Behavioral Grooves Podcast

Gary Latham, PhD is the Secretary of State Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the Rotman School of Management in the University of Toronto. His research in the field of organizational psychology has yielded over 200 peer-reviewed publications and he has written several books on the topic of goal setting. He and his lifelong research partner, Ed Locke PhD, are responsible for Goal Setting Theory, prized by both the scientific community and sales leaders around the world. He is the only recipient of both the Distinguished Contributions to Science award and the Practice award from SIOP. Top it off, he is only the second researcher we’ve talked to on Behavioral Grooves that was cited in Kurt’s dissertation. In our discussion with Professor Latham, we reviewed Goal Setting Theory, specific goals, participatory goals and talked about the relative importance of inductive and deductive reasoning. More importantly, we covered some of our favorite research on priming and were able to have a discussion about Kurt’

Mariel Beasley is the Co-Director of the Common Cents Lab at the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University. She works on applications of behavioral research, primarily in the financial services sector and public policy arena. She holds a Master of Public Policy degree from Duke University and her previous work experience includes a variety of nonprofits and charitable foundations.   As the leader of Common Cents Lab, she often develops partnerships with financial institutions to put behavioral science to good use through improving products, services and experiences for low-to-moderate households.  We talked to Mariel about their work with low-to-middle-income households and the way the crisis is impacting them in ways that are not making headlines. Specifically, short-term savings rates are changing because so many households were caught flat-footed by mass layoffs, furloughs, and pay reductions. We also talked about how behavioral science helps us all to see problems better and gives us the tools to m

Samuel Salzer is a leading behavioral strategist and habit expert, having worked with organizations across Europe, Australia, and North America. Among other things, he’s one of the first Chief Behavioral Officer's (CBO) in tech, applying insights from behavioral science and behavioral economics to build user-centered and habit-forming products and services.  At the forefront of the emerging field of Behavioral Design, Samuel is a frequent keynote speaker, curates the popular newsletter Habit Weekly, and has co-authored “Nudging in Practice - Helping organizations make it easy to do the right thing.”  The book offers a comprehensive guide to organizations interested in understanding and systematically utilizing behavioral insights. In our conversation with Samuel, we discussed streaks, those things that happen when we do something consistently over a long-period of time. They provide ongoing motivation to do the behavior which can help it become automatic.  However, they can also feel daunting. We also talked

Kaveh Yazdifard is the Chief Innovation Officer at Sahab Pardaz located in Tehran, Iran. He is also the Director of Urban Innovation for the city and COO of Avatech Accelerator, a firm focused on empowering business startups through a values-driven culture.  While much of Kaveh’s work is focused on collaborating and creating value through Innovation, we were particularly interested in speaking with him about the way he applies Cognitive Psychology and Data Science to his work.  And at this writing, Kaveh and his teams are developing initiatives in Iran to help individuals and businesses survive the uncertainty and ambiguity of the crisis. And we found this particularly interesting. Of all of the business ideas that were exchanged, we landed on a particularly provocative comment: Happiness is overrated. During this time, it caused us to stop and ponder a bit. Maybe you will, too. Links Connect with Kurt and Tim:  Kurt Nelson, PhD: @WhatMotivates  e-mail: kurt@lanterngroup.com  Tim Houlihan: @THoulihan  e-mail:

Gretchen Chapman, PhD researches how we make decisions about vaccines. She is a Professor in the Social & Decision Sciences department at Carnegie Mellon University and works across disciplines in both fields of judgment and decision making as well as health psychology. She is the recipient of an APA early career award and an NJ Psychological Association Distinguished Research Award, a fellow of APA and APS.  She is a former senior editor at Psychological Science, a past president of the Society for Judgment & Decision Making, the author of more than 100 journal articles, and the recipient of 20 years of continuous external funding. Our discussion covered a great deal of her work based on laboratory and field experiments, where she has tested behavioral interventions, simultaneously exploring the theoretical mechanisms of decision making and also yielding policy insights into methods for improving health behavior and health outcomes. We talked about vaccination rates on influenza (between 33% to 50% o

