The Science of Behavior Change with Kristen Berman
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I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and not only am I excited to have you on my journey to find all the hacks, but I am really excited to have you here for today's interview because I get to talk to Kristen Berman, who is a top researcher in the field of behavioral economics. She co-founded Irrational Labs with famed professor Dan Ariely, where they've worked to bring behavioral science to life inside of hundreds of big and small companies.

She also co-founded Common Sense Lab at Duke University. She was a founding team member at Google's Behavioral Science Unit. And she co-authored a series of workbooks called Hacking Human Nature for Good, A Practical Guide to Changing Behavior. Finally, she just launched a new podcast called The Science of Change, where she talks with the leaders at major companies like Peloton and Credit Karma who are actually changing human behavior today.

In our conversation, we discuss what research shows about why people act so irrationally, how we can actually start to change our own behaviors, why she thinks habits are overrated, and hear some of her favorite hacks for increasing happiness, whether it's during vacation or at your next dinner party. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Kristen Berman. Kristen, thanks for being here.

I'm very excited to be here. Yeah. So I have heard you speak a few different times. And I think it's so fascinating how people are completely irrational in many cases, even though a lot of what we've talked about on our show is about doing things the rational way because it makes sense and you can earn more and save more. But you come with a totally different angle. So I'd love you to give some background on yourself and how you got into all of this.

Wonderful. Yeah. So I'm a behavioral scientist, which basically means I study decision making. But more than that, study basically the mistakes that people make in their decisions. And we tend to make a lot of mistakes. And these are for small decisions. They're for big decisions. And...

The reality is even if you know about these mistakes, it's very hard to avoid them. So I may know that social norms influence my behavior, but if everybody else has bought this, you know, one purse or this computer, I may still be influenced to buy it, despite the fact that knowing that I don't want to be influenced by other people. So knowing about these biases and these psychologies aren't as helpful as we think to change our behavior. And so in behavioral science, the question would be is what is?

And that's basically what we study. And the punchline tends to be that the environment of decision-making...

is basically the gold mine here. So I may like M&Ms, but if the M&Ms are close to me, I'll eat more of them. And if the M&Ms are farther from me with a lid on, I'll eat less. So my attitude, preference, and belief for something, these M&Ms in this example, matters much less than the environment that they're in. And when we understand that, it's very fun because you can basically change your environment. You can say, how do I change my environment to change my behavior? And with that comes a whole new toolkit of what you can do to improve your life.

Is it as simple as just changing your environment and boom, that's easy? I now am saving more, eating healthier and exercising. You know, nothing is simple. I think the difference is basically when you're doing it for yourself, you have to make a one-time decision to change your environment. So at some level, your motivation has to be high enough to not buy the chips when you're in the grocery store. And that is going to be easier than buying the chips and trying not to eat them every day.

And so it still takes work, but the work is just different. It comes at one point versus spread out over daily decision making. Obviously, it's easier if a company does it for us. If Facebook would just limit the amount of time that we could spend on it, it'd be easier than us trying to set alerts and notifications that say, your screen time is four hours today. And then you have to make a decision about tomorrow. It's better if they do it for us.

But it's possible we can do it for ourselves. And that's the upside here. Are there some examples of things that people often do wrong and ways that they could start to improve them to make life more intentional?

Yeah, I mean, just talking about finances is interesting. I think if people spent a weekend setting up their account structure in a better way that they would make better financial decisions. You know, we tend to think that we can spend less, save more and make this as a daily or monthly decision. And a better way to do this is an account structure that automatically saves money.

every month into an investment account or automatically saves into your goal account and potentially creating more rules of thumb for yourself by which you're not using your credit card for small expenses. Although I know that for points people, that's probably a sin. But for many people, you should not use your credit card for small expenses. And so there are different ways to do this and especially for finances, but it does take some upfront motivation.

to do this. And same with eating. We can design our kitchen in better ways. I think many times people put the fruits and veggies in the fruit and veggie drawer, which is... It's hard to see them when they go bad. And you put this soda on the top shelf, it's very easy to see the soda. And so at some level, if you design your fridge so that it's impossible to miss the blueberries that are going bad, more people will eat the blueberries. And so we want to think...

very deeply about our environment and especially the daily environment that we live in to do this. Yeah. You mentioned some rules of thumb. I'm curious if there are specific rules of thumb. Let's start with savings that adopting day to day could change your behavior more easily than just wanting to change it, which it sounds like is impossible. Yeah.

Yeah, actually, one thing that annoys me is when people say savings is a habit, like I'm going to create a savings habit. It's like savings is not a habit. You have to go in there into your account. You have to log in, by the way. You have to remember your password. Most people don't remember their password. Then you have to choose how much you want to save and transfer it over. And you have to do this on a regular basis. And so things like that are just not habits. Habits is when you wake up and you drink water.

water or you brush your teeth or you're getting coffee. That's more of a habit. Doing a complex behavior at random intervals during the month is not a habit. And it's very hard to form at that level. In fact, one time they just removed reminders and people stopped saving completely. And so the move for savings is actually just to set up the reoccurring transfer at the time that you get paid. And that's critical for most people is to set up at the point you get paid. However, banks...

terrible. They don't do this. There are companies now trying to do this. Chime, I think, has it timed with your deposits. I believe Digit has it timed with your deposits at some level. And so I think the rule of thumb for savings is about reoccurring transfers timed with your deposits. And we tend to measure in behavioral science process versus outcome. So just doing this

is the win. You get the win if you do this. The amount you save now is a different decision. But I'd say most people should be setting up the process to get you to build the nest egg and worrying less about getting the absolute right number. In fact, I think one mistake people make is trying to get the absolute right number and this prevents them from doing anything. And in behavioral science, basically, when there's complexity, we procrastinate. And so when you don't save, this is worse than saving the wrong number.

