How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

by Katy Milkman

what Katy has learned is that the secret to a better life is not to eradicate the impulses that make us human but instead to understand them, outsmart them, and whenever possible, to make them work for us rather than against us.

Winning Ugly.

Behavior change is similar. You can use an all-purpose strategy that works well on average. Set tough goals and break them down into component steps. Visualize success. Work to create habits—tiny ones, atomic ones, keystone ones—following the advice laid out in self-help bestsellers. But you’ll get further faster if you customize your strategy: isolate the weakness preventing progress, and then pounce.

Did I know, he asked, when Google should encourage employees to take advantage of these resources? Was there some ideal moment on the calendar or in someone’s career to encourage behavior change?

The message of Back to Sleep arrives at this critical juncture, when you’re not yet set in your ways and are motivated to try to do everything right.

We’re more likely to pursue change on dates that feel like new beginnings because these moments help us overcome a common obstacle to goal initiation: the sense that we’ve failed before and will, thus, fail again.

that resets helped underperformers up their game but harmed people who were already doing well.

After I shared my fresh start research with Prasad, Google programmers built a “moments engine” that identifies when the company’s employees are likely to be open to change (say, after a promotion or a move to a new office). The moments engine then sends employees nudges to spur action at these points in time.

I like to remind cynics that if you flip the discouraging statistics about New Year’s resolutions on their head, you’ll see that 20 percent of the goals set each January succeed. That’s a lot of people who’ve changed their lives for the better simply because they resolved to try in the first place.

The barrier is simple: Doing the “right” thing is often unsatisfying in the short-term.

Economists call this tendency to favor instantly gratifying temptations over larger long-term rewards “present bias,” though its common name is “impulsivity,” and it’s unfortunately universal.

Lots of research shows that we tend to be overconfident about how easy it is to be self-disciplined.

“temptation bundling,”

But merely suggesting that people try temptation bundling is enough to produce benefits that last.

In general, a cognitively demanding task can’t easily be paired with another cognitively demanding task.

These complexities mean temptation bundling can’t always help you tackle present bias when you’re pursuing change. It’s just one tool to consider.

Jana hypothesized that the awards would make a monotonous task feel a bit more like a game. They didn’t change the nature of the work itself but simply added an element of fun and praise for a job well done.

These questions were designed to measure which salespeople had “entered the magic circle,” a term used to describe agreeing to be bound by a game’s rules rather than the normal rules that guide our daily interactions.

Gamification is unhelpful and can even be harmful if people feel that their employer is forcing them to participate in “mandatory fun.”

How can managers take advantage of gamification, if they can’t assume that employees will want to buy in? One low-risk way to make work more appealing is to simply make the workplace itself more enticing and fun—it’s rare for employees to object to that.

Whenever you do something that reduces your own freedoms in the service of a greater goal, you’re using a commitment device.

It also highlights a somewhat contradictory feature of cash commitment devices. On the one hand, when we use them, we’re flouting the standard laws of economics, which say more freedom is better than less. But on the other hand, we’re also leaning heavily on standard economics, which recommends that you hike up the price of unwanted behavior or impose restrictions to discourage it.

Signing a pledge is a particularly soft form of commitment because the penalty is simply the guilt and discomfort you’ll feel if you break your word, to others or yourself.

Being at odds with yourself, which psychologists call “cognitive dissonance,” is a surprisingly powerful force

Lots of research on commitment supports the benefits of this “bite-size” approach.

The theory is that there are two types of people in the world. Everyone has self-control problems, so that isn’t the distinguishing characteristic. Rather, some of us have come to terms with our impulsivity and are willing to take steps to rein it in. Behavioral economists call these people “sophisticates.” But not everyone in the world is a sophisticate, as evidenced by the debate that rages whenever I teach Wharton MBA students about Green Bank’s unusual savings product. Lots of people are instead overly optimistic about their ability to overcome their self-control problems through sheer willpower. These types of people are “naïfs.”

many of us choose not to adopt commitment devices because we undervalue them or are naïve about how much we need them, not because we don’t need them or are unwilling to risk the penalty.

The prevalence of naïfs suggests (not surprisingly) that one important function of a good manager is to set up systems that impose costs and restrictions on employees whenever temptation could stand in the way of wise long-term decisions. Such systems—such as deferring a subset of employee income into a pension plan or restricting access to certain websites at work—make commitment devices unnecessary because the right incentives already exist. “Good” commitments are already being imposed on employees by a third party.

The softer the penalty or restriction, the less likely it is to help with change, but the more palatable it is to adopt.

Reminders work far, far better when we can act on them immediately.

Hermann Ebbinghaus’s exponential forgetting curve

Peter Gollwitzer—calls forming an “implementation intention.”

Forming an implementation intention is as simple as filling in the blanks in the sentence “When ___ happens, I’ll do ___.”

Customers who were instructed to look out for the stuffed alien were 36 percent more likely than the others to remember to redeem their 1 dollar off.

it’s best to rely on cues that are out of the ordinary. Encountering something odd in your path (like a toy alien) captures your attention, which is, after all, a limited resource.

These questions were selected to ensure voters had carefully considered the cues (time, location, and activity) that would remind them it was time to vote.

