Newsletter

March 26, 2024
An unexpected upside of writing How to Change was that my “book tour” introduced me to some really neat people who don’t run in my usual (wonderful but wonky) academic circles. I met a curious group of podcasters, journalists, and organizational leaders with a taste for behavioral science, and one new connection who particularly stood out was a charming surfer, author, podcast host and product evangelist named Guy Kawasaki.

February 27, 2024
Every winter, I have the pleasure of (re)teaching a Wharton MBA course that covers classic psychology research on decision biases and heuristics. I’ve been teaching this material for fifteen years but it still feels fresh and fun because the takeaways are so clear and practical.

January 30, 2024
First and foremost, happy New Year! As long-time subscribers will know, I’m extra busy in January because nearly every media outlet runs a story on why we set New Year’s resolutions and how you can achieve yours, which happens to dovetail with my area of expertise.

December 19, 2023
It’s become a tradition to share a few of my favorite things from the past year in my December newsletter. I hope this year’s list will help you discover some wonderful new reads, listens, and laughs, and I wish you and yours a fantastic holiday season!

November 28, 2023
This fall, after noticing a pronounced drop in the fraction of Philadelphians sporting skinny jeans and an uptick in bootcuts, I’ve begun slowly retiring my (still comfortable and sturdy) skinny jean collection for more “modern” replacements. Please don’t judge my wastefulness too harshly. I’m far from a fashionista, but like most people, I respond to peer pressure, and when trends shift, I don’t want to be the last goofball caught wearing dated styles.

November 17, 2023
I’m excited to share some fun news …
A brand new MasterClass launched yesterday with Jay Shetty, author of Think Like a Monk and host of On Purpose. It focuses on navigating change and features interviews with experts including me (!) and my good friend Maya Shankar, who you may remember from the October edition of this newsletter

October 31, 2023
It has been a tumultuous month (to put it mildly). While the Q&A I’ve chosen to feature this month is unrelated to the upheaval all around us, it’s with Dr. Maya Shankar, who hosts my favorite podcast on coping with unforeseen change. As you’re confronting change, I highly recommend checking out A Slight Change of Plans, which Apple named the best podcast of the year in 2021 for good reason.

September 26, 2023
Today, I’m bringing you a Q&A with Harvard Professor Todd Rogers whose incredible new book WRITING FOR BUSY READERS hit the shelves in early September. Todd is a renaissance man — a renowned academic, successful entrepreneur, and winner of the prestigious Rising Star award from Politics magazine for his efforts to bring behavioral science to Washington. Our Q&A focuses on the power of forgetting and what can be done to remember better. But Todd’s book will help you write better (and more memorable) prose, and that’s a skill we could all use (particularly the author of this newsletter!).

June 27, 2023
In academia, summer is the season for reflection. College campuses go quiet, email traffic slows, and there’s finally room to consider what’s made you proud and what you most regretted in the last two semesters. I briefly entertained the notion of sharing a list of wins and woes from the past academic year in this newsletter. But anticipating I’d soon come to regret that (ahem), I instead decided to devote this issue of Milkman Delivers to a Q&A about the science of regret and the impact it can have on our decisions.

May 30, 2023
This year, I’ve had the great pleasure of reading the Harry Potter books to my seven-year-old son (an activity I highly recommend to all parents). In one of my favorite scenes from the series, Harry cleverly uses behavioral science to help his best friend succeed. On the day of a major sporting event, Harry tricks his teammate and fellow wizard, Ron, into believing that a bit of a valuable and rare luck potion is in his breakfast. Ron’s confidence soars as a result, and his performance on the field is unusually strong. However, we learn that no magic was actually deployed—Harry just relied on sleight of hand to mislead his friend and thereby change his mindset.

