YouSaid · the spoken record

Katy Milkman

lines on the record: 65
first: 2021-12-27
most recent: 2021-12-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This is funny because I study decisions. I would say it's that most things matter a lot less than you think they do in that moment, right? So this is like a focusing illusion, an error that we make where that exam, that tennis match, that presentation, that book launch, it feels like the end of the world if everything doesn't go perfectly. And I have slowly learned a bit more perspective that those aren't the things that truly matter. There are a few big decisions in life you want to get right, like your spouse and probably your career. So there are a few big things, but a lot of the things that loom large and that feel so important really don't matter that much. And even these things, you know, the little things that accumulate is what I study. Relax a little bit and let go, they'll be okay.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably that. You want to do unto others as you'd have them do unto you, right? And I think we've all learned that from our parents, but it was very sticky for my parents. They really emphasized the importance of treating other people well. I don't think I always live up to it. Certainly, I'm sure someone out there could complain, really, Katie, you really think you do unto others is you'd have them do unto you. But I do think that's maybe the most important life lesson I've ever learned. And I try to live up to it.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Loved all those things. I didn't like that someone else was in charge of what I was thinking about all day. I did not like not being in control of my schedule and my time. And I wanted to own my thoughts. And so that's what drove me towards academia. So I found this blend where I could have the fast-paced, high impact in a business school environment where I'm working with big organizations doing studies that would maybe change the way they manage and execute their business and surrounded by really brilliant people, but I got to wake up in the morning and define what were the questions I asked.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest mistake I've made this is going to be funny for this group. I spent a summer as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs in college thinking maybe that's the career I wanted to have and I guess the biggest mistake was that is not the career that I was destined to have. It was the wrong fit for me. I actually I think I was pretty good at it. You know, I got the offer at the end of the summer and I could have seen a future and there were many things I liked about investment banking. But it was a mistake in that it wasn't what I am best suited to. I love my career as a researcher. I could have spent that summer and that time exploring science. And so the big thing I learned from it was what I care about in a career and what wasn't a fit for me, the things I loved were that it was fast-paced, it felt high impact. I was around really smart people. I loved those things, right? The deals I was working on ended up in the Wall Street Journal. That was cool. I felt like I was at the top of the world. And there were lots of resources.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My dissertation advisor, Max Bazerman, he's a professor at Harvard Business School and a brilliant scholar of behavioral science and negotiations. And I think the second would probably be Richard Thaler, who wrote the book Nudge and also won a Nobel Prize in Economics, and his thinking about the way we can create change, every environment is shaping our decisions and that we can use nudges and tools of choice architecture by reshaping environments, reshaping choice contexts, we can help people change for the better. That's completely shaped my worldview, and then he's also been a supportive mentor.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't love it when other people are inconsiderate about time, so that's probably my biggest pet peeve. I probably should be a little bit more generous because lots of people don't know what different careers are like or how crazy life can be, but it irritates me when other people waste time given how precious that resource is.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was going to say exercise, which probably is, but that's a little boring in addition to the hiking answer right after it. But just toothbrushing qualify, that's a really important. I really care about my dental hygiene”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love exercise, as you probably gathered a little bit earlier. I was an avid tennis player when I was young. I played Division I tennis and it's part of me, that need for physical exertion and activity. It feels great. And hiking is this wonderful way to get it in, but in an in a beautiful environment without any stress or competition, I love being out of nature and breathing the fresh air and feeling my heart rate increase. And so it's just one of my favorite things to do.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 15 sometimes, you know, like Danny Kahneman's episode is longer. And I had started out not needing to prepare. And then once the podcast format changed, I was like, wow, I really need to write down a set of great questions and have a plan, which is funny. There's a chapter in my book that talks about the importance of planning that I was doing it so poorly. But that was a big change in the formula and the format and a big learning for me is how important that was to making sure the podcast went really well.