200. When Willpower Isn’t Enough

Sure, we all want to make good personal decisions, but it doesn't always work out. That's where "temptation bundling" comes in.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:28Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:13Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. You are about to hear the 200th original episode of Freakonomics Radio. Have you missed any? What about number 19, Waiter, There's a Physicist in My Soup, Part 1? Or number 20, yes, it's Waiter, There's a Physicist in My Soup, Part 2? About number 42, The Upside of Quitting, the game show we made, Tell Me Something I Don't Know, that was number 183. If you missed these or any others, they are all there for the taking, for free, at iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts, and also at Freakonomics.com. Just go to Freakonomics.com, find the Radio tab, and select the Archives. Thanks for listening to some, or maybe even all, of these 200

• 3:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  episodes, and thanks especially to those of you who have chosen to donate money to help make Freakonomics Radio. Our producing partner is WNYC, a public radio station, and one of their most important streams of revenue is listener donations. So while you're at Freakonomics.com rooting through our archives, go ahead and click on the Donate button you'll see there. Your money goes to WNYC, which in addition to producing Freakonomics Radio, makes great shows and podcasts like Radiolab, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media, New Tech City, many more. I will say this, the people who listen to Freakonomics Radio are famous around here for their high rate of giving. So what are you waiting for? Join the crowd, give us your money,

• 4:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  and maybe we'll make another 200 episodes, although that seems like a lot. At the moment, I'm not sure we'll even make two more. Well, I can probably commit to two. The fact is, this podcast is so much fun to make, I'll probably still be making it when I'm 200. Did I mention I got hold of some killer life extension drugs the other day? So please, give us a hand by going to Freakonomics.com and click Donate. Your grandchildren will thank you, as I do now.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  So I struggle, at the end of a long day, to get myself to the gym, even though I know I should go. And at the end of a long day, I also struggle with the desire to watch my favorite TV shows, instead of getting work done. And so, I actually realized that those two temptations, those two struggles I face, could be combined to solve both problems.

• 4:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Katie Milkman.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  And I'm an assistant professor at the Wharton School, where I study behavioral economics and how people make choices.

• 5:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, which might lead one to think that you are an economist by training, which would make one wrong, correct?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  That's right. My background is actually that I have a PhD in computer science and business, a joint PhD in those two fields. But I spent a lot of time hanging around economists and got really interested in this new field.

• 5:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  This new field that Milkman mentioned, behavioral economics, is something we talk about a lot on this program. It is essentially a marriage of psychology and economics. It is inhabited by people who wish to blend the economist's view of incentives with the psychologist's view that most people don't respond to incentives as rationally as economic theory would predict. It was behavioral economics that, years ago, got me interested in economics in the first place. Behavioral economics may not seem as consequential as macroeconomics or labor economics, but, I would argue, it can offer tremendous leverage when properly applied. One well-placed nudge can go a very long way. It is also a field that appreciates simple, clever solutions, like something that Katie Milkman's been working on.

• 6:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  She calls it temptation bundling.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  I invented that phrase, although I'm sure many other people had invented the same solution that I came up with and used that phrase to describe.

• 6:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's how it works, in Milkman's own case.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  What I realized is that if I only allowed myself to watch my favorite TV shows while exercising at the gym, then I'd stop wasting time at home on useless television, and I'd start craving trips to the gym at the end of a long day, because I'd want to find out what happens. Next in my show. And not only that, I'd actually enjoy my workout and my show more combined. I wouldn't feel guilty watching TV and time would fly while I was at the gym. So when I talk about temptation bundling, I mean combining a temptation, something like a TV show, a guilty pleasure, something that will pull you into engaging in a behavior with something you know you should do, but might struggle to do.

• 7:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a nice idea, isn't it? As is often the case, ideas that seem new in academia have in fact been running wild in the real world for quite some time, as we learned when we solicited your examples of temptation bundling.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  My temptation bundle is to listen to Freakonomics podcasts while I'm running, doing it right now.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  What I like to do is skip an afternoon of work and go to the movies after my annual pap smear.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  I really wish my temptation bundle was acceptable, but it would be drinking at work.