Yeah. And I've always told people that are struggling to start saving that you could start with a really low number. And if it works, you could just raise the number. Totally. Or maybe in some future world, we could have a product that would just like automatically raise the number every so often. And you'd have to choose to stop raising the number because as I think I've heard you say many times, people are more likely to opt in than opt out. Yeah.

Yeah, well, we're more likely to basically take the default. So if the default is basically not saving, we're more likely to not save. And if the default is to save, we're more likely to save. And if it rounds up

to a bigger number, if it adds $1 every week, we're more likely to do this if it's the default. But by the way, the other thing, your idea here on getting people to start small is very nice. There was a nice study by Hal Hirschfeld, who basically looked at opt-in rates when saving was either a low number, you could imagine $1 a week or $4 a month, or you can imagine $10 a week or

$40 a month and then annualize that. And people opted in when it was in the lower frame. So like a per day or per week amount at a higher rate than if it was annualized or monthly. And so basically, that's kind of like a reduced cognitive overload. You know, it's only...

We can all afford $2 or something. We can all afford $3. And understanding that gets people more likely to say yes to something. And it's so obvious, right? But banks and stuff, we don't think this way. We think about annual or monthly. Yeah. And how does this change as people move up the savings journey? Is there a similar set of tools that someone can use who maybe has the capability of saving more, but isn't? Yeah, I think the same...

think the same set of tools apply. You just want to increase the rate that you're saving. So you want to think about what number is coming out of your paycheck every month. And is that going into a diversified account set for you? So I think it's really about amping up the number. The other thing is to have decision days where you could say you're going to put something on the calendar and re-evaluate. So

One thing that you find with finance is people worry a lot and they think they're not doing the right thing. And this is kind of sad because in theory, you're just worrying all the time. I'd wanted more if people just worry on one day and then at the end of the day, they make a decision. So you stress yourself out on a Sunday every three months

You make some decision about adding more or withdrawing and then you forget it for the next three months. We call these more decision points versus kind of overall worrying that you've made some mistake. I like that idea, but I find myself... And we just had an episode talking about FOBO, which is like the fear of a better option, and about decision-making. And I think...

sometimes decision making, especially for someone who really wants to be optimal, can be a really stressful process that ends up taking way longer than they want. Are there things you've learned about how people make decisions that could make that process easier and maybe a little more enjoyable? Yes, I my partner, my husband is an optimizer, and I am not. And so I have deep,

experience with this. Sometimes I will set a timer when he's trying to pick something on Amazon and say, you have 15 minutes to do this. And so, you know, at some level, I'm sure folks, many have heard about the kind of explore-exploit problem, kind of the classic problem

Example here is you're on an airplane and either you get a list of movies and which movie do you pick? And an optimizer may go through the full list of movies multiple times. And by the time they choose a movie, it's too late and they won't be able to finish the movie. The plane will have ended. A satisficer may choose too early and not get an optimal movie, but maybe they've finished the movie by the time that the plane has landed. And so each basically there are tradeoffs.

for. I think with the optimizer, I worry, especially in a financial construct that again, not making a decision is worse than making a small wrong decision. And so it would basically push yourself to make a decision and have some deadline attached to this. So whether it be every quarter you make some decision and you have some accountability with somebody else to do this. By the way, accountability finances is a thing we just don't talk about that much. This is a great

podcast to have people talk about it. But probably if you're a listener, the question is like, do you know what your mom has in savings? Do you know what your best friend has in savings? Like probably not. And so at some level, these are tend to be private decisions. And with private decisions, we can make excuses to procrastinate more.

So one easy hack is just telling somebody what you're doing and that itself will likely hold you more accountable to doing it. A better one would be involving them in the decision and having a bigger conversation about it. Again, it's to make it something from private sphere to public sphere. And we tend to actually follow through on our intentions then and act quicker. And that doesn't need to be public like post on Facebook what's in your bank account. Oh my God, no. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's actually, you know, obviously many finance companies have tried to be like, we're going to do social and get people to post. It's like that. Sure, it could work in some cultures. It's probably we're far from it, at least in the U.S. context. It's a lot more about having just real conversations with a person that you trust. I do tend to find these conversations are easier to start if you're sharing a tip.

So most of the time, people don't like to ask for advice. So what should I do? How much should I be saving? I think the conversation can start easy if you're like, hey, I just learned this cool thing about a new bank account or credit card points. And then you've opened up the conversation for another person to share their tip. And all of a sudden, you can start talking about finances in a different way.

Yeah, I think we don't talk about money. Obviously, I enjoy doing it or I wouldn't be here and I've encouraged it. But I wonder, have you seen any groups online that might in some way be anonymous or maybe personal, but with people that aren't actually your friends? Is that something that could be helpful in a space where people aren't comfortable talking to each other?

Yeah, I mean, Reddit communities for money are incredible. The amount of specific advice, obviously, you want to be skeptical of, you know, a lot of random people giving you advice, but at some level, it's a really good forum for getting exposed with your finance. You could ask the question right now about this is how much I have in my account. This is how much I have in debt. What do you think I should do? And you'll get

you know, dozens, if not hundreds of people weighing in on your financial situation. So I think there's some anonymity that helps people ask for advice that's helpful, you know, and just by the way, again, the nature of asking for advice is going to make it from private to public sphere by which you've now made your kind of problem something much, much more salient for you to address sooner than later. We can always make an excuse to do something next week. As soon as you talk about it, it's a little bit harder to make that excuse.

