed to the sort of standard health course curriculum that focused on how to know what's healthy, how to read a nutrition label, and how to understand the effects of what you eat on your long-term health.

Me: That's really, really neat. Could you talk a bit about the way you think this work applies to our daily lives. What have your takeaways been?

Christopher: I think the higher-level lesson has been to recognize that the way to get other people to do what you're hoping they'll do is almost never to make them feel stupid or bad for what they're currently doing instead. Because when you make people feel stupid or bad for what they're doing now, then they can't afford to conclude that you're right. Because your request for how they change their behavior is coming with a poison pill for their self-regard. It's coming with the message that, ‘You're a bad person for not already doing that.’ So that's one thing.

The other thing is I'm a parent of five kids, and a bunch of them are either in or right on the precipice of adolescence. And I have already seen very clear evidence that simply asserting my authority is not getting me where I need to go. And so instead, I need to reason with them. I need to be open to being persuaded by them. They want to feel that they have agency, too. Fundamentally, reactance is the rejection of the constraining of our agency. And if you understand it that way, you can begin to catch yourself seeming to constrain other people's autonomy and agency. Then you're likely to avoid a lot of pushback, a lot of negative reactions. And I've certainly found that in my life.

Me: I love that. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Christopher’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into reactance.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in June!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I share ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

Some of these worries, while a little excessive, have served me well. But not all worries are innocuous. And many of the most problematic ones come from overestimating how likely something bad is to happen. For instance, overestimating the low risk of a plane crash or a snake bite could keep you from taking perfectly safe flights or enjoying the great outdoors. Overestimating risk could also lead you to unnecessarily pay for pricey insurance on a $40 train ticket or an extended warranty on a cheap toaster.

Right now, in our age of heightened uncertainty, my worries are on hyperdrive. It's easy to panic over every new headline about the terrible things that could happen (but are still very unlikely). To help cooler minds prevail, in this month’s Q&A, I’ve turned to UCLA Professor Craig Fox to explain why our brains tend to overestimate the likelihood of rare events—and what we can do about it.

But first, here’s some information about a Zoom event I’m co-hosting that you might enjoy attending plus a few listens and reads I recommend…

A Zoom Event on 4/30 with Harvard Economist and All-Around Superstar Raj Chetty

There’s widespread consensus that Raj Chetty is among the most extraordinary social scientists on the planet. Among other accolades, he’s received a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, the John Bates Clark medal (given to the economist under 40 whose work is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the field), and Harvard’s George Ledlie prize (awarded for research that made the most valuable contribution to science, or in any way for the benefit of mankind).

On 4/30 from 12 pm - 1 pm ET, I’ll be moderating a Zoom event where Raj shares his latest research on “The Science of Economic Opportunity: New Insights from Big Data” and takes questions. Anyone and everyone is welcome to join the event. All you have to do is register here: tinyurl.com/chetty430

This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads

• The Reality Trap: A new episode of Choiceology featuring Harvard Professor Julia Minson explains naïve realism, which is our tendency to presume our perception reflects the objective truth and that those who see things differently must be wrong.

• The University President Willing to Fight: This episode of The Daily podcast features an interview with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber who eloquently articulates the imperative to protect academic freedom (making me very proud of my alma mater).

• What We Value: Penn neuroscientist Emily Falk weaves together stories and science to explain how our brains make choices in this captivating new book for anyone who wants to learn and grow.

• The Doors You Can Open: In her new book, Carnegie Mellon psychologist Rosalind Chow harnesses cutting edge research to suggest better ways to network, build trust, and foster inclusion.

Q&A: How You Imagine Likely and Unlikely Events

In this Q&A from Choiceology, UCLA Professor and behavioral scientist Craig Fox discusses his research exploring the way we think about low-probability events and how to make better choices in an uncertain world.

Me: Craig, can you start by describing the way people think about very high and very low probability outcomes?

Craig: Well, psychologically, the impact of probability isn’t linear. For instance, if I was selling all 100 tickets to a raffle for a trip to Hawaii, most people would pay more for their first ticket than for a 31st ticket if they already had 30. We're sensitive to the difference between ‘not going to get it’ and ‘might get it.’ We're also very sensitive to the difference between ‘probably going to get it’ and ‘certainly going to get it,’ so most people would pay even more for the 100^th ticket to lock in that prize.

Me: So, what you're saying is that there are 100 tickets available and if I buy all 100, then I have a 100% chance of winning. And even if I don’t buy them all, the more tickets I buy, the more likely I am to win, so I value that first ticket the most.

Craig: Yeah. Psychologically, there's diminishing sensitivity to changes in probability around these two natural boundaries of impossible and certain. But we're not so sensitive to the difference between a 30% chance and a 31% chance. What that means is we tend to overweight low-probability events and underweight moderate-to-high probability events. People will pay a premium to enter some state lottery where they have a really tiny chance, because it's a lot more than no chance at all.

Me: That was a great description of the way we think about probabilities. Could you tell us why our minds work this way?

Craig: One idea that emerged from a string of studies was that it might be about attention.

Suppose you go to the doctor, and you have some sort of test, and the doctor says, "I don't like what I'm seeing in this image, Katy. I think it could be cancer." You're kind of freaking out! But the doctor says, "Don't worry. The probability is maybe 10%. We’ll do another test, take a biopsy, and we’ll call you next week." How would you feel about that?

Me: I wouldn't sleep for a week.

Craig: You wouldn't sleep for a week because never mind that it's a remote possibility—a 10% chance of having a deadly disease sounds incredibly frightening. That's where your mind is going. Your attention is shifting between two outcomes. I could die. I could live. I could die. I could live.

But what you don't do is simulate in your head getting ten calls from the doctor at the end of the week: (1) Good news. (2) Good news. (3) Good news. (4) Good news. (5) Good news. (6) Good news. (7) Good news. (8) Good news. (9) Good news. (10) Bad news. That's what 10% is. And that simulation I just did for you there is the basis of the things that we did in the experiments.

We gave people descriptions of events like a 10% chance of winning a prize or a 10% chance of some policy outcome, and we compared that to people's responses when you actually sampled the experience for them, like I did for you.

When we direct people's attention to the outcomes in proportion to their actual probabilities, what we find is that people weigh the probabilities in a more accurate, linear way. So they really subjectively “get” the difference between a 10% and a 90% probability in a way that they don't when you just describe it to them.

Me: So basically, just to summarize, when we think about why people overweight low probability events, the evidence suggests that it's because we don’t think in categories that are fine-grained enough to allow us to really appreciate an unlikely event. And we can correct that by giving people an accurate sample of what that low probability is like. And then once they've experienced those low probabilities, they react to them more rationally.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. We didn't evolve in a context where we use probabilities, but modern society requires it. We get weather forecasts in the form of probabilities and other kinds of information in a probabilistic way, but our minds have a hard time getting around those remote probabilities. We can calculate expected value if we've had a class in it, but to really feel it is difficult. And so, translating it into a more natural experience is one way of helping to overcome that, so our minds can kind of get around it by pushing our attention to the outcomes in proportion to their actual probability of occurrence.

Me: Craig, is there anything you do differently in your life because you understand this?

Craig: Yeah. Everything we’ve talked about leads to the conclusion that for most of the choices we make in life of small to moderate consequence, we should be risk neutral. So, I try to be risk neutral where I can. I try to self-insure for small things. Like, I have very large deductibles on my insurance, I decline the extra coverages, and so forth, recognizing that occasionally I'm going to lose. But overall, over the larger collection of experiences that I have in life, I'm going to come out ahead.