• 7:51Speaker 05

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 8:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I would love to know how you describe the unifying view of your research, which we're going to talk about today. And so here's, here's the way I would describe it, maybe, is that there are a lot of activities that most of us consider should activities. And then there are a lot of ways that we avoid those should activities. And you try to identify the gap and look for ways to close the gap that are not too intrusive or costly or painful. That was my lame attempt to present your worldview. Let me hear it from you.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  I love your attempt to present my worldview. I think it's much more cohesive. Actually, one of the things that I think is always funny is whenever someone, I'm at a cocktail party and I'm with my husband and somebody asks me what I do, I say, "Well, actually, he'll describe it better than I will," because I get so focused on the little details that it's hard to actually step back and see the big picture. But I think your description's beautiful. So I think, in short, I struggle a lot with willpower, and I find it difficult at the end of a long day to get to the gym. I find it difficult to stick to my diet. I find it difficult to stick to my goals more generally. And what I have found curious in the world, one of the things I've found curious is why and what I can do to solve those problems for myself and for others. And that's where a lot of my research focuses.

• 9:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so let's start with temptation bundling.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  So what if you only let yourself get a pedicure while catching up on overdue emails for work? Or what if you only let yourself listen to your favorite CDs while catching up on household chores? Or only let yourself go to your very favorite restaurant, whose hamburgers you crave, while spending time with a difficult relative who you should see more of? Those would all be examples of temptation bundling.

• 10:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gotcha. Okay, so the key is that the activity that you want to do is constrained. You can only do it when you're doing the other activities. So that sounds, to some degree, like a commitment device, which we've talked about on the show before. And our examples were-- so I'll give you a couple of our strange examples of commitment devices. One was this guy who wanted to get healthy. He wanted to lose weight, but he wanted to get healthy. He had a new kid, so he drew up a list of prohibitions, everything from alcohol to junk food to pornography, on and on and on. And if he violated them, then he would force himself to write a check to Oprah Winfrey, who he hated more than anything in the world, for whatever reason. Steve Levitt had a diet idea also, which is for people who are trying to lose weight.

• 10:50Speaker 06

  One thing I know would work is just take a little can, like, say, a baby food jar, and fill it with vomit, okay? And wear it around your neck. And every time you decide that you're hungry, just open the jar and take a little sniff. I guarantee you, you will lose weight. Guaranteed.

• 11:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  So those are commitment devices of some sorts. I'm curious to know whether you see temptation bundling as a commitment device, or it's more of a first cousin somehow?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  I see temptation bundling as a new type of commitment device with some distinct features from standard commitment devices. So a standard commitment device typically provides some consequence if you fail to engage in the intended behavior. And so this is a little different. What we're doing here is basically combining two commitments with each other, and they sort of fit like puzzle pieces. So you're using something that's instantly gratifying to create a pull to provide the motivation you need to do something that's unpleasurable at the moment of engagement. And then the other component that's different is that you can actually have complementarities, which is an econ speak term for peanut butter and jelly, two things that go better together and are more enjoyable together than they would be separately. And so one of the neat things about, for instance, only allowing yourself to watch

• 12:02Speaker 01

  your favorite TV show while you're at the gym is the fact that you might actually enjoy your workout more, and you might enjoy the TV show more when you do them together, whereas a traditional commitment device just penalizes some behavior.

• 12:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Great. Okay, so in theory, I'm sure everybody hearing this says, oh, man, Katie, that's brilliant. That is such a good way to approach problem solving. So that's the theory at least, but now you need to find out if in practice it works. So talk about what you did to find out if temptation bundling could actually improve outcomes.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So we ran an experiment, actually, at the gym at the University of Pennsylvania with a bunch of participants who told us that they wanted to exercise more. And we randomly assigned-

• 12:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  How did you find these subjects in the first place?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  We posted flyers all over the campus. We sent out email blasts to every listserv we could find, and the people who came told us they desperately wanted to exercise more. And they also had to have an iPod to be in our study, and they had to belong to the University of Pennsylvania gym so that they could enter and exit as they pleased.

• 13:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, good.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  So we took these participants who wanted to exercise more, and we randomly assigned them through a coin toss to one of several different groups. The first experimental group was a treatment group. And these participants came in and they had their iPod with them. And we told them that we were actually going to give them a new iPod, in addition to the one they already had, that would be preloaded with four tempting audio novels of their choice. So we had a list of 82 books that had been pre-rated as extremely tempting and difficult to put down once you get engaged. So these are books like The Da Vinci Code and The Hunger Games.

• 13:39Speaker 07

  The rules of The Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising, each of the 12 districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Participants choose the four that appeal most to them, load them on this loaned audio novel device, an iPod, and then they take them to the gym and they do a 30-minute workout while listening to the first audio novel.