And that's not just because you've told someone, but is there something that actually happens in your mind, in your brain that makes you feel more responsible versus just know that you've told someone? Yeah, it's a little bit about the reputation. You know, in general, this is why meetings are so lovely is that it'd be very hard for me to come to a meeting and say, I'm so sorry, I just didn't do that. I just didn't do the PowerPoint. I just like totally didn't do it.

Like because you know that somebody else may ask you about it, you act in a socially desirable way, which is to respond or do the thing that they might ask about. So the very understanding that in the future you may be held accountable for this, even if you aren't going to be. But that that small percent chance will make us act in a desirable fashion. So we do have this internal reputation that we're always trying to manage and protect, at least for ourself.

And we talked about getting things done and committing to get them done and sharing that. What about when you have a lot of things? I think one challenge is I'm an optimizer. I want to spend five hours on Amazon. I feel like your husband and I would have a very terrible conversation comparing reviews. You talk about the movie example, and I'm like the person who I'm like, well, we haven't taken off. So I'm online. I'm like, what's the Rotten Tomatoes score of every single movie? Which one's the highest? I

I have that problem. But also, what about when there's just a lot of things? Are there things you've learned about behavioral psychology that like would help people that are like, I have a to do list of 50 things. And you know, I only have so many hours. And it's not necessarily that each individual one takes so long. It's just that there's so many becomes overwhelming.

Yep. And I think at that level, you're basically looking at the prioritization matrix. And we tend to do things that feel good. So we tend to do things that are easier or feel more urgent for us, especially when other people are asking for it. And we tend to procrastinate the more important tasks that may level up into a bigger outcome later. And so instead of basically prioritizing tasks, if you're looking at a to-do list by urgent or small... By the way, this is also something right in credit card

folks like to pay off the smallest debt fastest. And this is not the rational answer. The rational answer should be to pay off the one with the highest interest rate. But we look at our to-do list the same way where we're tackling smaller tasks first. And the correct way to do it would be to prioritize by level of importance or even hardest. And that's because if you start something in the morning, you're

kind of it's a well-known idea that we are better in the morning. And so would basically assume you have a couple hours. Actually, I love adding urgency to this. If you think your brain like stops at 11, you have like two hours or, you know, if you start working at two hours, a really good time, what are you going to do in that time? And would start with the important and hard tasks versus the urgent ones, which is obviously incredibly difficult to do in our working world, but something we can strive for.

And are there things you've learned talking to people or doing research yourself that have kind of changed your perspective on this and helped you think about it differently? I think most people struggle with this, which is like, I think a lot of people internalize their struggles. And so I think the idea that other people are also struggling with this, it's helpful for folks to remember. Obviously,

things that I've learned in this, I mean, we basically fill... It's kind of the suitcase problem where if you have a small suitcase, you'll fill it. If you have a large suitcase, you'll fill it. And so I think with time, that's kind of the other big idea is that our calendars go from X time to X time. And so we're going to fill it with tasks. And

And so it would more try to think about like, where's your suitcase and how much do you get to fill? And so if you have two or three hours of good work time would fill that versus eight hours and you're spreading out and probably doing the unimportant tasks. The other thing is, you know, the calendar by default is empty, which is not true. I have a ton of meetings Monday through Wednesday this week, but not a lot on Thursday. It looks like I'm free. I'm obviously not free. I'm going to catch up

on all the work that I miss from taking these meetings. And my calendar is kind of lying to me in this way and telling me I'm free. And so the default calendar doesn't help us. Ideally, you can hold and block time for yourself. We know that sometimes we overschedule it when you do that. But at least having the mental model of this is helpful. There's a world called pre-commitment where you think about what you're going to do. Actually, the kind of...

more evolved thing of this is called implementation intentions, where you think about when, where and how you're going to do something. And you think about that before you do it. Reality is that we're not actually that creative. And so if I say I'm going to do this task, the task doesn't actually come to life in my mind. It's just something in the future that's going to happen. As soon as we build it out and say when, how and where, now it becomes something that I've thought more deeply about. I've kind of...

It's more real. And when we do that, it increases the likelihood that we actually do it. And this has been shown with flu shots. When you think about when, where, and how you're going to get a flu shot, it's been shown with voting. When you think of when, where, and how you're going to vote and with to-do lists. Wow.

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Okay. Do you need to write down the when, where, how, or do you just need to think about it? So there was a nice study where there's... If people do write it down, it makes you more likely. So thinking about it is going to help. Writing it down is going to help more. So I would kind of build it out in your mind and write it down. What this also does is basically...

You know, at some level, again, we procrastinate things that are complex and uncertain. And so it's reasonable if we have a task that we don't really know how we're going to start that we would procrastinate it. And so just thinking for a couple minutes on how you would start the task is really the win here, where you're making it less complex, less uncertain to do it. And it'll make you more likely to want to do it because it's going to feel easier.

You said tasks that are hard and complex to start reminded me of something I've heard you talk about, which kind of shocked me, which is that if you don't know how to a lot about something, let's say I don't know a lot about investing. And so I haven't done it.

My assumption, just naively, which I now know is wrong, is that if I just learn more, that maybe I could start investing more frequently. And I've heard you talk about this. And I'd love to dig in a little more about how just teaching something to someone doesn't actually change what their underlying behavior is.