Me: To clarify, for large things, you would generally advise buying insurance, right? If you’re the primary breadwinner for your family, for instance, life insurance is a good idea, as is home insurance. But I think you're talking about the smaller risks.

Craig: That's right. Absolutely right. For the small to moderate things that we face, I try to shut off that little emotional voice in my head that says, ‘Danger, danger, danger.’ When I recognize that I'm overweighting an outcome with very low probability.

Me: Like riding on a plane and being nervous?

Craig: Yeah, that's a good example, especially, of course, after 9/11 when we were all a little bit more scared and attuned to the possibility of terrorism. We tend to overweight those probabilities and especially ones that are emotional like terrorism and the threat to our mortality. So, when I'm in situations like that, I try to think ‘OK, what's the actual frequency of these things happening on planes?’ And gosh, that's incredibly rare and probably isn't going to happen, and I'm not going to let myself overweight that in my decision of whether to fly.

It certainly is very human to be afraid if you're told that there's a low probability of some horrible thing happening to you. But also, in terms of the decisions you make, try to discipline yourself to go by the odds a little bit more, to calculate the expected values a little bit more, at least for the decisions we make in daily life. Learn to stop worrying and embrace uncertainty.

Me: Craig, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Craig’s work, you can listen to this episode of Choiceology, where we dig into the way people think about probabilities or visit his website.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in May!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of over 100,000 followers on social media, where I share ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

This observation is just one way of measuring who follows norms and who bucks them—a distinction that matters for a lot more than safety on the slopes. This month, I’m sharing fascinating research showing that our proclivity for rule- or norm-following isn’t just a function of gender (as I’ve observed on ski trips), but is highly determined by our environment. It varies massively across countries, across companies, and of course, across contexts (consider the differences in adherence to norms at funerals versus Halloween parties).

In the Q&A below, you’ll learn more about the distinctions between cultures that breed rule-followers and rule-breakers and why it matters.

But before we dive in, here are a few listens, views and reads I think you might enjoy…

This Month’s Recommended Listens, Views and Reads

• 15 Lessons Scientists Learned about Us When the World Stood Still: This fabulous New York Times piece shares discoveries made thanks to the abrupt shift in human behavior caused by the COVID pandemic, offering insights on everything from how sports fans influence home-team advantage to the dangers of high heels.

• Change with Maya Shankar: Cognitive scientist, host of the award-winning podcast A Slight Change of Plans, and founder of the first White House “Nudge Unit” (circa 2014), Maya Shankar has a new Substack newsletter that I’d encourage you to read.

• Gene Hackman on Mental Accounting: Actor Gene Hackman will be remembered for many legacies, but by behavioral economists, he will be best remembered for explaining mental accounting to Dustin Hoffman in this clip, which is a must see for behavioral science lovers everywhere.

• A New Season of Choiceology Launches with “A Numbers Game”: Psychologist Dr. Linda Chang explores quantification fixation in this episode, or our tendency to overvalue numerical metrics—like the price of a meal or a job candidate’s GPA—when making tradeoffs.

Q&A: Tight vs. Loose

In this Q&A from Choiceology, Stanford Professor and psychologist Michele Gelfand discusses her research on the differences between tight and loose cultures, tight and loose mindsets, and why these distinctions matter.

Me: Michele, can you first define tight and loose cultures?

Michele: All cultures have social norms—these unwritten rules of behavior that sometimes get formalized into codes and laws. We need social norms. Imagine a world where people are driving on either side of the street and not obeying stop signs. But, while all cultures have rules, some cultures really strictly abide by those rules—we call them tight cultures—and other cultures have a wider range of behavior that's seen as permissible.

Our research group has been trying to understand what causes the evolution of tight and loose cultures, and what the trade-offs are.

Me: I love this work, and I'm excited to get into some of the details. Could you give some examples of tight and loose cultures around the world?

Michele: You could think about Singapore as a tight culture. It's called "the Fine Country" because you can get a lot of fines for things like spitting or littering or even not flushing the toilet in public. And more of a loose culture might be New Zealand, where you might see people walking barefoot in banks or people driving with open bottles of alcohol. Zoom back and you see the contrast in ancient Athens versus Sparta. Or, think about the military versus Silicon Valley.

Me: How can you measure whether a culture is tight or loose?

Michele: In the first study that we did on this, we simply asked people to report on the strength of norms in their local context, in Germany or in the U.S. or New Zealand. And we could see that people really agreed on their perceptions of how strict or permissive in general their countries were. We can also ask more fine-grained questions like how appropriate are certain behaviors — like 15 behaviors across 15 situations? How appropriate is to argue in a bank or sleep in class?

Me: For the record, sleeping in class is not appropriate! I know we agree on that, Michele. But how does the tightness or a looseness of a culture predict the decisions people living in that culture will make?

Michele: In one of my favorite studies, they were looking at tightness and looseness and creativity. And particularly they were looking at these large crowdsourcing studies of creativity and who enters and wins these contests where you come up with creative ideas like a new mall idea in Egypt or innovating on instant coffee. And what they found was really interesting: in loose cultures, people are much more likely to enter and win those contests. And this is just one indication of the openness that goes along with looseness.

Loose cultures provide a great degree of openness, where people feel comfortable engaging in innovation and creativity and idea generation. Openness also comes with tolerance. We find in lots of studies that people in loose cultures are much more open-minded about living near different types of people—people from different races, religions, creeds.

Tight cultures really struggle with openness. They struggle with stigma. They struggle with creativity. But on the flip side, tight cultures corner the market on order. They have far more discipline. People have more self-control. There's less debt. There's less obesity. There's less alcoholism. There's more self-regulation in tighter cultures. So you can think about this as a trade-off between order and openness.

Me: It's interesting to point out those trade-offs and to think that, in some situations, we want both.

Michele: Yeah, we're thinking a lot about how you maximize both order and openness in any social system. And I think about it psychologically as trying to maximize both the empowerment that goes along with looseness and the accountability that goes along with tightness. We know that the more extreme either type of culture gets, the more dysfunctional they are, whether they're extremely tight or extremely loose.

Extremely loose cultures have massive coordination problems—a lot of chaos. And on the flip side, super tight cultures are very repressive. We have data to suggest that there's a relationship between tight-loose and well-being. And actually, I think it opens up this really exciting possibility of how you negotiate tight-loose in any social system.

I work with the Navy, for example, which clearly needs to veer tight. They have a lot of coordination needs. They have a lot of threat. But they want to insert some looseness into that system. Airlines, manufacturing companies, and hospitals I work with also really want to tweak that balance between having a lot of accountability but also some empowerment. And on the flip side, you can think about some places that are uber loose, like Silicon Valley. They need to insert some structure, some accountability. And of course, there's going to be resistance from either direction. When you're trying to loosen a tight culture, boy, there's a lot of resistance. You can’t introduce huge changes quickly.

On the flip side, when you're trying to tighten a loose culture, there's a lot of catastrophizing like, "Oh my gosh, we're going to lose all our autonomy," when in fact, we want what I call tight-loose ambidexterity. We invented social norms. We can harness the power of them when we need to change.

Me: You sent me a quiz that allows people to figure out what their own degree of tightness and looseness is, and I loved it. I was very intrigued to discover that—as a lifelong rule follower whose husband always says, "you know it's OK to break the rules"—I was very loose. Can you say a little bit more about individual tightness and looseness and what to make of it?