Jules Nolan, PhD is a psychologist, speaker, and author. She is the president of the Minnesota School Psychology Association and chairwoman for the Human Diversity Committee for the International School Psychology Association.  Her research, which has been conducted and published internationally, focuses on behavior, achievement, and wellbeing for school-aged children. She consults with parents and educators on how to manage family life and classrooms to help all children thrive.   We talked to Jules to get her thoughts into how she assists families with the unfamiliar experience of being together constantly. Jules delivered insightful comments, terrific research references, and relevant tips on what real families can do at this time.   If you’re a parent, you’ll benefit from her real-world directives; and if you’re a teacher, you’re likely to pick up some tips that could make your own virtual work a little less stressful.  © 2020 Behavioral Grooves Connect with Kurt and Tim:  Kurt Nelson, PhD: @WhatMotivates

Our inspiration this week comes from an article written by Shayla Love for Vice titled, “You’ll probably forget what it was like to live through a pandemic.” We thought it would make a great jumping-off point for how we will remember this time as well as a discussion on memory in general.  We explore how memories get shaped during historically significant times and how vividness and emotion play into those memories. But, as Shayla notes, we don’t remember things all that accurately. She points out that our specific memory of this time, even with all it’s heightened emotions and significance, will become, as she says, “a blur.”  She goes on to say, “Those on the frontlines, like healthcare workers, will remember it differently. They'll witness the toll on human life firsthand and emotions like grief, fear, and anxiety will heighten their memories….[but] For those whose lives remain unscathed, who have the privilege of waiting out the weeks without much daily variety, this stretched out "historical event" isn't

Greg Davies, PhD is a specialist in applied behavioral finance, decision science, impact investing, and financial wellbeing. He founded the banking world’s first behavioral finance team at Barclays in 2006, which he led for a decade. In 2017 he joined Oxford Risk to lead the development of behavioral decision support software to help people make the best possible financial decisions. Greg holds a PhD in Behavioural Decision Theory from Cambridge; he has held academic affiliations at UCL, Imperial College, and Oxford; and is author of Behavioral Investment Management. Greg is also Chair of Sound and Music, the UK’s national charity for new music, and the creator of Open Outcry, a ‘reality opera’ premiered in London in 2012, creating live performance from a functioning trading floor. We invited Greg to have a conversation about COVID-19 because of his very academic view of how our financial decisions are made in the real world. We found his insights to be invaluable as we discussed the importance of using NOW a

Iris Tzafrir is an inspirational and influential cross-functional leader in strategy and business development, deal making, value actualization, and merger integration. She grew up in a Kibbutz in the Negev Desert of Israel, the daughter of 2 Holocaust survivors, and emigrated to the US for graduate school where she studied virology. She loves to learn and is committed to making the world a better place. We asked her to join us to discuss her insights on anti-racism, recognition of the other, and the importance of working together in teams (a key element of this is inclusion). Iris is, in our opinion, an accidental behavioral scientist. She’s not trained in the terminology or interventions of behavioral science, yet it’s evident that she possesses great skills in framing and messaging. We found her journey from telling her parent’s Holocaust story to telling her own story an important example of applied behavioral science. This episode is not so much about her life as the daughter of 2 Holocaust survivors as

Anurag Vaish is the co-founder and director of The FinalMile in Mumbai, India. In building the company's practice of Behavior Architecture, Anurag led the conceptualization and development of digital games as a platform for research. Anurag brings over 17 years of experience in strategic planning, research and marketing communication. Our conversation with him allowed him to highlight some of the work FinalMile is doing with the Indian government. More importantly, Anurag and his team are building a Pandemic Playbook (link below) which is an archive of data points, interventions, communication, trends in activities and observations and it will be available for the world and for future crises. One of his greatest observations is that because we experience risk as a feeling, not a set of numbers, many world leaders are missing an opportunity to improve the effectiveness of their communication. He’s also looking at how self (distance) learning could be carried on after the virus.  © 2020 Behavioral Grooves Links