Correct. Yeah, this is another thing where if somebody says like financial literacy at a party, I give them a 30 minute lecture. Basically, the idea here is that in a perfect world, if I would teach you about what FICO means and how much it impacts your life from buying a home...

whatnot, you would then take actions to improve your FICO score. That basically, if I give you knowledge about something, how many calories are in something, that you would then take steps to reduce the amount of calories. And this is just not what researchers have found. And it's really robust. It's robust in the calorie literature, and it's even more robust in the financial literacy literature. If I give you information about budgeting, this does not

correlate to behavior change. I'll give you a caveat, though. So if I give you information about, like, let's say a savings account, and then next to you is a savings teller, and you can open a savings account, the immediate just-in-time nature of that makes it more likely that you'll do it. But the effect decays every single hour to the point where after I think it was 24 hours, the effect is to 0.1% behavior change.

which means that if I give you information about savings, a day or two later, you're 0.1% likely to actually make that behavior change. And so it's not zero, but it's very close to zero. And I always say, you know, we can...

try to invent new ways to teach people about finances. Maybe we haven't tried a lot, but the paper meta-analysis cover around 200 studies of people attempting to make this connection between teaching and doing. And so it's a really depressing stat because financial literacy in America is horrific. If you ask people about compound interest, most people don't understand it. And so the upside of financial literacy is high if we can nail it. Sadly, it hasn't panned out. And I'll kind of

maybe end on an optimistic note, the upside here is that it's the punchline is the behavioral science punchline, which is the environment matters. If you make it easy for me to save, I'm more likely to save. If you make it more appealing for me to save, I'm more likely to save. The idea that I know what the interest rate is, a couple of days before I'm about to make this decision just has low likelihood of changing my behavior. But if you make the steps go from 10 to 2, or the options go from 10 complex mutual fund options to 3, I'm more likely to do it.

Yeah. And does this apply in other aspects of life outside of money? For sure. Yeah. I mean, I think in a personal life, you can imagine trying to tell your spouse, like, can you please clean up the dishes? Can you please pick up your clothes from the floor? Like you're giving them information in the form of...

nagging, but you're giving them information about the problem. And in behavioral science, we say just make it easier, make it more appealing, change the environment of the decision making. My personal example is I also, but so does my spouse, tend to throw clothes on the floor. It's just easier to do that. We kind of nag at each other about like, oh, we should pick up our clothes, etc. And we developed a system that basically is like we have a laundry basket of clean clothes.

And so at some level, now we've made it easier for us to clean up our clothes. We don't actually have to change our behavior too much. So we've changed the environment of decision making to get to the outcome of a clean space. But we haven't actually made ourselves kind of, no amount of saying it's important that I do this is going to make it me when I'm running out the door in the morning, change my behavior. I need to really change my environment to do that. So I think people make this mistake with kids. They make this mistake with

family members of just telling them an information versus trying to actually solve the problem. You know, if you want someone to recycle more, make the recycle can bigger, make the waste can smaller. If you want someone to compost more, we want to make composting easier. So, you know, you can nag and nag, but it's much more painful than just changing the environment.

Yeah, I want to go back to your laundry situation because I don't know if I quite followed. So you have a laundry basket of clean clothes. Yeah, we have a laundry basket of dirty clothes too, but that was obvious. But sometimes you're just not going to wash everything as you just throw it, you know, like maybe I have a coat or something and I just throw it on the ground. And so all my goal now is to aim. I just need to aim into the...

the basket. And now our room looks much cleaner than having two or three things on the floor all the time. This is a place to throw all the clothes that are not ready to be washed because maybe you just wore a sweatshirt for an hour and you want to hang it up in the closet, but you know that's not going to happen right now because you know your personality.

Right. Yeah. I mean, and it's also something where like, yeah, I hang a lot of my clothes up, but like some, the margin of error that we have is going to be high over time. So yes, I can put away, you know, if you have a dirty dish in order for you not to ever have dishes out, you'd have to have a perfect record. The reality is once in a while, you're going to leave a dish out. Like everyone makes some errors. Everyone is messy once in a while. And so systems should try to solve for those errors instead of solving for perfection and then getting mad when one or two errors happen. And I think that's particularly important.

interesting in a household thing where for folks I live with, I have a communal living environment where there's apartments and there's a house and there's a communal kitchen. So there's lots of humans to make errors. So what kinds of systems do you have? Yeah, we have something called Sink Zero, which is lovely because basically it means no dishes in the sink ever.

And that's, it's a nice rule of thumb. It's basically like, you know, saying no carbs. No, saying no carbs is easier than saying, you know, I'm going to once in a while have or try to limit my carbs. By saying no dishes in the sink ever, it's a very clear understanding of what to do in which context. By the way, this is also helpful for spending money. You don't want to say I'm going to spend less on something. I'm going to spend less on restaurants. The idea would be you make a rule of thumb that says I don't go out to eat on the weekday.

or I only go out to eat once a weekend. In that case, you know exactly what is correct. You've either followed the rule or you haven't followed the rule. When you say I'm going to spend less, it's very difficult to know if you've adhered to the rule. And if you say, oh, don't leave your dishes in the sink, that kind of implies that maybe one time you can leave your dishes in the sink if you're off to the races. We even have a thing where you should bring it back to your room instead of leaving it in the sink. Right.

You know, like we give people the fail state of saying, we know you're in a hurry. Just bring it to your room. So that would be one. I think we do a lot of, again, kind of this idea that there's errors that people make. And so you're not, if you see something out, you don't get passive aggressive, like, oh my gosh, I'm cleaning up somebody else's stuff. You just clean it up because you've also made an error. So you kind of have a mentality that we're all in this together. And at one point I'll leave something out. So let's help each other.

By the way, cooking is very interesting. Right now we've hired a chef. It's cheaper than if we all buy food and then we all have to divide and conquer. There's lots of food waste. And so I think there's lovely ways people should look into making life much, much easier for themselves. Meal delivery is something most people should do. It's actually one of the best ways to lose weight as well. Time and time again, studies try to help people lose weight and it's very difficult. But if you make it easy, like shipping yourself a meal every day, more people succeed.