Michele: Sure. I'd like to first just mention that I don't like to call people tight or loose and equate that with nations. That's kind of an ecological fallacy. At the individual level we call this basically a tight or loose mindset. It's how much you're focused on following rules, like self-monitoring, managing impulses, liking a lot of structure. In looser cultures, people don't necessarily notice the rules as much. They're a little more impulsive, and they might be more tolerant of ambiguity. And these variables help people to fit in.

It's more generally what's your default? Are you an order Muppet or a chaos Muppet? A Bert or an Ernie? Of course, we can change it up depending on the context, so we all have our inner Ernie and our inner Bert. But we all have a default based on our own experiences, our upbringing, and so forth.

I lean moderately loose on my own quiz. My husband, Todd, leans relatively tight, and he's a lawyer. He has a lot of accountability. I have a lot of empowerment, some accountability, but we have different weights of those in our jobs. And we also try to be mindful of, "OK, why do we score differently on this?" Why might I have veered loose and him tight? And that gives us a little more empathy for our different mindsets, and it helps with a lot of conflicts we have. I always like to think we should give our potential partners the tight-loose mindset quiz because you're buying into potential conflicts related to finances, parenting. Our most famous conflict is over the dishwasher. He is deeply disturbed by how I load the dishwasher because he thinks it's a mess. He even reloads it.

But once you know your own preference, you can start to negotiate. We can think about what domains in our household need to be tight and what can be loose, and that might change over time. And I think that's a way of being ambidextrous. And it starts with a quiz because that’s how you find out about yourself. Culture starts with the self.

Me: Michele, I so appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. It's been a pleasure.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Michele’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into tight and loose cultures or check out her terrific book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers. You can also take her tight-loose mindset quiz here.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in April!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I share ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

If you’ve heard the expression “don’t shoot the messenger” (which can apparently be credited to Sophocles), then you’re already familiar with the idea of emotion attribution errors. In ancient times, angry rulers literally killed messengers for delivering bad news, even when they had nothing to do with it. That’s because the anger these messengers incited when sharing bad news (of, say, defeat on the battlefield) spilled over and unfairly tainted the way they were viewed. In this month’s Q&A, you’ll learn how your emotional state when eating a meal, taking a class or trying a new workout can spill over to affect the attributions you’ll make about that experience in the future (sometimes with life-altering consequences).

But before we dive in, here are a few listens and reads I think you might enjoy…

This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads

• How to Make a Good Impression Online: Professor Andrew Brodsky’s evidence-based op-ed in the Wall Street Journal offers invaluable guidance on how we can all make a better impression on Zoom and over email.

• What to Do After Accomplishing Your Goal: This New York Times piece offers tips on how to harness the natural comedown you may feel after nailing a goal, some of which were provided by yours truly.

• Why Streaks Keep Us Hooked: The New York Times covered terrific research by Professors Jackie Silverman and Alix Barash showing that we fear breaking streaks because they feel like possessions we don’t want to lose, and this can motivate us to stay on track when games and apps emphasize our streaks of achievement.

• Ethan Kross is a world-renowned expert on emotions and how to regulate them, and he released a new book earlier this month called SHIFT: Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You, which became an instant bestseller. I highly recommend SHIFT as well as Ethan’s fabulous first book, CHATTER: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.

Q&A: Misattributions Matter

In this Q&A from Choiceology, UCLA Professor of Behavioral Economics Kareem Haggag discusses his research showing that people make predictable misattributions when recalling past experiences and explains why this bias matters.

Me: Let’s start off with a definition: what is attribution bias?

Kareem: The basic idea is that when judging the value of a good, people tend to be overly influenced by the state in which they previously consumed it. States refer to things like our hunger, thirst, fatigue, or even what the weather is like. The amount of enjoyment we get out of consuming a product or experience often depends on what state we happen to be in. For example, food is tastier when you're hungry.

However, a large body of research in psychology and behavioral economics suggests that we fail to appreciate the extent to which our preferences change with our states, and that can lead to misattributions.

So, imagine you went to a new restaurant after working up a large appetite. You're probably going to enjoy the food more than if you went when you were less hungry. But later, when you reflect on that experience, you may fail to realize that you liked the food so much because you were so hungry. So, when you recommend the restaurant to friends or you think about going back, you may overrate the restaurant or go back and be disappointed.

Me: I know you have a really interesting study that shows that attribution bias can even change what majors college students are interested in pursuing. Can you describe it?

Kareem: In that project we explored whether students might be making these sorts of misattributions during intro classes where they often get a first taste of a subject. Our hypothesis was that students who were assigned to an early morning section of a class or to multiple back-to-back classes might mix up how tired they are with how much they like the subject—thus leading them to be less likely to choose the subject as their major.

This was tricky to study because in many colleges, students can choose when to take their classes, and that's why we decided to do it at West Point. Because at West Point, students are randomly allocated to class times across a standardized core curriculum, which allows us to compare students assigned to different timings for their courses without worrying about, for example, them choosing to put their least favorite classes in the morning. We found that students randomly assigned to the 7:30 a.m. section are about 10% less likely to choose the corresponding major than a student who takes that class later in the day. So, if you're assigned to 7:30 a.m. Chem 101, you're about 10% less likely to become a chemistry major.

Me: I love this finding. It’s such an interesting demonstration of what a big impact a seemingly small bias can have on our lives. It can literally shape the profession we pick. And it brings me to my next question: why are we so bad at correctly adjusting our beliefs when our experience is shaped by being hot or encountering a rainy day or being sleep deprived?

Kareem: I think this relates to a broader psychology on anchoring and adjustment. We anchor on what our experience is in the moment, and it’s very difficult to fully parse it, even when the state is very salient. I find this a lot in my own life. For example, when I started working on this project, it was, I think, either right before or during the month of Ramadan, which is the month in which Muslims fast. And I had this sort of common experience of fasting all day. And then, particularly in grad school, we would go out to a new restaurant or to a friend's place, and they'd make a new dish, and it's always the most amazing meal after being hungry all day. But when I go back to one of these amazing restaurants after Ramadan is over, I'm invariably disappointed by the quality of the food.

Me: That's a fascinating example. Did that motivate this work?

Kareem: To some extent, yeah. It came up as we were brainstorming ideas.

Me: That’s a really nice illustration of how important it is that researchers have different backgrounds and experiences to motivate diverse research questions.

I’m curious what you do differently now that you know attribution bias?

Kareem: I would say that if it’s easy, I reflect on my underlying state. So, if I met someone for the first time and I had a bad headache, I might later consider how that could have played a role in my judgment of how engaging the conversation was. Or if I knew that I sampled something when I wasn’t in the best state for it, I try to go out and sample it again before deciding about it or giving a recommendation. So, if I try a restaurant when I’m incredibly hungry, maybe I try it again in a regular state of hunger before singing its praises to everybody.

For example, I recently went backpacking in Yosemite for the first time. I'm not a backpacker. I'm not a regular hiker. But I went with some friends who knew what they were doing, and we got these dehydrated meals. Pretty far into the hike we boiled some water to rehydrate the meal kits. And it was the most amazing meal I've ever had, this chicken and dumplings meal. It crept into my mind for a moment that maybe I should get some of these dehydrated meals and keep them around the house for when I don't have other food. But I think that's probably a misattribution. They probably don't taste as good without having done a strenuous hike. That just, again, illustrates how hard it is to know, because I've never had one of these meals when I wasn't so hungry.