• 14:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  I have to say that it's so flattering as a writer that you are treating hearing a book as the treat that people get for having to work out. It's so awesome.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  It is awesome. I love it. It worked, too. I do suspect that TV would have been even more tempting and enticing, but I think there are some novels that really grab you. And in fact, actually, almost half of the participants in our study at the time when we ran it chose The Hunger Games. It was really popular right then. It was a fabulous book for this study, I think, because it's so addictive. Once you get into it, it's just impossible to put the book down because you desperately want to know what happens.

• 14:39Speaker 07

  Happy Hunger Games, and may the odds be ever in your favor.

• 14:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  You only have access to the audio version of the book when you're at the gym, correct?

• 14:48Speaker 01

  That's right. So the participants in our study, they listen to the first 30 minutes and then they're told, and this is while exercising, they're told if they want to hear what happens next, they'll have to come back to the gym, where we're going to hold this iPod we've loaned them in a locked, monitored locker that they can only check out when exercising. So that's the first experimental group.

• 15:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yep.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Second experimental group has a very similar experience. They also get tempting audio novels. They also listen to the first 30 minutes. But this time, those tempting audio novels are loaded onto their personal iPods. And they also do the workout for 30 minutes while listening to the novel. But they are told, why don't you try to only listen while exercising? But we won't enforce it. So we want to see if actually people can self-impose this rule successfully, which would be great, because if we can just educate people about this strategy, and that's all we need to do, and that can have a benefit, that means it's a really easy job to roll out temptation bundling to the world.

• 15:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Great, okay.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Finally, we have our third group, which is actually a control group. And the control group, instead of receiving a tempting audio novel, they received an equally valued gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. And they also completed a 30-minute workout at the beginning of the study, but not while listening to a novel. They could do whatever they wanted. They had their iPod, so maybe they listened to music. Maybe they listened to a novel. They could do whatever they wanted, but we didn't control that. And we simply encouraged them to exercise more.

• 16:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so you've got the three groups, the ones who can only listen to the novel that you get them addicted to while at the gym.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  The second group, who you give them the addictive material, but they don't have to come to the gym to listen to it. Then the third group, who don't even get the addictive material, unless they go out and buy it themselves with the money that you gave them, right? Those are the three groups?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Those are the three groups. I'd add to the middle group, that gets the addictive material and doesn't have to listen to it at the gym, that we strongly encourage them to only allow themselves to listen

• 16:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  I see, okay.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  when they're at the gym. So it's framed as, try to only use this to lure yourself to the gym, as opposed to, here's just some material. So they're given the tool, in a sense. They're just not given the restriction. They have to self-impose it.

• 16:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so three groups. The data you collected for, people went for a minimum of nine weeks, I believe you said, yes?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  That's right, that's our follow-on period. So basically, what we're doing is, we have this period. At the end of that, they're paid for being in the study dismissed. They fill out some survey measures, and we thank them. So our critical period is whether or not they exercise more during those nine weeks while we're imposing these different rules on them and giving them access to temptation bundling.

• 17:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  And so what we see is that for the first seven weeks of our study, the full treatment group exercises significantly more than the control group. And the group that's given access to the audio novels and asked to just self impose the rules right in between the two. So that's good news in a sense. They're actually, they look a bit better than control initially. And so that seems like maybe people can actually do this for themselves, although they're not doing as well as the people who have the full binding commitment that we've provided. And then we see a little bit of wear off. And then over seven weeks, this is working. Participants then on the seventh week go home. It's Thanksgiving break. The gym is closed. When they come back, we look at the data and we see that the effect is completely eliminated. So when they come back, they

• 17:51Speaker 01

  seem to have forgotten about their novels, perhaps, and they're no longer motivated by temptation bundling. So on the one hand, this is actually kind of neat because it suggests that wanting to know what happens next in your novel may really be what's driving our effects as we'd hope, because forced separation is the one thing we know reduces cravings. But it also means we have more work to do to figure out how to reengage people with temptation bundling after time away from the gym.

• 18:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  For the people in the first group, the treatment group, who can only hear the material at the gym, do they actually have to be working out at the gym to hear it? Or can they just come and get the iPod out of the locker and listen to the novel while sitting and drinking a milkshake or something?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  That's a great question. When we did the study, we had no way of forcing them to work out while they were listening to the novel. We did actually have their security folks who sit right by the locker where these things are being held. And we asked them whether or not they saw people coming and sitting, hanging out. They said the people who were coming to the locker were coming to work out and they were in their workout clothes. But that's anecdotal rather than empirical. What would be really cool is if we had Fitbits, for instance, on everyone and could actually track how much exercise they're doing. And I'm doing new research right now, now that Fitbits are much more widely distributed than they were when I ran the study, where we are trying to do things like that, where we actually track physical activity, not just, in this case, all we could track is whether or not they enter and exit the gym.