Artem Petakov is a co-Founder of Noom, a behavioral change and weight loss product that marries both psychology and AI to help people form more healthy behaviors and lose weight. You’re probably seeing Noom everywhere these days – on television, social media, YouTube – and with high frequency. The media exposure is generating terrific growth for the company and we wanted to talk to Artem about how Noom applies behavioral science to the core of their offering.  Our conversation with Artem was ripe with terrific insights. We discussed behavioral science facets in the app, how Noom grew and changed over time, how the company experiments with interventions, and how the organization has adapted and innovated along their journey. We discussed Artem’s experience of being inspired by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and the Heath brothers' concept of Maslow’s Basement. We talked a bit about Burning Man Music (highly tech-driven beats) and were left wanting more.  We think you will be, too.  © 2020 Behavioral Grooves  

Michael Boden is the Head of U.S. Crop Protection Sales at Syngenta, a global agrochemicals and seeds firm based in Basel, Switzerland. He joined the company in 1986 and has held global sales and marketing positions throughout his career.  Michael grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, and is currently based in Syngenta’s North American headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina. Michael shared a vivid image of his business: it’s what he calls belly-to-belly relationships his reps and agronomists have with growers (farmers), retailers and distributors. He also shared an insight about the need for corporate redundancy that was refreshing to hear from a business leader, rather than an academic. Also, an interesting part of our grooving session was about Robin Dunbar’s research on the importance of physical touch and proximity and trust. We also asked the question about work-life balance and is it possible that we are redefining, in ways not seen since the industrial revolution, what work-life means. He left us with these

Alessandro del Ponte is a research fellow at the National University of Singapore working in the Behavioral Change program at the Global Asia Institute. He recently earned his PhD in behavioral political economy from Stony Brook University in New York. His recent research uses simple video games to understand how people feel about making tradeoffs between jobs and paying off national debt, or between saving lives in the national healthcare system or paying off the national debt. We decided to connect with Alessandro because of President Trump’s recent comment: The cure shouldn’t be worse than the problem. Clearly, we have a moral dilemma: open the country to save the economy or kill 10’s of thousands of people with the virus? We hope you enjoy this very philosophical discussion. © 2020 Behavioral Grooves Links Connect with Kurt and Tim: Kurt Nelson, PhD: @WhatMotivates  e-mail: kurt@lanterngroup.com Tim Houlihan: @THoulihan  e-mail: tim@behavioralchemy.com Lantern Group: http://lanterngroup.com/ BehaviorAlch

Stuart King designs evidence-based interventions for children and adults to change their behavior and manage their weight. He has worked with the UK’s NHS as an Obesity Lead, as a Senior Scientist in the Obesity and Healthy Weight Team, and is now the CEO and Head of Distraction at his company, BeeZee Bodies. The firm provides behavior change services across all of England. Our conversation was recorded just after the World Health Organization had declared the coronavirus a pandemic, but before countries like Italy and Spain had ordered more severe lockdown measures. In this dynamic world, it’s important to know that because, as Kurt and Tim like to say, context matters! Stuart’s observations on behavioral science combine his scholarly knowledge of the literature and a very practical approach to applying those principles. We found his ideas about the Whole Systems Approach, growth mindset, and the power of defaults very interesting. We hope you will, too. PS…it’s regrettable when we make mistakes, but it’s on

Cristina Bicchieri, PhD is the S. J. Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics, a Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, a Professor of Legal Studies at the Wharton School, the Head of the Behavioral Ethics Lab, the Director of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program, and is the Faculty Director of the Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research with UNICEF keeps her busy around the world, as well. Our discussion with Cristina offers more than just a few tips (noted below). Cristina’s observations are based on a lifetime of excellent research and writing and we are happy to share them with you. Also, Cristina was our guest on episode 102, where you can help yourself to more insights on social norms and reference networks in that conversation. We also asked Cristina to get out her crystal ball to share her visions of Also, listeners might want to think about these tips for all of the corp