From a more administrative perspective, I’m now a little bit more sensitive to the role of timing. So, if it's possible for me to choose not to teach a class early in the morning, not only for my own sake but also for the students, I perhaps try to take a later time of day.

Me: What advice would you give to others who want to avoid making this kind of attribution mistake?

Kareem: My advice would be to test something new multiple times while you’re in different states. For example, let's say you're trying some new exercise at the gym. If you put it at the end of your workout, you might misattribute how difficult or enjoyable it is to how tired you are at the end of that workout. And so, I would encourage you, the next time you go to the gym, to try the exercise at the beginning of your workout just to calibrate how much of a role your fatigue might have played in that evaluation.

Me: I love that. So more generally, we should try to sample new experiences in different states before forming strong judgments of those experiences. Kareem, this has been fascinating, and I really appreciate it. Thank you.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Kareem’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into attribution bias or check out his terrific paper in the Journal of Public Economics on how this bias can contort the majors people choose in college.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in March!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I share ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

Today I want to talk about a bias that can be a real pain in the neck – whether you’re choosing the right goal to tackle or the best restaurant to recommend to a friend. It turns out we have a suboptimal tendency to fixate on what’s top of mind, and one way things get to the top of mind is by being recently encountered. What happened yesterday or last week is a lot more likely to pop into your thoughts (and influence them) than what happened last month, last year, or last century – even if an event from the more distant past has greater relevance to your next decision. Unfortunately, this can lead to mistakes.

Consider a homebuyer contemplating a move to Miami or Los Angeles. Both cities face major climate risks, but might the recent fires in Los Angeles loom larger this month, tipping the balance towards Miami? In this month’s Q&A, we’ll explore recency bias and its impact not just on everyday decisions, but also on life-and-death choices—such as the procedures doctors decide to perform on their patients.

But before we dive in, here are a few listens and reads I think you might enjoy…

This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads

• Pretty Woman Meets Behavioral Science: I had a blast visiting the podcast Love Factually (hosted by two fellow academics) to talk about what this classic 90s movie gets right and wrong about human nature, according to behavioral science research.

• Beware the Dangers of Data: This thoughtful Economist piece discusses implications of a recent paper I co-authored (led by Drs. Linda Chang and Erika Kirgios) on quantification fixation – or our tendency to attend more to quantified attributes of products, job candidates, charities, and so on when making decisions.

• New Year’s Roundup: I did a slew of interviews over the last month about the science behind why we set New Year’s resolutions and how to achieve them. My favorite was probably this interview with NPR’s “Here & Now”, but you can also find my advice on WHYY, in The Washington Post, in National Geographic, on CNN, in U.S. News & World Report, and on NPR’s “All Things Considered”.

• January was a big month for behavioral science books! I strongly encourage you to check out these terrific new titles from fellow researchers: (1) MINDMASTERS: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior by Sandra Matz; (2) DEFY: The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes by Sunita Sah; (3) PING: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication by Andrew Brodsky; (4) MAKE WORK FAIR: Data-Driven Design for Real Results by Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi; (5) NEGOTIATION: The Game Has Changed by Max Bazerman; (6) INSPIRE: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others by Adam Galinsky; and (7) OUTRAGED: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground by Kurt Gray.

Q&A: Why What’s Top of Mind Matters

In this Q&A from Choiceology, Carnegie Mellon Social and Decision Sciences Professor Manasvini Singh discusses her research showing that we overreact to recent events, even in incredibly high stakes situations.

Me: I'm excited to talk about recency bias. Can you start off by defining it?

Manasvini: When we’re exhibiting recency bias, we’re making decisions that overweight things that happened closer to us in time. Things that just happened as opposed to things that happened long ago.

Me: When I think of recency bias, I imagine something like a friend asking me for a restaurant recommendation in my home city. And instead of thinking of the best restaurant in Philadelphia, I mention the place I went last week because it's what comes to mind first.

Manasvini: Exactly right. My go-to example is that I almost get into a car crash, and then I’m a little bit more careful the next day, a little less careful the day after, and by the third day, I'm basically back to normal.

Me: Oh, I love that example. You have this fascinating paper about the decisions doctors make about how to treat their patients. I interpret it as a great example of recency bias. Can you describe that work?

Manasvini: Of course. I look at whether physicians, specifically obstetricians, overreact to recent negative patient outcomes. If you have a physician, Dr. Mary, for example—Dr. Mary is going about her day, and then she performs a vaginal delivery of a baby, and there’s a bad patient outcome. On the next patient, is she more likely to perform a cesarean? I actually show that it happens in both directions. Patient 1's complication in a vaginal delivery makes it more likely that the physician switches to a cesarean on the next patient. And if there's a complication in patient 1's cesarean, the doctor is also more likely to switch to a vaginal delivery on the next patient.

Me: So, whether patient 1 is cesarean or vaginal delivery, if it doesn't go well, the next patient gets the opposite kind of treatment with a higher probability.

Manasvini: Exactly. And I'm not saying it's conscious. It's not like the physician says, "Oh, now I have to switch to this other delivery mode." If you think of the physician's threshold for performing cesarean, maybe the threshold is lowered, and they're more likely to do a cesarean on the next patient, or now it's higher, so they might be more reluctant to do a cesarean on the next patient.

Me: Going back to the driving example. If you have a near miss or an accident when you're driving, now it's going to be top of mind to be careful. So that's one example of recency. And this seems like another where if you're a doctor, you're trying to do the right thing for every patient. Am I thinking about that correctly?

Manasvini: Yes, and I think the medical setting is especially where such biases are likely to flourish because there's so much uncertainty. And when there's uncertainty, there's a greater likelihood of relying on biases.

Me: What do we know about the root cause of this type of behavior? Why would our minds be designed to swing drastically like this, overreacting to our most recent experiences?

Manasvini: There seems to be some sort of biological basis to this type of learning. There's evidence in how bees make formations and ants and foraging behaviors amongst rats and also how children learn language—this sort of incorporating the outcome of the last decision into your current decision, what I call "win, stay; lose, shift." And maybe in simpler environments, relying on your last decision is good.

Me: When things are changing a lot, I suppose I see how that could be smart. Could you talk more about when this kind of behavioral pattern is suboptimal?

Manasvini: That’s a very important question because it differentiates learning from a bias, and it's very, very hard to differentiate the two. The way I try to get at it is that I show that the patient for whom the physician used this heuristic has worse health outcomes. The mother and child have a slightly higher likelihood of dying if they follow a prior complication and there’s a switch performed on them.

Me: And this is using massive amounts of data from multiple hospital systems that you're able to see these patterns over, was it decades?

Manasvini: Over 20 years, two hospitals, because I needed electronic medical record data. And then the other thing that makes it inconsistent with learning is that experienced physicians are more likely to use this heuristic, which goes in the face of the most basic learning models. And that the physicians who use this more often are more likely to have bad outcomes over time.

Me: We've been talking a lot about this in the context of your fantastic study of medical decision-making. But I want to zoom out from that for now. If you could give one piece of advice about how people can improve their everyday decisions and avoid recency bias, what would you suggest they think about or do differently?

Manasvini: When making decisions, pause for a second and try to prime yourself with a scenario that has happened to you in the past, so you can take a more holistic view of the decision you're making currently. Make other things more recent. Even though they might not be recent in time, they will always be readily accessible in your memory. For example, if you’re going to take a big exam, and you didn't perform that well on your last one. Maybe you're nervous, and you're overweighting that past exam, but just remember that in your life you have done well several times, and you’re doing better than you think you are. And maybe that will boost your confidence and make you do better on this test.