Yeah. And there are a ton of startups that have raised money from venture capitalists and offer crazy deals. So you could probably prearrange your meals from one company for a week or two and then switch and switch and switch and probably take advantage of promo codes. It would probably get you through at least a quarter of meals, which I may or may not have done in the past. Yes.

So yeah, so on that note about being healthy or losing weight, there's the food side and the exercise side. Are there lessons that kind of tie from behavioral psychology about...

committing to more exercise, something that I think many people struggle with. And it always feels like, you know, you mentioned habits, habits aren't always always the way and something with as high a commitment level of, you know, putting on a pair of shorts and shoes and going out for 45 minutes is maybe not something you could build a habit around. How are there tricks or lessons that can help here?

Yeah, that's the same thing as exercise is very difficult to form a habit. Some that one latest study says it took six months. And as soon as you have a habit, it does become easier because you need less intention to do it. But when you don't have a habit, you'd actually need to form an intention to do a behavior. And so one idea is that you're actually forming the habit based on the getting ready. So you know, putting your shoes out, etc. That's the habit.

that you're trying to establish versus the habit of exercise that actually should have been shown to drive some higher adherence. The other one is just past behavior predicts future behavior. And so the best predictor of forming a habit is actually doing it. It's not a cheat sheet. It's just real. And so I think at some level, people, if they commit to routines and consistency, this is fine. And if you miss a day, that's okay too. And then

I'm a big fangirl of Peloton. I think Peloton makes it more fun to do workouts. They have these instructors that are quite compelling. I talked to the product manager at Peloton and he said, look, we have these challenges that start every month. And so there's this idea of fresh start where you can basically say...

you know, today I'm a different person. Peloton actually helps you do that all the time, right there. It's like, you can say today I'm going to join on Dolly Parton day. We need to give ourselves an excuse to start something. And so fresh start doing it on Mondays or the first day of the month can be one or joining a challenge for a short period of time is one, but increasing our motivation in order to get over the friction is definitely going to help kind of fuel the exercise fire. And then, you know, I think there's some level of variety and consistency, right?

I think people kind of stick to the same workout. And I would encourage folks to try something different, if not just to appreciate the main workout that you do. But we can tire quickly from doing the same thing every day. Yeah. As soon as I'm done with my broken foot, I intend to go for the fresh start. So...

When you think about longer term goals, things that you want to change over the year, change over the next couple of years, how do you think you can effectively do that? Are you a fan of New Year's resolutions? Are you a fan of things like that?

Yeah, actually, I think people give New Year's resolutions a lot of... They kind of get made fun of. And at some level, it's a really nice excuse to think about what you want to do and who you want to be and create that, you know, I said before, implementation intention for your goals. I think goals by themselves are pretty useless. We need the plan. We need to connect it to action. We need to tell somebody. So I think, yeah...

The idea of just saying I'm going to do this is not going to change your behavior. I think what can is creating the plan and redesigning your environment to support that. You know, one big opportunity for change is when we have change in our life. So habits, back to habits, habits are very, very difficult because you're trying to do something new in a world where you're very used to doing the same thing every day. So Wendy Wood has research. This is like 43%.

Our behaviors every day are habitual. We're just not thinking about it. This is driving and the coffee and the brushing the teeth. And so at some level, introducing something new, it's reasonable to say, my gosh, that's going to be difficult because I'm so used to doing the things I normally do. And so really, there's an interesting opportunity when you disrupt your environment.

So when you change jobs, when you move, when you have a child, maybe when you're traveling, this is when your environment changes and your habits are disrupted. The theory here is called habit discontinuity theory, by which you're basically breaking something. And this is the golden moment to be able to add something new.

There's a nice study, kind of a classic one that was done in the London tube system by which they shut it down for a couple of days. And, you know, people are really habitual creatures when it comes to commute. And so people then had to find another route to work when their station was shut down. And 5% of people found...

more optimal routes. This is interesting because if you're so, you know, commute is all about optimization and efficiency. And why didn't these people think of that beforehand? Like, what were they doing walking a longer way to a different station that was longer for them? It took some disruption for them to seek out an alternative and then they were able to stick with it. And so when we disrupt our normal routines is when we can start kind of looking around and saying, is there something optimal to do? So I think if I could, I'd get everyone to move more

We should be moving apartments more. We should be moving jobs more. We should be changing our environment much more. Those are all kind of big disruptions. I heard you mention if you have a kid, I can imagine if you were like, gosh, I really want to start eating healthy. I need to disrupt my life. Maybe having a child is a big step. Are there ways to kind of manufacture disruption in your life?

Yeah, I mean, I think so. Add a new one, get new friends, which is not probably not as hard as a kid. But, you know, we are who we surround ourselves with. And so one way to change your environment is maybe is not if it's not physically is to surround yourself with different people. So I think kind of an easier way to do it may be to expose yourself to different people. This could be joining a running group. This could be going to different lectures by which your mental, your cognitive environment then expands.

is changing and the influences on your environment are also changing. So that would be a bigger swing. And then the other one, you know, I just had a friend who hired a kind of a minimalist coach to come over and help them redesign their apartment. Sometimes it's hard for us to understand our own environment. And so I think, again, bringing other people in to say like, help me redesign my kitchen so that I'm more likely to eat better. You know, this is

changing where the chips go. This is changing where the veggies go in the fridge. By the way, I think Instapots are lovely. You know, cooking is very hard. It's not ideal. It takes work. And so if we can make it fundamentally easier, we should do that. And you may not have the intuition on changing your environment as much as somebody else does.