April 25, 2023
Every fall when my university’s academic calendar kicks into high gear, I tell myself that this term I’ll manage to stay on top of my work and avoid late nights writing reports, tweaking presentation slides and answering emails. I’m always sure that last semester’s challenges were an exception and this year will revert to “normal.” There was the year my son was born, and that naturally threw me for a loop, but he was destined to be an only child so I told myself I’d eventually settle back into a rhythm involving some balance. Then I started a new research center, and birthing that was its own wild ride. However, I knew the startup pain was only temporary. Of course, just as that madness started easing, I signed a contract to write a book, which was immensely time-consuming. And then there was the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant a spike in work hours spent on childcare. But once elementary schools and after school activities re-opened all would be sane again, right? Then came the surprise of an arduous committee assignment, but that’s wrapping up soon, so next year things will surely improve …

March 28, 2023
These days, when I walk into a classroom, I have tremendous confidence — probably too much. It’s bred from experience, as I’ve been teaching at Wharton since 2009 and have cumulatively lectured to thousands of students. But sometimes, unfortunately, my confidence has led me to under-prepare for a presentation, and I’ve been caught flat-footed when pressed on a topic outside my area of expertise. As an assistant professor, though, I had the opposite problem. I spent so much time prepping my slides, memorizing student names and anticipating questions that my delivery of material was often stiff. Strangely, I’ve spent the bulk of my teaching career miscalibrated — at first I was under-confident in my abilities, and now I’m over-confident. Why can’t I just get it right?

February 28, 2023
I hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day! As a sign of my love for you, dear subscriber, I’m sharing an interview with one of the greatest living social psychologists about a bias so fundamental that the word fundamental is in its name! I’ll cut to the chase quickly so you can learn about a logical error profound enough to confound Aristotle. But first I have just a few recommended listens and reads to share.

January 24, 2022
Happy New Year! If you’ve read How to Change, you know that early January is reliably weird for me because every reporter, podcaster, radio host and tv anchor is desperate to interview someone (anyone!) for a story on New Year’s resolutions. And guess what pops up if you Google “scientist who studies New Year’s resolutions”? No, it’s not Bill Nye …

December 20, 2022
The most popular edition of this newsletter yet was a list of my favorite things, which I shared at the end of 2021. Since making decisions informed by data is my shtick, naturally, I’m bringing back the “favorite things” theme for the end of 2022. I hope this year’s list of my favorites will help you discover some wonderful new reads, listens and laughs, and I wish you and yours a fantastic holiday season!

November 22, 2022
Have you ever gotten a selfie from a dear friend taken on the set of a big budget Hollywood production featuring said friend with a major movie star? Well, maybe you have, but I certainly hadn’t until about a year ago when my incredible co-author Modupe Akinola texted me a snapshot of her palling around with Thor (aka Chris Hemsworth) in Australia where National Geographic was filming the first episode of a new documentary called Limitless with Chris Hemsworth. In honor of Modupe’s Hollywood debut, I’m featuring a Q&A with her about stress from the Choiceology archive this month.

October 18, 2022
Do you remember the classic 90s movie As Good As It Gets? In an Oscar-winning performance, Jack Nicholson utters a now famous line to Helen Hunt, who’s helping him confront a long untreated mental illness. He tells her: “you make me want to be a better man.” I think of that line whenever I think of NYU Stern Professor, best-selling author and popular TED talker Dolly Chugh because she’s the person in my life who most consistently inspires me to be better. Dolly studies implicit and explicit bias, and she writes about how science can help us uncover inequities, grow, build more inclusive organizations, and contribute to a more inclusive world. She’s also an incredible human being.

September 27, 2022
My Wharton colleague Adam Grant is a truly outstanding science communicator. So when Adam pinged me earlier this month to let me know he was launching a new weekly TED podcast called ReThinking featuring conversations with intellectual giants ranging from Danny Kahneman to Atul Gawande, I was thrilled. And I figured the time was right to share one of my favorite Choiceology Q&As of all-time — a conversation with Adam about the power of constructive conflict and how to harness it.

August 30, 2022
I had planned to go silent this summer and get back into the swing of things with my standard issue newsletters in September, but then something happened … I realized there are four amazing books coming out in the next two months that I can’t wait for the world to discover! I had the privilege of reading early copies of each one, and they are simply terrific. Next month’s newsletter will be in the usual format (featuring a Q&A with a leading academic), but today I’m giving you a heads up on four behavioral science must-reads of the fall.

June 28, 2022
I had the good fortune to take a relaxing week-long vacation in California earlier this month. Naturally, my time away meant I returned to an overflowing inbox. If you’re taking a summer vacation, I’d be willing to bet your inbox will get backed up too. Whenever things pile up, I find it helpful to set goals for getting work back under control, so I thought covering some more research on goals would be an excellent topic for this month’s newsletter. In April, I shared a Q&A about the importance of breaking big goals down into smaller subgoals. Today, I’m picking up on that thread with an interview exploring the magnetism and power of round number goals.