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I first started doing it, I didn't prepare for interviews, which is sort of embarrassing and pathetic. I don't know why. What was I thinking? The first season was with Dan Heath, who's fantastic. And then he moved on to doing other things. And I got invited to take over. And he's not a scientist. He's a writer. The first season, the science interviews were very short, like three minutes at the end where an expert would sort of elaborate. So when I started going into it, I was insistent that I was going to do the interviews with the scientists. It used to be that like a podcast producer actually did them. They just stuck them at the end. But I was like, these are my friends and my peers. I'm certainly doing this. And I thought, okay, if it's going to be a three-minute snippet where they just explain what the bias is, I don't need to prepare for that. I'll just say like explain hindsight bias. What is it? But what I then realized is that I wanted to know a lot more than just what is the bias. And I wanted to have a conversation. And it slowly evolved to be a much larger portion of the show from three minutes to maybe.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, thank you for giving me the chance to talk about it. Choiceology has been such a fun project for me. I've been hosting this podcast that's sponsored by Charles Schwab for almost three years now. I can't believe that's true. We only put out about twelve episodes a year. We have two short seasons, and each episode is built around a behavioral bias that has been well studied and that can be a barrier for investors to make good decisions. So things like loss aversion or outcome bias, like overweighting the outcome and underweighting the process that leads to that outcome.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slightly more often. They did sort of form a habit around going at that magic time a little bit more often than the group that had had a more flexible schedule. But if they didn't make it at their usual time, they didn't go at all. So it was 7 a.m. or bust, say. Whereas the flexible group, they went ever so slightly less at seven AM than that rigid group, but if they didn't make it at seven, then they'd go at noon. And if they didn't make it at noon, they'd go at five, so they had backup plans and they, instead of forming a if only routine, they'd form a no matter what routine. They'd become more flexible and consistent in their behaviors, and that turned out to be really important to repetition and to durability. So that was a really surprising fighting to me. It went against what I thought I knew about the way habits form because we do know it's important to have sort of some degree of consistency in cue and reward, but what we learned is you can overdo it and that it is important that you be flexible and recognize life.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we got people to make their gym visits so that they were 85% of those gym visits that they made during the course of this program were in the same two-hour interval when we sent them a reminder to go and so on. The other group also told us an ideal time that they like to go to the gym and we reminded them to go at that time, but we encouraged them to mix up their routine more so that sometimes they went at that ideal time and sometimes they went at other times. And this group, about half of their workouts were in that consistent window. So we've got 85% in one group going in a consistent time, 50% in the other. And then the question was, we have two groups. They're going at the same frequency, but in different ways, one is more rigid in their routines, the other is more flexible. Whose patterns will last longer? So the month of encouragement ends, and we look, and we were startled to find that the rigidity was harmful. What we found is that that group, they went ever so slowly.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I thought that sounds right, right? The same time and place every day for this behavior, and that's how we build something that's sticky. So I did this experiment with Google with a collaborator John Bashirs of Harvard Business School and a few other folks who were involved as well, we convinced them to let us run this experiment with about twenty five hundred of their employees to try to help them build lasting exercise habits, and we ran a program for a month, and then the question was how durable would the change in their exercise habits be after that program ended? I've already caveated a lot. A lot of it's going to disappear, but some of it will stick for at least a little while when you try to build habit. Okay, so we tried two different versions of the program. One version was based on this model we had in mind that consistency is key. So we rewarded people and encouraged them to exercise at the same time every day when they went to the gym.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My most surprising finding had to do with habits. And it had to do with a long held belief that well-supported belief based on a lot of correlational data. That if you want to form a habit, the best thing you can do is have an incredibly strict systematic routine.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, what's possible, and so I do think that socially there's a lot of ways that I use these techniques that I hadn't mentioned.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Minutes of meetings into your day, and you can be done that much earlier and have more time for relaxation in the evening, or just get more work done net net. So I started copying and pasting that. And she noticed that there were certain kinds of emails I get over and over again. All professors get, you know, like, can I work in your research lab? Are you taking graduate students? And then I had pre-fab templates that I would cut and paste and literally copy in. And she was like, oh my God, I haven't done that. I rewrite a new email every time. I get this message three times a week. I can't believe it. So, you know, we're just like copying each other. And I realized I should do that more deliberately more often with more people. So I definitely use the emulation method a lot. And I absolutely surround myself with people who I look up to and who I see as sort of just better than I am in general at achieving whatever it is I'm trying to achieve. Those are the kinds of friends I love having the kinds of people I love working with. They stretch me to be better.