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So one thing I noticed, we changed our daughter's room around this weekend. Totally changed. Like basically moved every piece of furniture and it now feels like a different room. I'm wondering if that's enough. You know, could rearranging your living room or your bedroom be enough of a disruption to really like jumpstart a new habit or not habit, but a new change? I think it's worth trying. I think these things are 100% worth trying. Like, you

you know, the idea that these things are, it's just reversible too. If you change it, you can always change it back. Yeah. I think probably changing furniture around. If you're a female getting a haircut could change how you, I once had a little pink strip in my hair and people, they actually talked to me more, you know, baristas and restaurant folks would engage more. I don't know if felt more friendly or open, but you know, change my environment by nature of how people related to me. So, so I think all these small changes are good. Look, I,

The idea that we've landed on the optimal way to live and be is just silly, right? Like we've accidentally chose many things in our life. We've accidentally kind of opted into the life that we're living. Many of that has been by choice and by design, but it's hard to imagine that there wouldn't be small ways that we could...

change it to improve it. And by just by changing it, actually, we could, we could likely improve it because of the nature of change. So when you brought up the commuting example, if you had asked me, Oh, what are ways that you could have a more optimal day? I might never have thought of that. If you had asked me,

Is there a process or even just a list of things that people could kind of take inventory of that would allow you to discover ways that you could maybe be more optimal or intentional that wouldn't come to mind if you just thought about it? That's a great question. So I'll kind of go with the obvious, but it's going to be a harder one for people to...

to optimize immediately. One thing that makes us most happy is people. We tend to spend money on things. If you're buying a home, you look at the countertops and how well the bathrooms are done, not will you like your neighbors? And so why do I live with all these people? It's because I've optimized my life for happiness. If we think happiness is about relationships, which most studies show that it is, then you want to design your life to make relationships easier.

And so I think one thing that people could do in general to optimize their life is to make relationships easier. I'll give a tactical example here is that the weekend's lovely because it's a coordinated event. Do we have two days where we can all socially hang out and people are actually happier on the weekend? Even unemployed people are happier on the weekend. So it's not about work. It's just about the idea of coordinating with other people. And so I think we can use a calendar in a way here to coordinate with other people such that you could say every Saturday, Friday,

You're going to schedule a brunch at 11 a.m. on Dolores Park where people just bring bagels and your friends know to show up. It's difficult to always coordinate plans with people. And maybe sometimes some friends won't show up, but maybe sometimes a few will. And so you have a core group of people who just know 11 a.m. brunch on Saturday. This takes away the annoyingness of back and forth calendaring that prevents us from doing something. And, you know, you can imagine doing this for Zoom workouts at 8 a.m. on one day. You could imagine doing it for game nights, you know, once a month.

the first Friday of the month or something with your friends.

The goal here is just to make things that make us happier easier. And if we believe that relationships make us happy, then we want to make that easier for us to actually do. So hacking the calendar is one way to do it with social coordination. Are there any other non-obvious things that you think make people generally happier that we don't think about? Yeah. I've actually been complimenting people as, Chris, you're looking very good today. Like, the smile is great. Your look with the black shirt is great.

Very professional. So, you know, I said this is an example, but it actually turns out that fake compliments people also feel very good at as well. And so I think we can basically help people feel better if we're complimenting them and also we're getting compliments. Very, very easy to kind of create affinity there.

that way. So, so, and that kind of goes in the giving research where, you know, if I already give you $20, you're happier if you spend it on somebody else. And if you spend it on yourself, no, no, obviously it's probably that money goes up to lots of money. You can say, we can argue, you know, if I give you a million dollars and you give it away, are you happy? But, but it's small dollar amounts like this. We can actually be much happier by giving stuff away. And, and

And the very easy thing you can do right now is probably just compliment somebody. A genuine compliment is better, but even if it's not, it's probably helpful. One thing I know I've talked to you in the past about the work you do with companies. And I know you have a process for how you take a company's product and try to break down ways that it could be improved. And one of those steps is, I believe, a kind of...

behavioral diagnostic. Is that am I close? Yeah, I nailed it. Softball for me here. Yeah. Can you apply that same methodology and maybe feel free to talk about that process? But I'm curious after whether you could apply that to your own day and kind of do a diagnostic of your your average day.

Love it. Yeah. So basically a behavioral diagnosis is a map, kind of this like visual map of every single step and decision that you make in order to get to the behavior that you're aiming for. So if I want to say save money, you know, save money once a month, $10, I'm

making this up. As a bank, I would do a behavioral diagnosis that says, you know, I need to log in. I need to remember my password. Oh, shoot, I forgot my password. I have to remember my password or, you know, go to my email. And I'd go through all the steps that somebody has to do and the decisions in order to get to this. Yeah.

key behavior. And when we walk through this with companies, there's so many light bulbs of just like people realizing how much work people have to do. And this is like logistical friction, actual steps, but most of it's cognitive friction of things that people have to decide and think about before they can actually succeed in the behavior that you're aiming to change. So the first step in that is actually figuring out the behavior that you want to change, which is definitely a personal opportunity where, and we call it at Irrational Labs, getting uncomfortably specific behavior.

So instead of saying, I want to save money or I want to eat healthy, it's like, I want to eat a salad every day for lunch for a week. Now we've been obnoxiously, uncomfortably specific about the behavior such that the hack or the intervention is just going to be easier than saying, I want to eat healthier. And so for ourselves, I think we need to get more specific about the behavior. It's not going to help us if we say, I want to eat healthier. I want to be financially better off or I want to be happier.

We need to get to that behavior. And at that point, then you can do this diagnostic where you're like, let me do a map of every single step that it would take to get to that. You know, if you're trying to date right now and you want to say, I want to go on a date a week, what are all the steps that it would take to get

for you to do that. You'd have to be swiping maybe every morning. You'd have to be responding to messages in the evening. You'd have to keep one night open. Many people are very busy and do you have one night open? So at some level, walking through all those steps, you can then see like, wow, this is actually harder than I thought. Let me try to call it the 3B model where we're either going to reduce barriers or increase benefits. So once we've picked a behavior...

