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katymilkman.bsky.social
👩‍🏫 Professor at Wharton 📖 Author of the WSJ Bestseller #HowToChange 🎧 Host of Charles Schwab’s #Choiceology podcast 📰 Author of the Milkman Delivers newsletter @ http://katymilkman.substack.com 🌎 Website: www.katymilkman.com
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Celebrating the 4th birthday of How to Change today. Can’t quite believe it’s been in the world for 4 years! I’m grateful to the amazing community of readers around the world that has embraced this book. Wishing you all many fresh starts! a.co/d/bY54C3e

Have you ever bought insurance for a cheap trip or an extended warranty on a gadget you could easily afford to replace? It could be because you worry too much about unlikely events. @uclaanderson.bsky.social Prof. Craig Fox explains the behavioral science: open.substack.com/pub/katymilk...

🚨On 4/30 at 12 pm I'm co-hosting a 1 hour ZOOM seminar YOU CAN ATTEND🚨 featuring one of the academics I admire most: @harvard.edu economist, Raj Chetty 🤩 Join me and Kevin Volpp to learn about Raj's latest research on inequality and ask Q's. Sign up: tinyurl.com/chetty430

What's the headwinds-tailwinds asymmetry? Cornell Prof. Tom Gilovich explains this bias in our perception of the fraction of our experiences shaped by obstacles and hardship versus fair winds and good fortune on a new #Choiceology episode. 🎧Listen here: www.schwab.com/learn/story/...

We hope you can join us & @pennchibe.bsky.social for a virtual keynote presentation from Harvard Professor Raj Chetty about behavioral science & health. Our Co-Director @katymilkman.bsky.social will co-host with Kevin Volpp on 4/30 at 12 PM ET. Register here: bit.ly/4jKABH5

Congratulations to the fabulous CMU Prof. Rosalind Chow on the publication of her important book, THE DOORS YOU CAN OPEN: A New Way to Network, Build Trust, and Use Your Influence to Create a More Inclusive Workplace 👉 a.co/d/9O1Lgwd

If you're interested in behavioral science and policy, the annual @bescipol.bsky.social conference is not to be missed. Hear from Nicholas Kristof, Dean Karlan, Kevin Volpp, and many more about cutting edge applied research. Register at bit.ly/4iWXKoY

Today on the Love Letters podcast, through a great conversation about everything from friendships to #Twilight, professor @katymilkman.bsky.social gives @meredithgoldstein.bsky.social an honest take on what we can expect from ourselves and how we can help others evolve. 🎧: link.chtbl.com/zLLpSgsm

Naive realism can lead to brutal disagreements as well as errors in judgment, and it's the topic of a new episode of the #Choiceology podcast out today featuring an interview w/ @harvard.edu Prof. @juliaminson.bsky.social. Learn more by listening at: tinyurl.com/naive-realism

Love this combination of matching incentives and symbolic rewards for tipping $1,000 at the Secret Stash pizzeria in Crested Butte, CO. Excellent use of gamification spotted while traveling‬⁩.

🚨New paper alert!🚨 Women are less likely to enter competitions than men—even when equally qualified. But telling them this can change behavior. 📈 In a field experiment on a job application platform, we found that highlighting this gender gap increased the # of job apps women submitted by ~20%.

🚨New Paper Alert🚨 In a megastudy w/ 140k U.S. teachers on Zearn we tested 15 email campaigns nudging teachers to help their elementary school students progress in math. Our emails boosted math progress slightly (by 1.9%). Personalization added value. Led by A Duckworth. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

What’s the difference between tight and loose cultures and why does it matter? A Q&A with the fabulously insightful Michele Gelfand 👇🏻 open.substack.com/pub/katymilk...

What's quantification fixation? Your tendency to place more emphasis on a choice attribute (say, a restaurant's review) when it's in numeric form than in words or ⭐️'s. In the 1st episode of a new season of the #Choiceology podcast, @iamlindachang.bsky.social explains. www.schwab.com/learn/story/...

More high-quality evidence that the world is not blind to race... absent intervention, there is not equality of opportunity. academic.oup.com/qje/article-...

Today I'm filled with admiration for my university's president, Chris Eisgruber. He's standing up for Columbia and for universities as a home for freedom of ideas, debate, and thought - free of government attack. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Nature walks are one of the best ways to boost your spirits. Today, I followed the science and spotted some early blooms (my 9 year old taught me that these are snow lilies).