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my gosh, so many of them. And it makes my life so much better. I mean, it was just part of the reason I wrote the book because I felt like, wow, I actually feel like there is really a lot of accumulated science here that can be helpful to people. One thing I do a lot and is copy and paste. So I mentioned this benefit of emulating other people. My friend Angela Duckworth, who's a brilliant psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, we co-direct a center on behavior change for good. We spend a lot of time working together and one of the things when we first became friends, we both noticed we were doing is we'd see something that the other person was doing that was really smart and useful that we weren't doing and we would just say, oh my gosh, I have to start doing that. Like I noticed she would always when she was walking across campus between meetings, she always had a call scheduled for that time slot. So she was getting work done while she was commuting. And I was like, that is so smart. You get another 30 or 45.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Continuing to do it shouldn't be so hard. For instance, temptation bundling is a joy for me. It hasn't been hard to keep doing that my whole life, to keep linking things I love with workouts.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had this wonderful conversation with a collaborator and friend, Kevin Volpe, who's a medical doctor who studies behavioral economics. And I think he said it really beautifully when he pointed out that when we're treating a patient who comes in and say has diabetes, we don't expect to sort of put them on insulin for a month and then take them off and have them be cured. We know that it's chronic, that they'll need for the rest of their life to use the strategy in that case insulin to solve the problem but we think about behavior change differently somehow we expect to find these solutions where it's sort of one and done. And in reality that is not true. In reality all of these obstacles that I've described their features of human nature and they are chronic. They're with us for our whole lives. It sounds very pessimistic as I say it, but I actually don't have a pessimistic outlook on it at all because I think once you learn these insights and figure out what works for you.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is the most important question. How do we make change last? And if I've spent the last 20 years studying change, I think I'll spend the next 40 years, hopefully. I hope to have a good long life and a good long academic career learning more about this because I think we've only scratched the surface. But I will say for a while when I was doing this work, I had a fantasy that I have since abandoned. And the fantasy was that there was sort of a silver bullet, a solution, a set of techniques or tactics that if we just focused on for a short period of time, that then forever after you could have created change. And I no longer believe that. What I have found in my research and so many other have found too is that it's really about consistency and treating these obstacles as chronic rather than temporary.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“possible that by constructing habits through Q based routines that are repeated in a sort of consistent environment and consistent ways at fairly consistent times, and then where we reward ourselves in some way, each time we enact the behavior, doing that with sort of a burst of energy for as little as a month or two can create a A habit that is sticky enough to last, and that's been written about a lot before The Power of Habit is a great book on this. I think Atomic Habits does a really nice job treating the literature on how habits are formed as well, but it is a potent tool in our arsenal when we face laziness to try to figure out, okay, how do we make it either we make it the path of least resistance either through default or through building a habit deliberately to do this thing that's in our long-term best interest?”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even though it's normally a simple matter of filling out a form or checking a box somewhere to get out of it, we take the path of least resistance. And so that actually means that choosing defaults wisely is a way we can set ourselves up for success in all different paths of life, in all different domains. So that's the first thing about laziness. And that's the easy one. Like when it's a one-time decision and you can set a good default, it's great. The problem is that a lot of things don't lend themselves to defaults. And that's where I think habit becomes really important because a habit is essentially the default mode we're in for repeated behavior. It's what we go to on autopilot without thinking a lot about it. And so there's a big opportunity to leverage laziness to improve our outcomes once we recognize that by being really deliberate about the habits we form. And there is research suggesting that.