Me: That's really nice. Thank you for taking the time to talk about recency bias and your amazing research.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Manasvini’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into recency bias or check out her fantastic paper in Science magazine on how this bias can contort life-and-death medical decisions.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in February!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I shares ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

My Favorite Cartoon of 2024

“Do you have to stare at her right in front of me?” by Paul Noth in the September 20, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. Donuts are just so tempting… (follow Paul Noth on Instagram or X)

My Favorite Podcast of 2024

“Love Factually” by Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick

In each episode of this delightful new podcast, behavioral scientists Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick dissect a different romantic comedy. But they don’t engage in your standard banter about the movie’s highs and lows. Instead, after a quick summary of the film, they dive into an analysis of whether its plotlines and commentary accurately represent what we know to be true about relationships (according to science). This podcast is a gift to everyone who loves rom coms and learning. It’s magnificently fun edutainment, and I highly recommend it. I particularly enjoyed the “Clueless” episode.

Episode Honorable Mention: “Thanksgiving with Ina Garten” from The Daily in which the Barefoot Contessa offers a master class on the art of hosting a dinner party. Prominently featured tips that every behavioral science lover will appreciate include detailed planning and simplification.

My Three Favorite Books of 2024

I know it’s a bit lazy of me to choose three favorite books this year, but I just couldn’t pick between these gems. I highly recommend them all!

Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There by Tali Sharot and Cass Sunstein

This book will help you refresh your point of view. Sharot and Sunstein reveal why it’s easy to be lulled into complacency about anything and how to prevent falling into this trap. In the bargain, they’ll help you live a happier, healthier, wiser and more just life.

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg

A perk of being an author is that I get a lot of free books, and I normally read the first page on the short walk between my mailbox and my office at Wharton. Rarely am I so engrossed that I’m unable to tear myself away, but this book captivated me from the start – I literally couldn’t put it down. In addition to being highly entertaining, Supercommunicators will make you a better conversationalist, both when the stakes are low and when they’re high. Highly recommended!

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics and Studies Exploit our Biases – And What We Can Do About It by Alex Edmans

This book will improve the quality of your thinking. Edmans explains how to avoid common biases in order to successfully separate fact from fiction. May Contain Lies is all about the science of cause and effect and excerpts will soon be required reading in my Wharton MBA class.

My Favorite Research Paper of 2024

“The Health Costs of Cost Sharing” by Amitabh Chandra, Evan Flack and Ziad Obermeyer, which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. This paper employs a clever statistical trick to causally determine what happens when an American over the age of 65 suddenly needs to pay more out-of-pocket for their medications. The key finding is that people make the critical mistake of cutting back on life-saving drugs (anticipating that missing a month of, say, their statins won’t matter much). These cutbacks have massive adverse consequences, producing a ~14% increase in mortality for each $100 per month sudden decrease in a person’s budget thanks to discontinuities in insurance companies’ out-of-pocket drug coverage.

Runner Up: “Megastudy Testing 25 Treatments to Reduce Antidemocratic Attitudes and Partisan Animosity” by Jan Voelkel and 75+ co-authors, which appeared in the journal Science. This paper features a megastudy, which is the approach to science that my collaborators and I have been promoting since 2021. This particular megastudy tests a variety of approaches to… you guessed it… reducing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity. Happily, the paper finds a number of short, behaviorally-informed interventions capable of improving these important outcomes.

My Favorite Essay of 2024

“The Nobel Winner Who Liked to Collaborate with His Adversaries” by Cass Sunstein

This year, behavioral scientists around the globe mourned the passing of the great Daniel Kahneman (Nobel laureate, mega-bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom). In homage to Danny’s passing, his friend and co-author Cass Sunstein penned a terrific essay in the New York Times celebrating Danny’s habit of pursuing adversarial collaborations to find the truth in cases where Danny found himself in disagreement with other scientists.

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I hope you’ll enjoy exploring some of my favorite things from 2024.

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I shares ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

Fast forward to today, and my information diet looks wildly different. Now, I find myself frequently scrolling through LinkedIn, X, BlueSky, Threads, and Instagram. These platforms aggregate content for me from outlets like The New York Times, PBS, and The Washington Post but they also mix in a flood of updates from friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and even celebrities. In this new media landscape, it’s easy to lose track of where I’ve heard something—whether it came from a credible news source or someone who might have been misinformed.

There are many reasons this is a bit scary, but one relates to a psychological bias in the way we process information that we hear over and over again. That is the focus of today’s Q&A. 

But before we dive in, I have a bit of good news to share, along with a few hand-picked listens and reads I think you’ll enjoy…

Good News

Earlier this month, Choiceology with Katy Milkman was named an official selection at #BrandStorytelling2025, which is part of the Sundance Film Festival! We’re over the moon about this honor! Thank you for all of your support. If you’ll be in Park City for Sundance this year, please check out the brand storytelling panel and give three cheers for Choiceology. 

This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads

• A Hero’s Journey: Our Choiceology season finale might be my favorite episode ever! Backed by fascinating research, it explores how reframing your life story as a classic Hero’s Journey can yield surprising benefits.

• Trying to Quantify Everything is Hurting our Decisions: This Bloomberg piece delves into new research I co-authored, revealing the outsize emphasis our decisions place on anything that’s quantified (e.g., the number of ratings a product has on Amazon) over qualitative factors (e.g., the product’s star rating or written reviews).

• Love Factually: Behavioral scientists Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick host the witty and evidence-based new podcast Love Factually. Each episode analyzes a different romantic comedy—discussing its plot and what it gets right and wrong about the science of relationships. 

• Why and How to Change Your Exercise Routine: This Time feature explains how and why to break out of stale workout routines and build more satisfying ones and includes practical tips from my research.

Q&A: What Happens When We Encounter the Same Information Repeatedly?

In this Q&A from Choiceology, UCL and MIT neuroscience professor Tali Sharot discusses her research exploring a mistake we can make when we’re exposed to the same information repeatedly.

Me: First, could you describe “the illusory truth effect”?

Tali: If you hear something repeatedly, you're more likely to believe it regardless of whether it's true or if it's false. That's one reason that we believe things that are not true. A lot of people believe that you use 10% of your brain or that vitamin C can prevent the common cold. So the more you hear it, the more you believe it.

Me: What’s your favorite classic study that illustrates the illusory truth effect? 

Tali: I think maybe the first study is the best to illustrate it. The first study was published in 1977. They gave people 60 different statements. Some of them were true, and some of them were not, and 20 of them were repeated across three weeks, and the others were not repeated. What they found is that those statements repeated at least once were more likely to be believed.

So that's the first demonstration. But since then, this illusory truth effect has been shown many times. It's been shown in different populations, different gaps of time between the first time and the second time you hear it. So it's a very, very strong effect.

Me: Why is it that when I see or hear the same statement multiple times, I am more likely to believe it's true?

Tali: There's probably a few reasons. One reason is that when you hear something again and again, your brain processes it less and less. The first time you hear something absolutely new, like for example: “a shrimp's gut is in its head,” your brain has a lot to process. It maybe comes up with an image of a shrimp or the last time you ate a shrimp. So your mind does a lot of processing.

But the second time I tell you a shrimp's gut is in its head, the brain doesn't process it as much. And what happens when we process something less? It feels more familiar. It's less surprising. And we're used to familiar things being true. And so the result is that you're more likely to accept something the more familiar it is – the “truthier” it is. We don't stop to think about it. We've heard it before, the brain doesn't respond, and we just accept it as it is.