• 19:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Awesome. And I'm guessing there's so many places you could go with that because you could see pace and intensity and all different kinds of things of workout, depending on material and inspir-

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, there are so many neat things you can see with Fitbit data.

• 19:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  There are also a lot of neat things that Milkman can envision doing with temptation bundling more generally.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  One thing you could do is imagine building this into an app, for instance, that let you create certain geolocations, like all the gyms you belong to, or the only gym you belong to, where you can access tempting content on your iPod and then set restrictions so you can say, I can only access this content at those tempting locations.

• 19:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then there's what she calls Gymflicks.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Gymflicks is one of my favorite suggested products. So imagine that you took a company like Netflix and you called it Gymflicks and you let people set aside certain TV shows for gym-only access. My research suggests that a product like that might be very attractive to people.

• 20:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, what do you think is the most common temptation that is bundled by Freakonomics Radio listeners?

• 20:20Speaker 08

  I like to drink Scotch while I fold laundry.

• 20:23Speaker 06

  I like to enjoy a cold beer while I clean the house.

• 20:26Speaker 08

  A drink that I love making. I call it the nectar of the gods.

• 20:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  And we explore what Katie Milkman calls the fresh start effect.

• 20:37Speaker 09

  Like, when I wake up, sometimes I feel sometimes that I'm a new person.

• 20:43Speaker 10

  I went vegetarian, like, on my birthday in 1997.

• 20:47Speaker 11

  My birthday's coming up in two weeks, and I'm just tired of being dead.

• 20:59Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 21:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just head to granola.ai/freakonomics. That's granola.ai/freakonomics to get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai/freakonomics. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on the things you love, like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day. So switch your home and auto to Progressive and see if you could save and keep sipping away. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers.

• 22:29Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 23:08Speaker 05

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 23:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  We are talking with Katie Milkman of the Wharton School at Penn. She's been doing research on temptation bundling and how it can help motivate us to do the things we ought to be doing but, left to our own devices, might not do. Milkman has also been doing research on what she calls the fresh start effect.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  So the work I've done on the Fresh Start Effect was actually motivated by giving a talk out at Google a couple of years ago and telling them about some of the different tools I had done research on that can be helpful to getting people to do things like exercise and get flu shots and follow through on various other goals that they intend to follow through on, but sometimes fail to. And one of the HR folks at Google asked me this great question while I was out there. He said, you know, we see that there are all these tools available and we'd love to roll them out and try to promote them to our employees to encourage more long-term focused behaviors. But do you have a sense of when it would be best to deploy these tools? What is the best time? And we just hadn't looked at that in my research group.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  So that's actually what motivated the work I've done on the Fresh Start Effect.

• 24:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right. And what kind of tools were they trying to roll out?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  So I had actually talked about the idea of temptation bundling. So that was one of the things I presented. I'd also presented some of my research showing that if you prompt people to form concrete plans about exactly when they intend to follow through on a given behavior, in this case, it was getting a flu shot or getting a colonoscopy, even in the privacy of their own home, if they're just prompted to think through privately the date and time when they intend to do that, that actually increases follow through quite significantly and substantially. So those are the tools that I had just presented. And they said, when do we roll these out? And I sat back and I scratched my head and I thought, you know, well, we know about the New Year's effect.

• 25:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  We do know about the New Year's effect that a lot of people make resolutions that they at least try to keep. Here are a few samples from people we spoke with.

• 25:16Speaker 12

  My resolution for New Year's was to smile more.

• 25:22Speaker 13

  I make the same one every year. Yeah? Eat less, [BLEEP] more.

• 25:28Speaker 14

  I mean, it was New Year's last year and I did start doing yoga and now I do go three times a week. And it's only to stop the inevitable decline of my person because I'm 33. But I think it's the best thing I've done for myself in a long time and it was New Year's.