In this grooving episode, Kurt and Tim discuss Temporal Discounting and it’s closely related cousins. Temporal discounting is where we tend to value events in the near term more than similar events that are off in the distance. Another way to say it is that we discount – or reduce – our perceived value of events scheduled far off in the future. (The “timing” element is what gives it the name “temporal.”) This is a very common bias and is closely related to Hyperbolic Discounting, which is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs. (Think of Seinfeld’s Nighttime Guy vs. Morning Guy.) And Temporal Construal, where near-term events are valued in very concrete ways, but distant-term events seem very vague. And, a slightly more distant relative in this family of biases is Preference Reversal. With Preference Reversal, we see how the relative preference for one option over another changes with order or framing, such as when we see it. All of these bia

Aline Holzwarth is the head of Behavioral Science at Pattern Health in Durham, North Carolina and a writer who supplies work to Behavioral Scientist and Forbes and has well as her blog on Medium. And she is also Principal of Dan Ariely’s Center for Advanced Hindsight, where she is responsible for directing the strategy, operations and communications for the Duke University research center. Our conversation with Aline was relaxed and built on the underpinnings of abundance and gratitude. We talked first about some the great tips she offers for handwashing messages and how our behavioral immune systems are excellent when we can see, smell or touch something, but they are compromised when it comes to invisibilia such as a virus. We also discussed the role that music can play in providing buoyancy to our feelings and gave up some excellent tips on what to do with video conferencing. © 2020 Behavioral Grooves   Links Connect with Kurt and Tim: Kurt Nelson, PhD: @WhatMotivates  e-mail: kurt@lanterngroup.com Tim Ho

Brad Shuck, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Evaluation and Organizational Development at the University of Louisville. He is also the Program Director of the Center for Human Resource and Organizational Development. Brad has been researching employee engagement for many years and is a featured speaker at conferences on employee engagement around the world. Talking to Brad was like having a friendly counselor talk you off the ledge while we covered meaningful topics starting with the fact that this is definitely NOT business as usual. His take on intentionality, deliberate action and boundaries was novel and we were intrigued by some new research he’s completing on capacity (for time, energy and resources). We’re grateful for Brad’s insights and calming delivery in a very unsettling time. © 2020 Behavioral Grooves   Links Connect with Kurt and Tim: Kurt Nelson, PhD: @WhatMotivates  e-mail: kurt@lanterngroup.com Tim Houlihan: @THoulihan  e-mail: tim@behavioralchemy.co

Eugen Dimant, PhD is an Associate Professor of Practice in Behavioral and Decision Sciences, which is part of the new Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics under Cristina Bicchieri, Ph.D.’s leadership at the University of Pennsylvania. Much of his work is focused on how social norms are formed and impact our lives. We talked about how social norms drive individual behaviors in different ways and how research on coronavirus-related behaviors is being completed at record speeds – but not necessarily all in good ways. He recommends slowing down, working across disciplines, and being clear on research objectives to insure test methods and data collection conform to the highest standards and deliver the most meaningful results. He also mentioned that sustainable behavior change requires more than nudges and the roles that both descriptive and injunctive norms play (they are described in greater detail in our grooving session after the interview). It’s also important to be reminded that when we see empty

Wendy Wood, PhD is a social psychologist whose research addresses the ways that habits guide behavior. She researches and teaches at USC both in psychology and in the business school and is a world-renowned expert on breaking old habits and creating new ones. Her book, “Good Habits, Bad Habits” is a New York Times bestseller and delivers a terrifically readable and scholarly approach to habits. In our conversation with her, she shared what habits are and how habits get formed. We talked about how now could be a time for more pro-social behavior. And she reminded us to be kind to ourselves as we endeavor through a very challenging set of circumstances. You’re not going to be as productive as you might otherwise be because of all these new routines, she warns, but don’t let that stop you! Be intentional and keep pushing through!  © 2020 Behavioral Grooves Links Connect with Kurt and Tim: Kurt Nelson, PhD: @WhatMotivates  e-mail: kurt@lanterngroup.com Tim Houlihan: @THoulihan  e-mail: tim@behavioralchemy.com La