Now, a related reason is that we're quite good at remembering what we've heard before, but not necessarily where we've heard it. So you can hear statements from a lot of different places, and some of the sources can be quite dodgy, but you don't necessarily remember what the source was. So it's harder for you to figure out, "Well, I've heard this before, but was it a reliable source, or wasn't it a reliable source?"

Me: That’s fascinating, and this phenomenon fits into the heuristics and biases literature because it seems like familiar things probably are more likely true than new things, on average. It's just that this is going to lead us astray in situations, particularly where someone is deliberately trying to mislead us or where there's an often-repeated rumor that isn't true. Could you describe your recent research suggesting that the illusory truth effect can drive the spread of inaccurate information?

Tali: It's been shown so many times that things that you've heard more than once, you believe more. And so we thought, "Well, if you believe it more, are you going to share it more?" Because it turns out there's a lot of research that shows that people actually want to share true information. Yes, people sometimes go online to share misinformation. There are mal-agents. But most of us: we want to share true information. So we thought, "Well, let's see if we show people statements more than once, not only will they believe it more, they would want to share it more?"

So we did something quite simple. We showed people 60 different statements. We actually did two experiments. One experiment was all health statements. The other experiment was really a combination of statements from history and biology and so on. Half of the statements were repeated, and half were not repeated.

Me: How were they repeated? Was it just in the course of taking a survey experiment, or were they repeated over the course of time?

Tali: It was all in a short amount of time. It was all within one hour.  Next, for each statement, we asked two questions, and the order was random. Either we ask you how accurate it is first, or we ask you, "Do you want to share it?" And we found that statements that were repeated more than once, people believed them more, and they wanted to share them more. And the reason that people shared repeated statements more was because they believed those statements were more accurate.

Me: That’s fascinating.  Do you have advice for people on how they can try to avoid making mistakes related to the illusory truth effect now that they're aware of it?

Tali: The best way is: check the source. If something feels a little bit suspicious, check it out. If it's not important, it's not important. But if you're going to act based on the information, it's good to take a few seconds to just Google it. See: do you get hits from reputable sources?

Katy: So, what you're saying is once we start to understand that there are biases that can contort how well we assess the truthfulness of information, that should make us more skeptical of any information that we might instinctively want to believe. And so if we can just be a bit more skeptical generally, that's going to be protective, not just against the illusory truth effect, but probably against a whole range of biases in the way we judge what's accurate.

Thank you for the really interesting research you've done and for telling us about the illusory truth effect. I really appreciate it.

Tali: Thanks for having me. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Tali’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the illusory truth effect or check out her wonderful book, LOOK AGAIN: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in December!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I shares ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram / BlueSky / Threads

Tip #1: Ask Your Friends Exactly When They’ll Vote 

Research shows that asking people specific questions about when they’ll vote, where they’ll come from, and what they'll be doing before heading out can significantly boost their likelihood of voting. These questions are particularly helpful for people who live alone and thus might not have already talked to someone about their plan to get to the polls. So be sure to call or text your friends to ask them about the specifics of their voting plans!

Tip #2: Find a (Minimally Creepy!) Way to Tell Your Friends That Whether They Vote Is Public, and You’re Hoping They’ll Make You Proud

In case it freaks you out to learn that your voting record is public, let me just emphasize that who you vote for is private. It’s only whether you vote that’s public. The advice I’m offering here is based on a large study that showed reminding people their voter records are public and letting them know their neighbors would find out if they voted or not massively boosted voter turnout. So, consider finding a minimally creepy (ideally funny and sweet!) way to let your friends know that you can (and will) check up on whether they voted, post-election on www.didmyfriendsvote.org.

Tip #3: Tell People After You’ve Voted – Shout It From the Rooftops

Why should you snap a selfie wearing your “I Voted” sticker and share it online (even if you haven’t yet showered and aren’t looking your very best; ahem…)? Because research shows that when friends make it visible that they’ve voted on social media, we’re more likely to vote too. So don’t be shy this election cycle! Below is the (decidedly mediocre) selfie I snapped after voting in 2022. You can be sure I’ll post another after voting on November 5th. Feel free to tag me when you post your selfie online so I can amplify.

Q&A: The Magic of Tandem Goal Pursuit

While we’re on the topic of nudging our friends not to shirk on the important goal of voting this election season, it seems like the perfect time to share a Q&A about tandem goal pursuit. This is a conversation with my friend and collaborator, UC Berkeley marketing professor Rachel Gershon, about our research on just how motivating it is when friends are rewarded for pursuing their goals together (rather than alone).

Me: Hi, Rachel. Could you describe what tandem goal pursuit is?

Rachel: Tandem goal pursuit is simply people pursuing a goal -- such as exercise or an educational goal or quitting smoking -- with a friend.

Me: So instead of doing it alone, I'm doing it with someone else. We both have the same goal for ourselves personally, and we do it together.

Rachel: Yes, exactly. Just pursue a goal in tandem together.

Me: It sounds much better than solo goal pursuit. Could you describe the research that you led on this topic? 

Rachel: Yeah, so generally we were interested in whether people are more motivated when pursuing their goals alone or when pursuing those goals with a friend. And we tested this by running a large experiment with about 800 undergraduates at UC San Diego. They signed up to participate in this experiment with a friend. We offered half of these people a standard incentive to exercise at the on-campus gym. So they got a dollar every time they went to the gym. And we offered the other half the exact same incentive with an additional hurdle: they only got the reward if they went to the gym with this friend.

Me: And what happened?

Rachel: We found that people exercised more often when they received a social reward for visiting the gym. They went to the gym about 35% more often than those who received an individual reward.

Me: And did that surprise you, Rachel, or were sure that's what you would find all along?

Rachel: I think that our co-author group had all experienced some goal pursuit with friends, and we'd found it to be effective. But I still found this to be a really surprising finding. And the reason is that in the social reward condition, we're adding a hurdle, right? It's more costly to pursue a goal with a friend. You have to coordinate with them. You have to figure out each other's schedules. You have to compromise based on your individual preferences. So you have all these coordination costs. But we found that people overcame these costs and actually exercised more often when they had to go with their friend. So yeah, I found that pretty surprising.

Me: What do you think drives the effectiveness of rewarding tandem goal pursuit instead of individual goal pursuit?

Rachel: First, people just enjoy exercising with their friends. There's this increased enjoyment of pursuing the goal together. And then also they felt that their friend was holding them accountable. They didn't want to let their friend down by not showing up to the gym when they'd committed to going.

Me: This research is in the context of exercise, but could you talk a little bit about whether you think the finding is more broadly applicable and where else it might be relevant?

Rachel: Yeah, certainly. In addition to our exercise experiment, we also ran a survey where we asked people to imagine trying to learn a language with a friend. And we found that even in this hypothetical scenario, people seemed more motivated when imagining tandem goal pursuit. They felt that they would be held more accountable to learning a new language when doing so with a friend. And you can imagine this extending to other skills that you might learn, to productivity, to writing with friends, and to all sorts of other individual and workplace goals. 

Me: What recommendations do you have to help people use this insight?

Rachel: I guess the simple advice would just be to find an accountability buddy. Someone who can help you pursue your goals. And not only can this be mutually beneficial for pursuing your goals, but one really nice additional finding that we had from our experiment is that people actually felt closer to their friend by the end of this study. So not only is it helping you pursue these health and wellness and personal goals, but also helping with social goals of staying close with your friends.