• 25:41Speaker 15

  Is it a resolution if your wife decides that you can't wear tube socks anymore? That was a resolution because they were thrown away.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  We create these resolutions and there's a lot of social support for that kind of thing, so it's not clear that that is anything besides a social norm or a social ritual. But I wondered if there might be something more to it. And in particular, one of the things that struck me is that at the start of a new year, we feel like we have a clean slate. It's the fresh start effect, in essence, that I feel at the beginning of a new year is driven by the fact that last year's behind me, all of my past failures are from last year. And I can think, those are not me, that's old me, that's not new me, new me isn't going to make these mistakes. And so I thought, if that's true, if that's part of what's going on at the beginning of a new year, then there should be lots of other cycles that show that pattern as well.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  So we should see the same kinds of dissociation from our past failings and same motivation to do better on this cycle at the beginning of a new week, the beginning of a new month, following birthdays, when we feel like we're beginning a new cycle in our own lives, following holidays, which may stand apart from other dates and create the start of a new cycle for us personally as well.

• 26:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  So talk about the evidence you have and where the evidence comes from, what you go looking for, where you're getting the data to do that.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so the first, the very first data set we explored actually was maybe very natural, given that the idea originated at Google. The first thing we did is we downloaded searches for the term diet on Google. And diet, by the way, is the most popular New Year's resolution. It's the thing that we most struggle with, and that applies to me as well. So we downloaded daily search volume for this term over the course of eight years, which you can get from Google. And what we did is we looked to see whether or not there were any particular moments when it bounced up and whether or not, in fact, it was consistent with our hypothesis, which was that people would search more for the term diet at the beginning of a new week, month, year, and following holidays. And we found indeed that that's exactly the case in that data set.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  So we see bigger effects for dates that feel like fresh starts. And if we look at placebo terms, something like weather or news that people often search for, we don't see those patterns. So it's something distinct happening when we look at the term diet. So that was our very first exploration. We got all excited about what we saw and we said, well, let's, let's see, that's just... Information search, information gathering. What about real behavior? So we actually went to this data set on all of the visits to the gym by undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, which we had at our fingertips, and said, maybe we'll see it in gym visits, too. And when we looked at that data, what we saw is that people visit the gym, the very same undergraduate, in fact, we can look within student and see that the very same undergraduate

• 28:23Speaker 01

  is more likely to visit the gym at the start of a new week, month, year, following holidays and following birthdays, with the notable exception of 21st birthdays. And I'll let you speculate as to why that might be different.

• 28:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm guessing alcohol may be involved.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  I'm letting you speculate. I don't have, I don't have any data on exactly why. But, you know, my speculation may or may not have gone in the same direction.

• 28:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Judging by the submissions you sent when we asked for your examples of temptation bundling, I'd say that, yes, alcohol may be involved.

• 28:58Speaker 08

  I like to drink Scotch while I fold laundry. If I don't work out, I don't drink beer. That's my trade off.

• 29:06Speaker 16

  My name is Philip Nielsen, and I live in Sweden. And my temptation bundle is actually cleaning my apartment before going out for drinks with my friends.

• 29:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, OK, so I'm thinking of the different ways that one might look at this fresh start effect. So, so one would be that, you know, the beginning of a new year, or maybe a new school term, or some new, you know, some demarcation of time that feels like your past is behind you and your future is ahead of you, and then you embark on this thing. And theoretically, that thing that you embark on is better for you. But then, talk about the degree to which people fall off. And the implication is that it's bad to fall off, but I guess I'm thinking, well, maybe this activity they were trying to change or add to wasn't that important to them.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a lot of fall off with New Year's resolutions or with any goal that we're pursuing with anything that requires willpower.

• 30:04Speaker 17

  New Year's, I always say I need to stop smoking cigarettes and I always revert back to smoking a couple of days after.

• 30:10Speaker 18

  You know, I find resolutions are tough. Like, I try to meditate more in the new year and it doesn't go well.

• 30:17Speaker 19

  For the new year, yeah, you say you're gonna lose weight or do something like that. Then by February, meh, I fell off.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Some people say that means, why even bother in the first place? Why even form New Year's resolutions if you're gonna fall off?

• 30:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  I think there's a few different responses to that. One is, you sort of, you can't hit a homerun if you don't swing, so it's never gonna work if you don't start. And I think that that suggests that we want fresh start moments to motivate people and hopefully eventually they'll actually hit the homerun, even if they fall off a bunch of times. So, that's one answer. Another answer is that sometimes, actually, the behavior just takes a tiny bit of effort. So there are some things we can do that are just a one-time decision and they make a huge impact on the rest of our lives. For instance, if you just sign up for a 401k plan just once, then you're gonna be saving forever after. Or if you just get your flu shot, you only have to do that once a year and then it has benefits for the remainder of the year. A lot, a lot of different medical procedures have that

• 31:16Speaker 01

  characteristic, where if you can just get people to do it once every so often, even at a low frequency, like a colonoscopy, once every 10 years could be enough to save many lives. So, I think we can also think about the fresh start effect as having a lot of benefits for those kinds of one-time behaviors with huge, huge downstream consequences that are positive.