3B. So the behavior, the barriers and the benefits, you pick a behavior, you decrease the barriers and you increase the benefits to doing that. So we make it easier and we make it highly motivating, barriers and benefits. And so the diagnostic, then you look at this and you say, let me just make it easy. Let me decrease the barriers to doing something and I'll be more likely to do it or I add some fun benefits.

Yeah. So I think we're fortunate that people like yourselves take all of your skills helping companies do this, mostly, at least as far as I can tell, for good, right? Working with companies to help people save more, working with that kind of thing. There are plenty of companies out there that I think have learned these same tactics and use them to get you to scroll endlessly on TikTok or various other habits that are very beneficial to companies, but maybe not beneficial to your life.

Are there tips you have for people who are trying to avoid getting sucked into companies who have learned all the same tricks, but maybe are applying them to ways that are less optimal for their lives?

Yeah. So first, I think realizing you're walking into a really hard environment. If you go to a mall, how could you not spend money? People have thought deeply about how to get you to spend money. They've thought deeply about getting you to buy something that is kind of aspirationally good for you, but may not increase your happiness. And so it's a really hard fight that we have. And it's getting harder, you know, like Amazon Prime making it. We said one of the ways to get us to do something is to make it easier.

Online now, Amazon Prime is the goldmine of that. And we have now Amazon Go stores where you just walk out, right? They figured something out about human behavior and it's going to be hard for us to fight that. I think at some level, the macro solution is disappointing for people is where we actually need companies to design better environments. And that's what we try to help people.

companies do is design better environments to help us succeed because it's so difficult for ourselves to kind of fight these forces. And, you know, maybe the uplifting thing is we can. So from a focus perspective, you know, there's plenty of apps out there that can help you focus more.

There's rescue time that gives you data, which data usually isn't enough. There's a new app that I just use that if you go to anything other than the screen you're on, a voice will come on and keep talking to you until you go back to your screen. These are these self-controlled basic devices where you have to have a one-time motivation to put them on yourself and...

It's tough. And so I think that's the upside. In a hot state, we're not going to stop eating the chips. We're not going to stop Netflix on show one when you want to binge on show two and three. We can't rely on ourselves to make those decisions in the heat of the moment. We need to make these implementation intentions before or put kind of self-control devices up. This is difficult. So typically around 30% of people that are

Research is like, are you a sophisticate, somebody who understands that in the future you will fail? Or are you naivete, somebody who has more optimism and thinks in the future you may succeed despite all the forces? And sophisticates are a little bit, are much better at putting on these self-control devices to ourselves. So asking, you know, when you go up to the counter, nobody's preventing you from asking McDonald's to say, can I have half the fries? I want some fries. Can I have half?

This is something that we could all do. And it's difficult. And so that's one of the reasons why you just don't ask for the fries in the first place is because you know you're going to eat them all. But yeah, I would encourage folks to think about the behavior you want to change and then the apps or tools that can help you do it in a cold state, not in a hot one.

Yeah. And does just discovering the biases that we have help? I know that it seems like from some of our conversation that just learning about how your brain works and how you might think about things doesn't really help. But I know that I've been to a handful of kind of unconscious bias trainings that now I'm wondering, like, are those even effective at changing anyone's behavior?

Yeah. So the research does not look promising for unconscious bias trainings. I'm sure that they're improving, that new companies are coming out and trying to improve them. So I would say, I may be wrong in the latest company, but most research to date does not look promising for basically teaching you about your bias, actually changing your behavior, which is why if

If you're thinking from a hiring standpoint, you want to blind the resumes so that you're not seeing names and you're not seeing pictures. You don't want to look at the school that people came from right away because this may influence you. Actually turning your video off is good in the first interview so you're not biased by looks. And so these are the types of things that will actually help us make better and more equitable decision making, teaching us about our biases so that in the future we can become better people.

is not likely to work. Okay, so future is not necessarily promising for learning, but I like that you've taught us a ton of different processes and things we can put into place to kind of plan for what we know we are not good at. Are there any other parting hacks for life, money, travel, anything that you want to share that we haven't gotten to hear?

Yes. Okay. I have a couple. One is the hedonic treadmill is real, which means like once you have something, you adapt to it and you want more of it.

So, and this is especially relevant if you are potentially surrounded by other people who have the thing. And I think this makes me very nervous because if you go and you buy a four-bedroom house, your next house is not going to be a three-bedroom house. You've made a decision to lock yourself into something that's going to be hard to downgrade. So I would be very, very cautious about

of making decisions that try to upgrade your lifestyle too quickly because you're cognitively going to be locked in and you adapt to things so much that it's not, you know, if I have nice countertops or not, does not change my happiness levels or my life satisfaction. And yet if you have lovely countertops in their next house, you have bad ones. This is,

It's going to be difficult for you. I don't wear jewelry. Zero. No earrings, no necklace, no rings, nothing. There's some level of like, if I wanted, if I started wearing a necklace or earrings, I would just want better ones.

I'd be on the treadmill. And so I've decided for jewelry to get off the treadmill, to just not participate. And I think that actually is very nice to pick a few categories in life where you're just not going to be on the treadmill. You're not going to participate. I think this could be, you know, if you're not a foodie, you know, do you really need to go out to the very nice restaurants?