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of two big buckets for the laziness work that I find interesting. And the first is on the power of defaults, which I think is a really well studied and fairly well-known topic, but it relates to laziness and it's so important, which is that whenever there is an option that will take effect automatically if I don't do anything, it's dramatically more likely that people will follow that path. So if I'm defaulted into saving in a 401k when I sign up with a new employer, if I'm defaulted into being an organ donor by my country's government, but I can easily opt out, if I am defaulted as a doctor into prescribing generic versions of drugs rather than brand name drugs, you see this huge increase at the rate in which I do these things relative to the default is flipped. So these are enormous effects. Some of the biggest effects in behavioral science.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always been curious about laziness as an obstacle and really laziness and inertia in the sense that it's so much easier to do what we're in the habit of already doing. What did the research show in and around laziness?”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More the opportunity to pay us to take their own iPod and lock it in a monitored locker at the gym so they could only access it when they were exercising. So again, paying us for less freedoms and more than 60% of people in our study, a self-selected group, right? These are people looking for ways to exercise more, but more than 60% said that sounds like a great service. Sign me up. My recollection is actually one person offered us $100 and I think we offered her the service. So the median willingness to pay was order of magnitude maybe $7 for a month of locked iPod at the gym. So maybe about what you'd pay for a locker actually. But there does seem to be some appetite for these kinds of constraints.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. There are websites that make money by selling you commitment devices and they're cash commitment devices where you pay the website to take your money, take your credit card information, assign a referee and find out what your goal is and that referee reports to the site on whether or not you've achieved your goal and the site sends your money away to a charity of your choice and they have charities you might hate so they choose contentious charities on either side like NRA and gun control charities right and you pick your poison and they take a little cut of that and so people pay fees to have these websites take money away from them if they fail to achieve their goals so i'd say that's sort of one way of paying in a sense for it's not exactly for less liquidity but it's paying to be fined in the work i did actually about temptation bundling we offered people who wanted to exercise”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a great corollary of that in our world with locked up funds. You think about private equity funds and venture capital funds. If the benefit is so large, even though you're tying your own hands, are there situations where people are willing to For that benefit, you can imagine a situation where even though I could say, well, I'm restricting my options, that should be worse for me to be in this locked account. If I do it, I'm going to have so much more money that I should be willing to pay something for it. And I'm kind of getting at, is there a corollary with higher fees in certain structures that people generally tend to want liquidity, they tend to want their money, they tend to want to pay less. What have you seen in terms of the costs of that lockup?”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Took it. And if you look at the two groups, the one that was offered the accountant and the one that wasn't, regardless of whether people use the account, they saved 80% more. So those 30% who Said, yeah, I'm going to put some money in the account. They saved so much more that 100% if you look at 100% of the people, there's an 80% increase in savings. So this is a really powerful tool, finding ways to bind our hands is the story of Ulysses in the Odyssey, right? Odysseus or Ulysses, whichever you prefer to call him, the story of binding his hands to the mast, the original story of a commitment device to avoid the temptation of shipwreck on an island occupied by sirens who sing sweet songs to lure sailors closer by where they'll inevitably die amid the rocks. It's a really powerful solution, but one that people tend to underuse and underappreciate.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But a festival, a birthday comes up, and the money comes right back out. And the experiment that I find so interesting about commitment devices, about procrastinating to actually build that nest egg, said, what if we basically make it impossible for you to take money out of your account? What if we offer you a locked account where you can put money in but you can't take money out until you've reached a predetermined savings goal or a predetermined date? And of course there was a lot of skepticism. Well, anyone wants such an account so that this experiment was run where half of the customers in the population were just offered a standard savings account with a standard interest rate and the other half were also offered that standard account or this commitment account which had exactly the same interest rate as the standard account but these restrictions on access to your funds. An economist would say no one should want that. It's a worse account, but actually about 30% of people offered this account.