• 31:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. So, considering that you've identified this and found it and found evidence for it in the data, what can you do about it? How can you use this knowledge to help people make more pro-social choices?

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great question. Well, I think there's a bunch of different implications. So, one thing we've tried is just reminding people that a given day is a fresh start. So, for instance, we have one experiment where we reminded people that a certain day was the first day of spring. And we experimentally compared people who we reminded. A certain day was the first day of spring with another group that we didn't. And the group that got that first day of spring reminder was more motivated to pursue their goals and receive a reminder about their goals specifically on the first day of spring when it was labeled as such. And so you can think about just reframing a given day, reminding someone that it is an opportunity for a fresh start as one intervention that might increase engagement in fresh start behaviors. You could also think about just asking people to do things that are good for them on fresh

• 32:34Speaker 01

  start dates. So you might try to roll out, for instance, a planning prompt campaign or offer people an opportunity to sign up for a commitment device or for a temptation bundling device on a fresh start date when we know their natural inclination and their motivation to do things like exercise and diet. And by the way, we also found the fresh start effect with non-health-related goals. So looking at things like financial goals and educational goals. So whatever it is that they're striving to do, if we provide them with the tools they need at a moment when they're feeling fresh, they may be more likely to take advantage of those tools and start a good new habit.

• 33:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so Katie, let me play devil's advocate for a minute. It's more like jerk's advocate, not so much devil's advocate. But why should smart, motivated people like you have to work so hard to nudge and trick people into taking better care of themselves, for instance? Why not just let Darwinian forces do their thing and weed out the people who are too lazy to go to the gym or to get a vaccine?

• 33:44Speaker 01

  There are a lot of different answers. One could be that you simply want to see better outcomes for people who maybe didn't realize what they needed to do or were too busy to figure out what they needed to do. So this is one way of helping people who maybe really would do this if they had the time and energy and education. Another answer would be that there's huge social benefits, right? So even selfishly, we all pay the costs when other people fail to exert the willpower needed to take care of themselves. And so you could even think of a selfish reason for engaging in this kind of research and in providing these kinds of nudges, which is that society is going to pay the cost when bad things happen to people who didn't take care of themselves. But I like to think of it as a more altruistic motive.

• 34:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can I just say for the record that I don't really agree with the jerk's advocate argument. I just wanted to hear what you had to say.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  I know.

• 34:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm on your side.

• 34:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Maybe Katie Milkman's research has inspired you to harness the fresh start effect, but maybe you need one more nudge, a bit of further inspiration to follow. If that's the case, we will leave you with some more of your examples that we gathered along the way.

• 34:59Speaker 20

  I'm not a particularly religious person, but during Yom Kippur, I think about some of the things that I haven't done particularly well that year and some of the things that I want to improve upon the next year.

• 35:10Speaker 21

  My grandmother, she died from smoking. So I remember I used to smoke cigarettes with my friends all the time in high school. As soon as she died, it was like over. I was just like, why? Like, that's it. I'm not smoking cigarettes ever again. But now I just smoke weed. But yeah, that's a better solution.

• 35:26Speaker 22

  Last August was my birthday and I turned 25. And something that was a long-term goal for me was to apply to grad school. So after I celebrated my birthday, I started with the application process for all the grad schools.

• 35:39Speaker 23

  Leaving a job is probably the perfect sort of fresh start moment. So generally, in the morning, I make better decisions than I do at the, in the evening, put it that way.

• 35:51Speaker 24

  I think every day, honestly, you can start fresh. So let's say I went out to dinner the night before and I ate a lot of sweets and carbs. The next day, I wake up and instead of beating myself up about it, I try to eat a little bit better that day.

• 36:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. Next week on the show, what would an economist never, ever, ever, ever put on his own online dating profile? And what might an economist lie about?

• 36:30Speaker 25

  In some of the questions it asks you how into deep conversations with your mate and cuddling and things like that you are, I may have made myself seem a bit more accessible in those dimensions than an honest person would say.

• 36:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  How to build the best ever online dating profile. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 37:00Speaker 05

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• 37:28Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 38:13Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 38:46Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 39:23Speaker 26

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