Assertion Supported
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 …”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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.”
Assertion Supported
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…”
Assertion Supported
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, …”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Supported
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…”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Assertion Supported
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, …”