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not procrastinate, and we're very used to that. Speed limits help us make the right choice in a situation where our impulses would lead us astray. We're used to being fined for bad behavior or having rules imposed on us by other people, but we're not so used to imposing them on ourselves. And the best scientifically proven solution I've seen for procrastination and for a lot of willpower problems is actually constraining ourselves using what economists call commitment devices or tools that prevent us from making decisions from procrastinating, from making choices that will be bad in the long run and impose some sort of penalty on us, in fact, if we do. So my favorite example of this is a study of people who are customers at Green Bank, which is a bank in the Philippines. And the challenge there was that lots of people had leaky savings. They wanted to save more.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, procrastination is such an interesting barrier to change and it relates closely to impulsivity. It's sort of like what happens due to impulsivity is that we put things off that we should be doing because I can always get to it tomorrow, but today I have something that's more instantly gratifying. What I think is really interesting about procrastination is that the best solution seems to be a solution that we're really used to having other people impose on us but uncomfortable imposing on ourselves. So let me explain what I mean by that. It's common for the world or I'll say policy makers, teachers, parents to set up rules and regulations and systems that help us avoid procrastinating or making impulsive decisions. So things like deadlines in school for your assignments instead of everything you have to do for a class all being due at the end of the semester at the same time help us.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you detect when it will be one or the other? Like, how do you know? And probably, I feel like if I were a mathematician, right now I would try to write a model of what fraction of other people need to have already taken this action before it ceases to be advisable for you to follow and you could sort of imagine trying to figure out the moment when it tips and you wouldn't want to be conforming because now in a zero-sum game you're actually losing out but i guess like short of having the precise answer i think the best answer is the faster you jump on the bandwagon the better and if you feel that you're late maybe it's not actually going to be useful to do it at all in a zero-sum context”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such a great question. It's so interesting. It certainly seems like in that context, right, you're going to get benefits if you're a fast mover on conformity, right? If you follow the herd quickly enough. But you're right that if you wait too long and you conform slowly, then there's likely to be little benefit left and perhaps, you know, you'll even get stuck holding the stock that was a bubble, right? And you bought it at the high. Oops. I'm just thinking about GameStop. So it's a challenge for sure. And I think this is a really interesting thing about conformity is that just like fresh starts, there's pros and cons. It's like a double-edged sword. And that's really the way I write about it in the book as it can be an asset if you harness it correctly, but it also can be a barrier. It's hard to know what to say in terms of”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Watching this roommate, you ended up with who's so talented, hit the books, and see, oh, they don't go out to parties on Wednesday nights. And that seems to turn out well for them. It can be that you realize, oh, I can emulate that. One of the things that I've studied that I find really interesting, though, is that people don't always pick up as much as they could from the people who surround them to get better at doing whatever it is they want to do. So we did this study where we encouraged some people to deliberately copy and paste a strategy that was working for someone who had a similar goal. And that actually improved outcomes for these people. So it suggests that while we just naturally, maybe through osmosis or observation, we see plenty of things rubbing off from the people around us. There's an opportunity to do even more and use conformity actually to be an asset by being really conscious of”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conformity is so interesting, and one of my favorite studies that illustrates this, which I talk about in the book, was done by UCSD economist Scott Carell. And he was interested in what the effect is of the roommate you're randomly assigned to live with, your freshman year in college. And he actually got data from his alma mater, the Air Force Academy, to see whether or not the roommate you're randomly assigned changes your grades. And he found that your roommate assignment does matter for your own performance, that being assigned a roommate who did better on the verbal SATs lifts you up and assigned to a roommate who did worse, pushes you down. So that advice you got from your parents growing up to hang out with the right crowd, it does matter.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give advice in two areas math, which was one of the areas we originally said we'd look at and also in the class they told us they most wanted to improve in. And we didn't turn C students into valedictorians, but what we'd done was move them up about one point on a 50 to 100 scale, and it was significant with 10 minutes of just asking them to be a mentor or a coach. So I think the insight at the heart of this is when we give advice to others, when we are put in the position of mentors, it has all sorts of benefits, including boosting our confidence. And this is, I think there's a reason that programs like Alcoholics Anonymous not only give you a sponsor, but turn you into a sponsor when trying to help you stay sober. Because by being in that role model mode, you actually benefit immensely. That's just one insight. There are others, but I think that's my favorite.