May 31, 2022
This month, I’m sharing an interview with Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos. Laurie teaches a wildly popular class on the science of well-being and also hosts a terrific podcast called The Happiness Lab. In her class and on her podcast, Laurie explores common misconceptions about happiness. She also shares research that can help us live more fulfilling lives. Goodness knows we could all use a dose of Laurie’s wisdom right now!

April 26, 2022
Now that spring has sprung, many of us are thinking about big new goals we hope to achieve. New year’s isn’t the only season for that, after all. So this month, I’m sharing an interview from a 2021 episode of Choiceology that touches on one of my favorite ways to boost your chances of making progress on a big goal.

March 22, 2022
Every time I’ve cried while taking in news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, my reaction was triggered by learning the story of a single person’s painful losses. Headlines about hundreds of deaths, war crimes and the millions of refugees who are suffering have prompted dismay and even curses, but they haven’t produced tears. So this month, I’m sharing a Q&A that feels unfortunately timely. It explains why we react more emotionally to stories about a single victim than stories about thousands.

February 22, 2022
I’m celebrating a round number birthday this month, and I can’t stop thinking about categorization. In honor of entering a new decade (40s here I come), I’m sharing an interview with Nobel laureate Richard Thaler on the topic of categorization, or what he calls “mental accounting.” It turns out that the somewhat arbitrary ways we categorize money and time have all sorts of fascinating implications.

January 25, 2022
Happy New Year! I know it’s a bit late in the month to offer that greeting, but I’m still milking the fresh start feeling I get every January 1st for all it’s worth. Naturally, this month’s newsletter is focused on the science of achieving your new year’s resolutions, which is one of my favorite topics (and a focus of much of my research). Inside you’ll find (mostly) relevant listens and reads as well as an interview with brilliant motivation scientist, Ayelet Fishbach. Ayelet shares evidence-based advice on the secret sauce that can help you stick to your goals.

December 28, 2021
I’ve studied the fresh start effect, so naturally, I relish endings — they usher in fresh starts! To wrap up the year, I’m breaking from my usual newsletter format and sharing a few of my favorite reads, listens and sources of laughs from 2021.

November 30, 2021
For many of us, the holidays are a season filled with shopping. Shopping for the best recipes and ingredients to make a delicious family feast. Shopping for the perfect presents. Shopping for plane, train, or bus tickets. Shopping, shopping, and more shopping. It can get overwhelming! If you, like me, are tempted to run in the other direction when facing a wall of choices, then you’ll particularly appreciate this month’s newsletter. I’ll share a conversation with psychologist and bestselling author Barry Schwartz, who has researched a phenomenon called choice overload. It turns out that more options aren’t always better.

October 26, 2021
One day in late September, I forgot to put my son’s water bottle in his backpack alongside his lunch, snack, and backup masks. As soon as I realized what I’d done, I was stricken with panic that he’d be desperately thirsty all day but too shy to ask a teacher for something to drink. Determined not to make a mistake like that ever again, I printed a checklist of the items that belong in my son’s backpack and placed it on the refrigerator. I haven’t made another mistake since. My improved track record might just be due to luck or my heightened attentiveness after a goof, but I’m betting the checklist has helped. This month, I’ll share a conversation with Northwestern University Professor Kirabo Jackson, whose research on checklists suggests we should rely on them far more than we do.

September 21, 2021
Recently, I’ve found myself assiduously avoiding stories about COVID in the news. Like everyone else, I’d hoped things would be far better than they are this fall, and some days I just don’t want to know exactly how safe (or unsafe) life is for a vaccinated Philadelphian. This type of information avoidance isn’t all that peculiar — it’s actually a well-known tendency of our species (dubbed “the ostrich effect”). This month, I’ll share an interview that explores why people avoid useful but potentially disheartening information.

June 29, 2021
I recently took my son to a play date. After a year-and-a-half without this kind of social interaction, I wasn’t surprised when he confessed that he was feeling nervous beforehand. I’d had a similar experience when heading to my first post-vaccine dinner party. But thanks to research by the amazing Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School, I had a trick up my sleeve that I was able to share with my son and use myself to quell some of those butterflies. It involved relabeling anxiety.