Some foodies, I get it. You want to, but you can choose to opt out of some of these categories. The jewelry that, you know, for women, it's clothes and shoes. It could be makeup. You can say, this is just not something I'm going to compete in or want to aspire to. And once you do, it's going to, again, be harder.

take it off. And then the other one for travel is around memory. And a lot of happiness comes... There's a debate in the literature. Is it, am I happy because of the moment I'm happy? Or am I happy when I remember something in the past? And when we think about memory, we want to create a lot of peak experiences. And so if I were designing a vacation, I probably wouldn't have you go on a vacation for 2 weeks.

somewhere. I'd probably have you go either multiple vocations of three-day weekends where you're creating lots of small experiences for yourself that are memorable and exciting. You have something to look forward to every weekend. You have something to reflect on when you come back versus kind of a two-week vacation in the middle of the year. Or within that two-week vacation, have multiple peak points where you're going in different places to create memories. And that's something we can do in our daily lives as well, where just kind of making sure that

One month doesn't blend to the next and creating more peak experiences and memories for us. A group of friends and I went to Valencia Street in San Francisco that closed off the streets on Fridays. And we set up a table and had a fancy dinner in the middle of the street.

Okay, we had tacos, but we all dressed up. There was lamps and a generator and classical music. This is weird. We're not going to do it every weekend. But by doing these kind of weird, crazy things once in a while, we can create kind of meaningful experiences. These are nice things to talk about. It's a high memory. It's not going to be like every Friday night that we have. And so we should probably put more work into creating these kind of peak experiences versus having normal Friday nights.

Yeah. Any other favorite peak experiences that like, I want to hear your list. I do this no small talk hard thing. So in general, I think conversation tends to go to the lowest common denominator and

where if you're in a room with people, it doesn't benefit you to go up to somebody and say, what is your deepest fear? This is awkward. You put yourself at risk. I don't recommend it. And it's not good for anyone if you're just talking about mundane or the weather or sports. You're just not going to enjoy yourself that much. So this is a problem.

And so how do you overcome this problem? And this kind of goes back to the weekend question of coordination. If everybody agrees that you're going to talk about your deepest fear, then it's not weird for you to go up to somebody and ask them. It'd be weird for you to talk about small talk if everybody has agreed that you're going to be talking about more vulnerable or interesting things that evening. And so one thing to do if you have a group of friends you're hosting over or in general, kind of a host of something is to mandate that people talk about

interesting things. And I have these no small talk cards that are kind of decision aids in this. So if I just say don't talk about small talk things, people get nervous. And what should I talk about? And so actually, we did an experiment here and people really don't like it if you just say don't talk small talk. It's hard to think of these things. As soon as we give the cards to people, it becomes much easier and people enjoy it. They make more connections. They want to hang out with each other for longer. And they're talking about a bigger variety of topics.

And so I would give your party members some decision aids or some help if you go this route. And by the way, we are happier when we talk about these vulnerable things. We like each other more.

So what are your biggest fears? Any other good topics for someone that wants to put this into place for friends coming over in the next few days? Yeah, I think we did an experiment where we talked about what is the best question. And so we had two conditions where it was like talk about the past was a few parties or talk about the future was a few other parties. So two conditions. What do you think was better at predicting vulnerability? The past.

That's what we thought too. And it turns out there was no difference.

So both conditions beat out the control. The control was just kind of an activity, a random activity that didn't push conversation. So the upside here is that talking about anything interesting is going to be helpful. But you can think about getting people to pontificate about their future self, either their hopes or dreams or their past. When was the last time that you've been in love? Are you more like your father or your mother? Or one of my favorite is, what do you want to be complimented on more? This actually...

helps reveal a lot about somebody. It says, you know what, I'm not complimented on this. And I personally think that it's a strength of mine that may go unseen. It also gives you an in to compliment them on that. So which we know, which we know creates happiness, even if it's even if it's fake. Yeah. Awesome. This was fantastic. I want to hear a little about what you're working on and about this podcast that came out yesterday.

Wonderful. Yeah. So I'll start there. The podcast is called The Science of Change. And the idea here is that we interview visionary thought leaders from companies that are trying to change our behavior. So we talked to Peloton to figure out how they design an addicting exercise program and Duolingo to figure out how they get us to learn a language and Credit Karma to figure out how they get us out of debt. And then we talked to a lot of people

And behavioral science is really about the environment that we live in. And so we're trying to deep dive with the people who are actually designing our environment and all the apps and products and services we use. So I'm very excited about the science of change. And it is out with the Peloton episode being our first.

And then Irrational Labs. So folks are interested in behavior change, behavioral science. Irrational Labs is a behavior change company co-founded by myself and Dan Ariely. We have boot camps, we have trainings, and we do a lot of consulting with companies to help design new products and features that change behavior for good. And if you go to our website, the pro tip is to subscribe to the newsletter. And we send out what I think are fairly interesting summaries of our latest research and what's going on in the field.

Awesome. Well, you're already in the podcast app listening to this. So definitely check out the science of change. And Kristen, thank you so much for being here. Great to be here. Thanks, Chris.

Does anyone else just want to get dressed up and host a fancy taco party in the middle of a street downtown? Or is that just me? That was fantastic. And if you're here for the first time, I hope you enjoyed. Please go ahead and subscribe to the show so you can get notified of all of our upcoming episodes. And we always appreciate a rating and review in your podcast app. Finally, I'm looking at hosting a few live episodes where you can join in, ask questions for me or guests live on the show.

If you want to hear about when that's happening or just stay in the loop of any great hacks, definitely subscribe to our newsletter at allthehacks.com slash email. Or if you're already subscribed and wondering why you haven't heard from me yet, I promise I'm working on something I really think you'll enjoy. And once it's going again, it should be on a much more regular schedule.

All right. That's it for this time. You can always reach me at chris at allthehacks.com. See you next week.