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm telling you, I believe in you. You're so great that I want you coaching someone else. But she thought that would work in Coordination with a couple other things. One is it might lead people to introspect a bit more about what could work for them as they're trying to dredge up insights about what advice to offer. And then it would feel hypocritical to coach someone to behave in a certain way and not behave that way yourself. So she's run a number of random assignment trials and one of them we ran together looking at this. My favorite one was a study with high school students about 2,000 of them where we randomly assigned half of the students to give advice to their peers at the beginning of the second semester on how to be more effective in their study strategies. So we said we want you to give some coaching to younger peers who are below you in school. How do you think they can study more effectively? And they spent about 10 minutes answering questionnaires to give advice. And then we had a control group that didn't go through this exercise. And we looked at the students' grades at the end of the third quarter and we found that the students had significantly improved their grades who had been prompted.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She felt that one of the big barriers though was they lacked confidence in their abilities, and this seemed like it was a big blockade. She noticed that over and over again they were being given advice when someone heard that they were struggling, someone sort of put their arm around them and give them a bunch of advice. Here's my tips on how to get better. That was actually really quite discouraging to have everyone you meet doling out their two cents as if you had no insight into your own condition and how to get better. And she wondered, what if we flipped the script, if confidence is actually part of the problem, what if instead of putting our arm around someone's shoulder and coaching them, we actually asked them to coach someone else? What if we asked people who weren't achieving as much as they'd like to for advice on how to get better on achieving their own goal and to give it to someone else? And she thought a few things might happen here. One is it might boost your confidence. That was sort of the biggest thing, right? It puts you on a pedestal, you're a role model now.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my favorite insight in the chapter comes from research that was done by Lauren Eskris Winkler, who's about to be a new professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. And she had this really brilliant insight when she was studying people and trying to figure out what separated high achievers from low achievers and doing all these interviews. And what she was really startled to discover was that even low achievers had a lot of great insights about how to be more successful. So salespeople who were struggling, students who were struggling, they weren't quite as clueless as she had envisioned”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same. This is not okay. And so you're more likely to hire diverse groups when you hire in sets than in singletons. When I focus on the barrier of self-efficacy or self-confidence, it's more thinking about how can we equip the individual who wants to achieve more and has been facing feedback that makes them under confident or a world that makes them underconfident, what can be done to address that specific issue.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's really different answers for the organization that wants to hire a more diverse workforce and for the individual who is trying to pursue their own goals and is facing a world where they are hearing negative stereotypes and need to step up to the plate in spite of all the negative feedback that they might get. I'll tell you one study. We found that if you hire in sets, like you hire five people at a time instead of one person at a time, people choose to hire more diverse groups because diversity is not a property of an individual, but it is of a group. And if you value diversity, even if you're trying hard to take it into account and you want to work towards a more diverse goal, when you're hiring singletons one at a time, you may one at a time hire people who all look the same. When you hire five people, it jumps out at you that wow, they all look.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what are the mechanisms that you'd want to put in place? You could take that as an example of, say, people are interested in making sure they have a more diverse workforce. How do you go about getting past that confidence obstacle?”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he was right. I tried to walk the line and said, Yes, I agree. People are generally overconfident that's bad. However, this book is about what are the things we can do when we see a barrier. And one barrier is sometimes people just don't believe they have what it takes. And so they won't put in the effort. They won't lean in. And I have to note, I just said lean in. I wasn't really meaning to harkage that. But maybe it was. Confidence tends to be a bigger issue for those subpopulations. And so I think it was particularly important to me. I've sometimes studied bias when I'm not studying behavior change. It was important to me to have something in the book that I also felt would particularly benefit those groups.