I worked with a team of economists* to convince Evive to make a small addition to a standard reminder letter. Recipients would be encouraged to write down the date and time when they planned to get their flu shot at their free workplace clinic.* It’s worth noting here that these letters weren’t inviting people to schedule flu shot appointments. That often confuses audiences when I present this study. The letters provided no mail-back address and no way for the recipients to convey their flu shot plan to Evive or their employer. We simply hoped that a prompt to think through a concrete plan with a time trigger could help them follow through on getting an important vaccination by combatting forgetting. Prashant was hopeful, too. If simple changes like this to the company’s reminder forms could make a difference without costing Evive a dime, it would be a huge boon. So when we tested our letters experimentally at a large midwestern company with dozens of offices and saw substantive changes in vaccination rates, everyone celebrated. Much to our delight, merely prompting people to write down a plan in the privacy of their home led to a 13 percent increase in vaccinations, though no one from Evive ever heard or saw these plans.* Many more people than usual in our study followed through to get an immunization they wanted, lowering their risk of a nasty illness. Interestingly though, like Todd, we found that the prompts were much more helpful in some contexts than others. Offices ...

Plans don’t change minds—they only help us remember to do the things we already want to do. So they’re a nice, noncoercive way you can help other people achieve their own goals.

What in the world happened?” Steve Honeywell wondered. Steve worked as an analyst at the University of Pennsylvania’s massive health system, and one day in the fall of 2014 he couldn’t make heads or tails of a graph he’d just created. According to his data, a persistent problem that had been costing the health system and its patients roughly 15 million dollars per year had disappeared overnight. This was not normal. So he started putting out feelers. “Did anything big change last month at the hospital? Were new best practices rolled out or something?” he asked his boss. “Could someone check?” I first heard the story of Steve’s baffling discovery when I invited Mitesh Patel, a talented physician and Wharton alumnus, to guest lecture in my MBA class. Mitesh runs a group at the University of Pennsylvania’s health system that, rumor had it, was accomplishing great things with behavioral science. And after he’d finished sharing his first slide, it was clear that these rumors were true. At the start of my class, Mitesh told us about Steve Honeywell’s miraculous discovery and why it mattered. Up until 2014, Penn’s health system had been incurring fines from its largest insurer for its doctors’ prescription practices. Much to the chagrin of Penn Medicine’s leaders, the medical staff habitually prescribed brand-name medications such as Lipitor and Viagra instead of cheaper but chemically identical generic drugs. This might not sound like a big deal, but patients were spending milli...

Penn Medicine’s miraculous success rested squarely on people’s tendency to take the path of least resistance. During a routine system upgrade, an IT consultant working on the software that Penn physicians used to send prescriptions to pharmacies made a small change to the user interface: he added a new checkbox to the system. From then on, unless a physician checked that box, whatever drug they prescribed would be sent to the pharmacy as a generic. Since doctors, like the rest of us, tend to be a little lazy, they only rarely checked the box: just 2 percent of the time. As a result, Penn’s generic prescription rate shot up to 98 percent. Behavioral scientists would describe what happened at Penn Medicine by saying the IT consultant changed the prescription system “default,” or the outcome the system delivered if no one actively chose another option (such as the standard factory settings that come with a new computer). If defaults are set wisely, you’ll still end up making the best decision even if you don’t lift a finger—an opportunity most of us relish, thanks to our efficiency-loving operating systems. For years at Penn Medicine, Mitesh and his colleagues had been lobbying to change the prescription interface to automatically order generics unless doctors opted out. But final approval was still pending. In the end, a lone IT developer, knowing that good defaults matter, took it upon himself to make the change when Penn Medicine’s software system needed updating anyway. A...

But the big surprise was that Googlers we’d encouraged to hit the gym at a consistent time (the Routine Rachels) essentially built a habit around exercising only at that precise time.

The most versatile and robust habits are formed when we train ourselves to make the best decision, no matter the circumstances.

tracking a behavior helps you avoid forgetting to do it until it becomes second nature.

Self-efficacy is a person’s confidence in their ability to control their own behavior, motivation, and social circumstances.

Too often, we assume that the obstacle to change in others is ignorance, and so we offer advice to mend that gap. But what if the problem isn’t ignorance but confidence—and our unsolicited wisdom isn’t making things better but worse?

If giving advice can destroy confidence, then asking people who are struggling to be advisers instead of advisees might be a better approach. Encouraging someone to share their wisdom conveys that they’re intelligent, capable of helping others, a good role model, and the kind of person who succeeds. It shows that we believe in them. In theory, being asked to write just a few words of guidance to someone else might give people the confidence to achieve their own objectives.

Lauren ran survey after survey of Americans with unmet goals. Some were striving to save more, others to control their tempers, get fit, or find new jobs. Time and again, she found two things. First, when asked directly, most people predicted that receiving advice would be more motivating than giving it, which explains why we’re all the targets of so much unsolicited advice. But when she examined the accuracy of this belief, using controlled experiments, she found that it was wrong. Just as she’d come to suspect, prompting goal seekers to offer advice led them to feel more motivated than when they were given the very same caliber of advice.

even on the spot, with no time to think hard about it—people were capable of producing useful insights about how to better tackle the same goals they, themselves, struggled with.

we pledged to help one another make tough calls whenever any of us got invited to do something time-consuming outside of our teaching and research responsibilities. Now, whenever one of us is asked to deliver a talk, write a blog post, or give an interview, we reach out to our “No Club” to discuss whether the opportunity is worthwhile and to get advice on how to politely but firmly turn it down if it isn’t.

Max had insisted that there wasn’t anything special about him that helped his students succeed. It was something special about his students. When I emailed asking for his mentoring secrets, he’d explained that his students ranged “from very smart to spectacular.” His unshakable faith that each student he advised had remarkable talents, I now realized, was a bedrock of Max’s advising success.