Happy Pi Day! In honor of this nerdy occasion, Callie Rosenzweig (a terrific Wharton Research Coordinator) brought Pi cookies to our @bcfginitiative.bsky.social team meeting. Wishing you a great day of celebrating the incredible contributions STEM research has made to our society.

Dear @nytimes.com, I’ll admit I was unusually goal-directed when I logged on this morning, scrolled past your top headlines, and clicked on your Oscars recap. But calling me a robot + blocking me bc I browsed and clicked “much faster than is typical of a human being” is 😳

I now have a streak of publishing research on streaks and how they can be a source of motivation with Alix Barasch, plus @katiemehr.bsky.social @katymilkman.bsky.social and Marissa Sharif! Here we look at the positive effects of streaky incentives 💲💲💲 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Event Announcement: We’re co-hosting the keynote of @pennchibe.bsky.social's Virtual Research Seminar Series featuring Yale Professor & BCFG Team Scientist @nachristakis.bsky.social. Our Co-Director @katymilkman.bsky.social will facilitate his talk on 3/26 at 12 PM ET. Register here: bit.ly/4hz4UQ2

Today, the world lost Gene Hackman, who will be remembered for many legacies. But by behavioral economists, he will be best remembered for explaining mental accounting in this clip with Dustin Hoffman. What is mental accounting? A 🧵 www.youtube.com/watch?v=t96L...

Ever heard the expression "don't shoot the messenger"? It's a warning about letting your current feelings spill over to poison attributions of the blameless. Spillovers like this are quite common, as explained in a Q&A with Prof. @kareemhaggag.bsky.social: open.substack.com/pub/katymilk...

🚨NEW PAPER ALERT🚨 6 experiments (N = 4,504) led by @katiemehr.bsky.social show workers accomplish more when their compensation encourages "streaks" of achievement (3 successive accomplishments w/o a break) than when offered higher flat-rate rewards per accomplishment. 👉 doi.org/10.1016/j.ob...

Observation from my long weekend with family: “who wants brownies” yields far fewer (and less enthusiastic) takers than “who wants the last brownie.” #scarcity Good thing it was a framing trick and there were enough brownies for everyone!

So I'm a big fan of Claude, and anyone can goof up, but this did make me laugh.

The measles outbreak in Texas is reminding me of the public letter Roald Dahl wrote about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, just before the vaccine was publicly available.

Congratulations to @UTAustin Prof. @andrewbrodsky.bsky.social on the publication of his terrific new book PING: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication. Goodness know we all need those secrets in the modern era! 📖 a.co/d/hhZZxKM

Two flying facial hair ads in the first half of the Super Bowl is too many 🥸

At a panel discussion celebrating @cfcamerer.bsky.social ’s achievements, Tom Palfrey, @katymilkman.bsky.social , @rthaler.bsky.social ky.social, and Ernst Fehr shared their perspectives on the future of the field.

Executive wants to frame the NIH indirects cut as $4B in savings. But given that NIH returns $2.5 on every $1 investment, this would actually cost US economy a net $6 BILLION (per year!). Not to mention the human costs of wrecking education and research sectors and the communities they serve.

The implications of this for academia are likely to be catastrophic. If you care about science, pay attention 👇🏻👀

A new working paper with Daniel Banki, @urisohn.bsky.social and Robert Walatka, just submitted to SSRN. The paper is comment on Ryan Oprea's recent AER paper. The paper is processing, but you, my friends, get early entry. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

“A lot of people who have all the resources you could imagine still struggle to stay fit or to save sufficiently.” Katy Milkman of @upenn.edu discusses the psychological obstacles to change on a new episode of Social Science Bites. Listen now: www.socialsciencespace.com/2025/02/katy... 1/2

Data collection during @cfcamerer.bsky.social’s festschrift: #cfcfc

The great Ulrike Malmendier sharing her work on how our lifetime experiences with good (vs bad) stock market conditions shapes our risk-tolerance for buying stocks vs bonds. Credits @cfcamerer.bsky.social with allowing economic agents to not just be imperfect but also shaped by experience. #cfcfc

Mind blown: Ming Hsu just shared a re-analysis of an audit study my coauthors and I ran testing how responsive profs are to students with different names. Mturkers’ ratings of student names’ warmth/competence predict 50% of variance in response rates! #cfcfc

Thanks to Ming Hsu for sharing this excellent (and true) quote in his @cfcamerer.bsky.social celebratory talk #cfcfc

Angela Duckworth and I are very excited to start a magnificent day of celebrating the great @cfcamerer.bsky.social at his @caltech.edu festschrift #cfcfc