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's funny. And I have to say, by the way, that it was a little bizarre as a behavioral scientist to write a chapter about boosting confidence because we spend a lot of our time, one of the things I teach all my Wharton students is we're all overconfident. We all think we're above average and it's really harmful. And so it is peculiar to be focused on it. But of course, while it's harmful to be overconfident in many contexts, if you're trying to pursue goals and you don't believe you can, you don't get as far. And in fact, overconfidence while I would never prescribe it, but it does have some advantages for goal pursuit. And you can see why it might even be that we ended up with that trait in the first place that it might get you up in the morning. So it was funny to write this chapter and it was funny actually the first piece of email I got complaining about my book was from a scientist friend who studies overconfidence who was like, are you sure you should have had a chapter that was telling people to be more overconfident?”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the ugly part is if you were doing really well, you were an above average performer and you get traded across leagues and have to start from scratch, now you get a bump down. So it's harmful because you lose that traction, you lose that momentum. And so there's other ways that this has been looked at as well, but I just love that illustration. And it does highlight that we have to be really conscious when things are going well of what may disrupt us, whether it's a vacation, a reset in the way our performance is being tracked at work because we have monthly sales records, for instance, whatever it is that could disrupt our flow and our success, that can be harmful. And if we can plan for it and try to figure out how to avoid the disruption that may be beneficial.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leagues in the middle of the season and compared what happened to those players depending on whether they'd been performing really well earlier in the season or really poorly. And the reason she compared players who were treated across versus within leagues is one gets more of a fresh start than the other with that change. When you're traded within league, your season to date statistics just keep on trucking. They keep on tracking. But if you're traded across leagues, you get a fresh start, a clean slate, they wipe that off, and you have to start from zero with your batting average and so on. So a bigger, fresh start. And what she found is that for people who were traded across leagues and are getting this bigger fresh start compared to people traded within leagues, there was a bigger boost if you'd had a rough season in terms of performance. So you get a little benefit from the fresh start either way. It might just be regression to the mean, but where you can see something real is it's a bigger effect when you're traded across leagues with this fresh.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I love that you asked that because there's this ugly underbelly of the fresh star effect, as we call it, which is that disruption is good when things are not going well. Disruption is good when you have a new goal you need to get motivated to start. But when things are going well, disruptions are harmful. And there's this wonderful study that my former student, Heng Shen Dai, who's now a UCLA professor, did as her dissertation project. She and I had done this work I just described on the fresh start effect together, and she wanted to explore whether it might be a double-edged sword. We had a intuition and some early data suggesting that it might be harmful. And it made total sense theoretically, but she wanted to collect real data on it. So she ran some experiments showing this, but my favorite study is one that she ran looking at baseball players. She looked at baseball players who were either traded across leagues in the middle of the season or were traded within.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These dates, and we can use it as a nudge or a lever when we encourage people, for instance, to start saving in a 401k plan who aren't yet saving, and we invite them to begin saving at a future date if we say, do you want to start saving on your birthday or after your next birthday, that turns out to lead to about 30% more savings in the next eight months than inviting someone to start saving at an equal time delay? So if your birthday is in three months, we flip a coin, randomly assign you to either get invited to save after your birthday or in three months. So identical offers, but one calls to mind this fresh start date and that one that calls to mind the fresh start date leads to more savings. So these are all different ways that we've seen we can use time and time markers to create a sense of a new beginning and motivate people to change at those moments.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Old news and the new me can do it. And I'm also more likely to step back and think big picture about my goals at these moments that feel like chapter breaks in life. So what we've found in our research is that New Year's is just one example. There are lots of other dates ranging from the start of a new week or a new month to the celebration of a birthday or even a holiday that's associated with a fresh start can even be something like the start of spring. There are all of these moments that feel like chapter breaks. And of course, you can get to real chapter breaks that aren't just psychological and see even bigger effects like you move to a new home or you end up with a new job, you become a parent, those moments also demarcate time for us and change our motivation. So we've seen this both descriptively when we just analyze data. We see that people set goals more at these dates. They go to the gym more frequently around these fresh start dates. They're more likely to search for the term diet on Google around.”
2021-12-27 · Capital Allocators · #3: Katy Milkman – How to Change, EP..199 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source