Can behavioral science help the government?

Dr. Maya Shankar shares wins from bringing behavioral science to Washington

It has been a tumultuous month (to put it mildly).

While the Q&A I’ve chosen to feature this month is unrelated to the upheaval all around us, it’s with Dr. Maya Shankar, who hosts my favorite podcast on coping with unforeseen change. As you’re confronting change, I highly recommend checking out A Slight Change of Plans, which Apple named the best podcast of the year in 2021 for good reason.

I’ve chosen to spotlight Maya today so you can learn about her terrific work bringing behavioral science to Washington, but also because we could all use her wisdom on coping with unexpected and challenging change right now. I hope you’ll find our Q&A interesting and that it will inspire you to check out her TED talk and podcast.

This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads

• The Problem with One-Off Choices: In this recent Choiceology episode, I interviewed University of Chicago professor Erika Kirgios about a phenomenon called choice bracketing, which leads us to construct more diverse playlists, dinner menus and teams when our selections are made all at once rather than one at a time.

• The New Science of Making Healthy Habits Stick: This Wall Street Journal piece answers your questions about how long it takes to build better diet and exercise routines and offers science-backed strategies to help you craft healthier habits.

• Hidden Potential: My Wharton colleague and co-author Adam Grant has a new book out this month that you won’t want to miss. It shares science that can help you achieve more (and while you’re at it, you might revisit this newsletter Q&A I did with Adam a while back).

• What It’s Like to Be…: Dan Heath (who hosted the first season of Choiceology and is a terrific behavioral science communicator and best-selling author) just launched a new podcast exploring what people do in their jobs, and I recommend it.

Q&A: Behavioral Science Goes to Washington

The Q&A I’m sharing is with Dr. Maya Shankar, who is the Senior Director of Behavioral Economics at Google (as well as a popular TED Talker, and award-winning podcast host). It focuses on Maya’s work to bring behavioral science insights into the Federal Government. After reading Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s outstanding book Nudge (which many of you know changed my career trajectory), Maya decided that the United States needed a “nudge unit” mirroring the U.K.’s venture designed to bring insights from behavioral science to government. Maya successfully led the creation of just such a team in the White House roughly a decade ago, and I have been a fangirl (and friend) of Maya’s ever since she lent her energy to this important task. I hope you’ll enjoy the conversation below.

Me: Maya, I’d love to hear how you ended up building a nudge unit in the White House.

Maya: Long story short, I was a postdoc studying decision-making and human biases and reading the book Nudge. My brain just lit up when I started to understand that wow, there are so many powerful applications of the research I'm reading about and conducting.

I was talking to a mutual friend of ours, Laurie Santos, who shared with me how the federal government was using insights from behavioral economics to help more low-income kids get access to free or reduced-price lunches at school. Cass Sunstein, a coauthor of the book Nudge, was leading the way for this effort. And incredibly, as a result of a small policy change that used the power of default, 12 and a half million more kids were now getting access to lunch every day at school.

It was such an elegant and emotionally stirring example illustrating how removing what we might perceive as a small friction could have these totally out-sized and wonderful impacts on society.

That led me to send a cold email to Cass and ask him if there might be an opportunity for me to work in the federal government. Fortunately for me, he's willing to write back to total strangers.

Cass connected me to officials in the science and technology policy office, and within a few days I was interviewing and pitching them on the idea of bringing in a behavioral scientist. Namely me.

Me: The work you did at the White House is so exciting and important. Could you describe a favorite project that produced measurable benefits for Americans?

Maya: One of my favorite studies was with the department of veterans’ affairs. We were offering educational and employment benefits to veterans to help facilitate their transition from military life to civilian life. And that can be a very fraught transition, loaded with lots of psychological stress and just trying to figure out what comes next. What jobs do I want? Do I want to pursue higher education? The government does a great job of making sure that we give folks a stepping stone. The problem, and this is obviously a very classic problem, which is what the nudge space is designed to help solve, is that there was an intention-action gap.

So, lots of veterans wanted to apply, but hadn't taken the step and some veterans weren't aware of the value of the program. We had to up our marketing efforts, but we had a very small budget. The VA told us — I think at the time it was me and two other people — “can you please try to figure out some innovative ways, given our fixed budget, of using behavioral science to boost participation rates in the program?” We ended up changing just one word in the email that went out to veterans.

Instead of telling vets that they were eligible for the program, we reminded them that they had earned it through their years of service. And that one-word change led to a 9% increase in access to the program. The change was based on a behavioral science principle called the endowment effect, which says that we value things more when we own them or in this case have earned them.

We found that once veterans embodied this mindset of “this is my benefit to lose,” they were much more interested in taking the relevant steps to access the program. And so that was a wonderful proof of concept, case study of sorts, where we were able to show that the government was not only able to adopt fresh insights from behavioral science, but also to empirically validate those insights and make sure that it was in fact having the intended effect on vets.

Me:  I love that example. If you have a second favorite project, please tell me about that one too.

Maya: I would say another project I really loved when I was working in the White House was in collaboration with the Department of Defense. They were trying to boost participation rates in retirement savings plans for military service members. Our dream policy change at that time would have been to automatically enroll service members into the plan because we know that's a tried and tested technique. But automatic enrollment was not on the table. We had to introduce a bit of a stepping stone. So, we used an active choice intervention. Instead of automatically enrolling people, we made the choice salient at a moment in time when we knew service members were making a bunch of other decisions, which was when they were transferring from one military base to another. Transfer is accompanied by alcohol and drug counseling, planning for the future, filling out lots of forms, compensation changes, and what have you. So, they're already in this change mindset.

So we introduced into that orientation process an application for the retirement savings plan, as well as a presentation where vets could learn more about the plan and whether it was a good fit for them. Introducing this active choice led to a 4.2 percentage point boost in enrollment in the retirement savings plan.

That just shows how powerful it can be to simply ask people to make a choice when the context inspires people to make a choice. Certainly, service members who didn't want to apply weren't going to. We'll rarely move people who don't actually want to take that step.

But for those who were delaying enrollment — you know, they were procrastinating or weren't quite sure what their options were — it was this nice clarifying moment when they could actually act on their intentions.

Me: Thank you for all the work you did. It is so exciting as a researcher to see how in the last 10 years we've gone from a world where there were one or two nudge units to one where now there are hundreds and hundreds.

Maya: Well, it's so energizing and so exciting to see how many of these nudge units are sprouting up in city, state, and local governments all over the world.

The wonderful thing about nudges is that they just make so much damn sense, right? They're low cost. They can be easy to implement.

Me: I couldn’t agree more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Maya’s work setting up a Nudge Unit in the White House, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the topic. And be sure to check out her podcast and TED talk.

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