Katy Milkman
Professor, The Wharton School. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Katy Milkman is the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is a behavioral scientist who studies behavior change, hosts the Choiceology podcast, and authored the book How to Change.
2shows
2appearances
23statements
9resolved
9supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
6said about them ↓ Everything Katy Milkman said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Milkman: Rigid routines harm exercise habit durability compared to flexible schedules
“We were startled to find that the rigidity was harmful. What we found is that that group, they went ever so 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 …”
Milkman: Pushing through painful goal pursuit fails; making it enjoyable improves outcomes
“The science shows that that's a terrible strategy and that what we actually need to do is try and find a way to make it enjoyable, to pursue our goals.”
Milkman: Hiring in batches leads to more diverse teams than one-off hiring
“What we have shown in our research is that when people hire in sets, meaning, you know, let's hire five at a time as, you know, everybody will bring on all our new folks together. We'll hire five people all at once in April instead of sort of one person per mo…”
Milkman: Fresh starts only provide temporary motivation for one-off actions
“But a big problem with fresh starts is that all they do is they give us a temporary boost in motivation. So they're actually really great moments to do something that's sort of a one and done.”
Milkman: Motivating long-term beneficial behavior requires making it immediately rewarding
“Getting myself to do the things that were good for me in the long term required me to find a way to make them instantly gratifying, make them rewarding in the short term, or else I would never motivate myself to do it.”
Milkman: Human laziness is an efficient cognitive design feature
“Laziness, which I actually would argue is a good design feature for the human mind, that we prefer the path of least resistance. We generally look for the easy way out. It makes a lot of sense. It's very efficient, and yet it creates challenges when we want to…”
Milkman: Fresh start disruptions aid poor performers but hurt positive momentum
“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.”
Milkman: Hiring candidates in batches leads to more diverse groups
“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 yo…”
Milkman: High schoolers who gave peer study advice improved their own grades
“My favorite one was a study with high school students, about 2000 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, …”
Milkman: Conforming in zero-sum environments only helps early movers
“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.”
Milkman: Commitment devices are the best proven solution for procrastination
“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, f…”
Milkman: Rewarding cue-based routines for two months builds lasting habits
“By constructing habits through cue-based routines that are repeated in sort of consistent environments 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 bur…”
Milkman: High-stakes moments matter far less than people perceive
“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 doe…”
Milkman: Modeling people as perfectly rational economic actors is absurd
“I ended up being an engineer as an undergrad because economics did not make sense to me. I just thought, You know, why would you possibly think that people are perfectly rational decision-making agents and model the economy and their decisions that way? This i…”
Milkman: 40% of premature US deaths stem from daily behavioral choices
“So this pie chart kind of blew my mind and changed my life because it showed that 40% of premature deaths are due to behaviors we could change, daily decisions we make.”
Milkman: Mondays and new months serve as powerful psychological fresh starts
“Actually every Monday seems to be a very powerful fresh start when we look at our data, and they come around conveniently once a week, so that's a great one to peg yourself to the start of a new month also seems to do it for some people”
Milkman: Self-nudging works by making the lowest-friction default path the healthy choice
“We can think about this Powerful nudge and how we can use it as a snudge by just creating frictions that are aligned with making the lazy and easy path the one that is healthy and beneficial in the long run.”
Crisis Text Line boosted productivity 8% using weekly volunteer targets
“And when we made that small change, we actually saw about an eight percent increase in productivity across the board, and people were volunteering more.”
Milkman: Breaking yearly goals into weekly targets exploits the goal gradient effect
“There's something called the goal gradient effect, where we're more motivated when we get close to a goal. And that means, you know, if you have a 200 hour yearly goal to do something, you're not gonna be motivated for a long time until you get really close to…”
Milkman: Highlighting majority peer adoption persuades organizational change laggards
“So it turns out that if people are told, hey, the majority of my peers are doing thing X, it makes me much more excited to do it. So if you already have decent adoption, you're just trying to bring along sort of the last 40%, which, by the way, is often the ca…”
Milkman: 40% of premature US deaths stem from modifiable behaviors
“And it was a graph showing the percentage of premature deaths in the U.S. That are due to different causes, and the largest wedge in that graph was 40% due to behaviors that we could change. So decisions about things like eating drinking, smoking, vehicle safe…”
Milkman: Birthday-timed saving nudges increase savings by about 30%
“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.”
Milkman: 60% of study participants paid to restrict access to their iPods
“In the work I did actually about temptation bundling, we offered people who wanted to exercise 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, …”
The other half of the tape: Katy Milkman's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 4 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 3Jeff Berman 3
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 3
Masters of Scale 3
2026 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Katy's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Professor, The Wharton School | 1 | 13 | 100% 6/6 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
| MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Professor, The Wharton School | 1 | 10 | 100% 3/3 | full record on Masters of Scale → |