Me: I love that. Is there anything you do differently in your life thanks to this research?

Rachel: I really enjoy pursuing goals with friends. I have productivity groups where friends write together. Sometimes we do online workout videos. I really try to pursue these goals with friends to not only keep myself accountable, but also keep these friends in my life.

Me: Wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today, Rachel. I really appreciate it.

Rachel: Thank you, Katy.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

To learn more about Rachel’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology, where we dig into it or check out the paper Rachel led on the benefits of tandem goal pursuit: Friends with Health Benefits: A Field Experiment.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in November!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I shares ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram

But before we get to that, I do want to share some happy news: Choiceology received multiple awards this summer, which is incredibly gratifying. Thank you to ADWEEK for naming us 2024’s best Edutainment podcast (we were honored alongside superstar podcasters in other categories like Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and the Kelce Brothers).  

Thanks also to the members of the Global Association of Applied Behavioral Scientists (GAABS) for voting Choiceology the best behavioral science podcast of 2024. We’re very grateful to our listeners and fans for all of the support! Please keep tuning in, keep referring your friends to the show, and leave us a rating if you haven’t already.

This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads

• The Truth Is Out There: We launched a new season of Choiceology in August, and this recent episode covers Princeton psychologist Taina Lombrozo’s fascinating work on our mind’s preference for simple, single explanations and how it can lead us astray.

• How to Kick-Start a Reading Habit: Real Simple offers evidence-based tips, including some sourced from yours truly, on how to get back into reading books after a long hiatus.

• The 100 Best Books of the 21^st Century: Speaking of starting a reading habit, don’t miss this great reading list from The New York Times Book Review staff.

• Mentoring for Good: This short essay shares remembrances of one of my favorite Wharton senior colleagues who passed away last year – the perpetual optimist, Howard Kunreuther.

Q&A: What Happens When We’re Asked to Explain How Things Work

In this Q&A from Choiceology, Brown psychology professor Steve Sloman discusses his research showing that being prompted to explain how something works makes us more humble about our understanding of it and has the potential to reduce political polarization.

Me: Hi Steve, I'm really excited to dive into the illusion of explanatory depth. What is it exactly?

Steve: Well, this illusion is that people think they understand things better than they do. So, this was first demonstrated with simple objects like zippers and ballpoint pens and toilets. You ask people how well they think they understand how they work. And then you ask them to explain how they work. And what you find is that their sense of their own understanding after trying to explain is lower than it was at the beginning. People admit that they don't understand how something works as well as they thought.

Me: That's really fascinating. What drives this bias? Why do we think we understand things deeply until we have to explain them?

Steve: I think the explanation is that we live in a community of knowledge, and we depend on others for much of the information we have. So, the bias is a result of failing to distinguish the knowledge that's in our own heads from the knowledge that's in other people's heads.

Me: Do you have a sense of why I can't distinguish what's in my head from what's in your head, for example? That is, as an expert on decision-making, I think I do actually have a decent handle on the decision-making literature. But why would I think I have a handle on how ballpoint pens or my toilet works and not recognize the distinction?

Steve: Well, I think that in our very specialized world today, we live on credentials and are all evaluating each other all the time. But we evolved in a group environment where it didn't matter whether the knowledge was in our own heads or the heads of our tribe members. So, I think the reason that we fail to make the distinction is because most of the time it's not an important distinction. Most of the time we're collaborating with other people and depending on the knowledge that sits in our tribe. And so, the phenomenon arises simply because we depend on those other people for our decisions and actions.

Me: What can we do to de-bias this illusion? I know you've done some work that shows there are strategies that can help reduce it.

Steve: Well, the first question is do we want to de-bias it? 

Me: Good point.

Steve: And most of the time, I'm not sure it matters, but here's a case where it really does. My entree to this illusion was doing work with some colleagues showing that you find exactly the same illusion with political and social policies.

Me: So just to be clear, if you and I are having a conversation about how we're going to upgrade the nation's infrastructure, I would think I know more about how that proposed policy is going to work than I really do.

Steve: Exactly. And so, the problem with that is hubris. When we're talking in the social policy domain, we think we understand things better than we do. And that may explain why we feel so strongly about our positions these days. I think it's actually a partial explanation for political polarization.

So how do you de-bias? You ask people to explain. Most people are going to try to explain and discover that they don't really understand how it works. The attempt to explain punctures our illusion of understanding. 

When you're asked to explain, you have to talk about something outside of your own brain. You're not talking about your opinion. You're not talking about why you have the position you have on this policy. Rather you're talking about the policy itself and what its consequences in the world will be. And I believe that externalizing things sort of separates them from you, so you're thinking about them mechanistically, but you also don't have the same investment in being right. So, I think it's a way to achieve compromise.

Me:  I'm curious if you think there are other settings where this bias can be pernicious. Where else can we reach a middle ground when the illusion of explanatory depth could otherwise lead us to make big mistakes?

Steve: I mean, any context in which there's the potential for conflict.

I hate to say this, but sometimes when I'm talking to my wife, I think I understand what we're talking about probably better than I do. And if I could come to a more accurate conclusion of my own understanding of her intentions and of what caused the conflict, then I would probably be more forgiving, less sure of myself, and we could have a more productive conversation. I think this is true in many businesses, many committee meetings, many faculty meetings.

One of the basic facts about people is that we are hard to persuade. We take our positions strongly. So, I think that lowering the temperature during conflict in general is a good thing. And, in particular, I think that thinking about things mechanistically rather than thinking about our values makes us less egocentric and lets us have more productive conversations.

Me: Could you walk us through one of your studies on how having people work through their actual understanding can reduce polarization?

Steve: Sure. In our studies, one of the policy issues was whether or not there should be a flat tax on all Americans. And you ask people how well they understand the policy and what its implications would be. And generally, people say, "Oh yeah, I understand it." On a one to seven scale, they'll give a four or five. And then you say, "OK, now explain the policy in as much detail as you possibly can." And then people very quickly come to the realization that they don't understand the policy enough to explain how exactly it's going to manifest out in the real world.

So then we ask them again, "Now, how well do you think you understand the policy?" and their judgments are reliably lower. But the other thing we do is we say, "Has your attitude changed at all? on a scale from ‘I disagree completely with the policy’ to ‘I agree completely with the policy.’” After trying to explain, they’re closer to the midpoint of the scale. Their judgments are less extreme. 

Me: That's really encouraging. I learned a lot from this conversation. 

Steven Sloman: It was a pleasure. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

To learn more about Steve’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the illusion of explanatory depth or buy a copy of his fantastic book, The Knowledge Illusion.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in October!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change

P.S. Join my community of ~100,000 followers on social media, where I shares ideas, research, and more: LinkedIn / Twitter / Instagram

But our choices tend to change quite dramatically when we recognize these recurring decisions are part of a larger portfolio.  That’s the focus of this month’s newsletter. 

Part of my motivation for choosing this topic was the realization that I’ve been writing this newsletter for nearly four years and have published over forty issues.  Yet, I approach each month’s topic in isolation. Moving forward, I’m considering a different approach…

This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads

• A Checklist for Making Good Decisions: In this recent episode of Choiceology, we share the story of a video game co-designed by BU marketing professor Carey Morewidge that’s been proven to reduce decision biases as well as a checklist for improving your decisions courtesy of Duke management professor Jack Soll.

• Tracking New Year’s Resolutions: The Washington Post followed dozens of readers who set New Year's resolutions to learn what it takes to succeed, and I enjoyed weighing in on how well the takeaways they gathered aligned with the science.

• 8 Productivity Books Used by Experts: When the New York Times asked me to share my favorite book on how to boost productivity, I was delighted to reply, and I was even more delighted when they put my pick at the top of their list of recommendations from experts.

• Behavioral Science Insights for the UN:  Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of spending time at the United Nations and answering leaders’ questions about how behavioral insights can be applied to pressing global challenges. While some of the most exciting proceedings were closed, one keynote I delivered as part of the UN’s Behavioral Insights Week is now on YouTube if you’re curious.

Q&A: Choice Bracketing

In this Q&A from Choiceology, Erika Kirgios, an assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business discusses classic decision making research on choice bracketing and her own scholarship examining its implications in the workplace.

Me: I was hoping we could start by just defining choice bracketing. What is it exactly?

Erika: Choice bracketing is the idea that when we make decisions, very often in life we have the option between thinking pretty locally about an individual choice or thinking more globally. So, for example, I might think locally about whether to buy coffee in the morning, and that means today I wake up, I realize that I'm in a rush to get to work. Should I stop at Starbucks, or should I make myself a coffee at home? And there are all sorts of reasons why I might decide that stopping at Starbucks makes more sense, but if I look back over the course of a whole week or a whole month or a whole year, will I think differently about those individual choices to go get coffee and buy it from Starbucks rather than make it at home? Maybe so, and that kind of local-versus-global thinking can apply in all sorts of decision-making contexts because we very often make repeated choices and think about each of those choices individually more commonly than we're thinking about the aggregation of those choices.

Me: So in the context of the Starbucks example you gave, I guess if I were thinking globally about it, I might think, "wow, that's a really big expense if I do that every day," but if I'm thinking locally, I might think, "it's going to save me time, and it'll taste better than what I can make at home." Is that kind of the idea?

Erika: Exactly. That's exactly right.

Me: Could you describe some of your favorite research that demonstrates people think differently when they bracket their choices narrowly versus broadly?

Erika: One study that's kind of canonical in this space and that everybody thinks of when they think about choice bracketing is the decision between snacks. So some researchers went to their classes and told their students, "We'll bring you a free snack every week for the next three weeks," which is an amazing treat. And they either had their students decide in week one what snack they wanted for the next three weeks, or they decided every week what snack they wanted that week. So either you're thinking globally—you're deciding what snacks you want in a three-week period—or you're thinking locally, what snack do I want this week? And then the next week, what snack do I want this week? And so on and so forth.

Me: And just to clarify, in both cases, I can make three different choices or the same choice over and over again, right? It's just the researchers varied the timing of when the choice happened - either people made all the choices together at the beginning of a three week period, say, in early March or they made them once a week over the course of the month. Am I thinking about that correctly?

Erika: That's exactly right. So, for example, I might give you a list. I might say, "I, as your professor, am doing this wonderfully kind thing for you. You can decide whether you want a bag of potato chips, a Twix bar, a Snickers bar, an apple, or a bag of pretzels," and you either say which of those five items you want on week one, two, and three all at the same time on March 1st, or you make a decision on March 1st between those five items, another on March 8th, and another on March 15th." And what they find is that when people make all three decisions at the same time, so they're thinking globally about the decision, they choose a lot more product diversity. So you're more likely to choose an apple and a Twix bar and a bag of chips. But if you make those choices separated over time – a choice on March 1st, a choice on March 8th, and a choice on March 15th – then you're more likely to choose a Twix bar every single time.

Me: Erika, why is it that we think differently about choices when we make a series of them that will take effect in the future versus when we make them one at a time?

Erika: When you're making many choices at once, you can make trade-offs between choices that you can't make when you're just making one choice at a time. So, for example, if you're deciding what to eat on a given day, you're trying to maximize lots of things, like how tasty it is, how healthy it is, what mix of nutrients you're getting, whether you have enough carbs in the meal and proteins in the meal. (I keep thinking of food now, I must be hungry!)  But if you're making your meal plan for the whole week, you might be able to balance some of those trade-offs better and say, "OK, this is a day where I'll have more carbs. I'm going on a run the next day. Then the next day I really want to prioritize getting more proteins in my meal." And you can make those trade-offs in a wiser way when you're thinking globally than locally.

And instead, when you're thinking locally, what you might do is say, "What's the best individual choice? Even though it requires me to sacrifice all sorts of things." OK, I'll make that choice and then I'll make it over and over. But actually, probably it would be better if you thought about the trade-offs and made a balanced set of decisions across a period of time.

If you think every day individually about the decision to go to the gym, it's very obvious to you that going to the gym can bring you some discomfort. Maybe it's annoying. Maybe you feel like you don't have a lot of time. Maybe the idea of getting on the treadmill is just exhausting to you, and you're like, "OK, losing one gym visit, not that big of a deal." But again, if you think about it over the course of a month, a year, 10 years, you might think very differently about the cost versus benefits of going to the gym.

Me: That makes a lot of sense.  I want to turn to talking about a related bias that we've studied together, Erika, which is the isolated choice effect. And I was wondering if you could first just define what that is and explain how it relates to choice bracketing.

Erika: Oh, absolutely. So the isolated choice effect is the idea that when people make a hiring decision or a promotion decision in isolation, so they're just responsible for making one hiring choice, they're much less likely to prioritize and think about and choose diversity than when they're making a collection of choices.

So, in one study run with Edward Chang and Aneesh Rai, who are two of our incredible collaborators, we have people come to take our experiment and we tell them, "You're a hiring manager at this major tech company, and you're trying to put together a new innovation team," and we either tell them "Your responsibility is just to select one person for this team," let's say the head software engineer or the product manager or the UX designer, or "You're going to be responsible for staffing up the whole team."

So, for each role, we showed people three potential candidates, and what we find is that people are systematically more likely to include women in the team, and they include more women when they make five decisions all at once than when we aggregate together five decisions made by different people.

Me: Thanks for describing that.  I’m still really fascinated by those findings.  What would you recommend people do differently now that they know about the power of choice bracketing?

Erika: I think when you're thinking about your own life and your own individual decisions, I think there's a lot of value in thinking about when global properties of your decisions might matter. So, is this a decision that could become a habit? And in that case, I should think globally about what kinds of habits I do and don't want to build. Or is this a decision that contributes meaningfully to a bigger team or a bigger endeavor, a bigger effort? In that case, I want to think about it within the context of that bigger global effort or team, right? I think about this when I'm hiring people or when I'm choosing, for example, PhD students. I think about not just that individual, but what's the team? What's the cohort going to look like? How can I build a team or a cohort that's going to be best able to support each other?

One thing that I try to stress is when my team and I are all going off and making individual choices that will end up affecting each other, it is worth having at least a meeting or a person responsible for looking at what the totality of those decisions look like.

Me: So, in short, to put this in investment speak, is it fair to say life is a portfolio? And that means we need to think about our choices not just as individual picks, but about how they'll affect our life portfolio?

Erika: Absolutely.

Me: I really like that as a place to end.  Erika, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me.

Erika: Of course. Thank you.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Erika’s work on choice bracketing, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the topic or check out our joint research on the isolated choice effect.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. As usual, I plan to take a break from Milkman Delivers over the summer, but I’ll be back with fresh content before you know it!  And in the meantime, if you’re itching for more behavioral science insights, consider checking out my back catalog.

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change

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