October 13, 2021 • 16 mins
Dr. Maya Shankar is the founder of the White House's Behavioral Science Team. She served as a senior advisor during the Obama administration and in 2016, Shankar was the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations.
She is the host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans.
Here are some resources that Dr. Shankar mentions in this episode:
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
“A Slight Change of Plans” with Adam Grant
“A Slight Change of Plans” with Dr. Katy Milkman
Solvable is produced by Jocelyn Frank, research by David Zha, booking by Lisa Dunn, The managing producer is Sachar Mathias and the executive producer is Mia Lobel.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, this is solvable. I'm Ronald Young Junior. What do
you get when you put a behavioral scientist in the
room with policymakers? Every program in policy has a default
design that will influence people one way or the other.
If that behavioral scientist is Maya Shankar, you may get
(00:37):
an analysis of how our complicated human minds impact our
participation in government programs. We are influenced by some very
surprising factors that ought to not influence our decisions, but
absolutely do. Effective government policies are tricky things to get right.
To begin with, there's lobbying and then rigorous debate around
whether a policy or program should exist at all. That's
(01:00):
followed by, as we've seen recently, a lot of argument
about how much money to spend. But once the budget
has been settled and the money allocated to federal programs,
there's the important step of designing programs that truly serve
the people and reach them, and that's where studying human
behavior can help. Small changes can be the difference between
successful engagement or a low participation rate. So the government
(01:24):
ended up leveraging an insight known as the power of defaults,
and basically it changed the school Lunch program from an
opt in program to an opt out program. The National
School Lunch Program reaches nearly thirty million children each year.
Thanks to smart, sometimes seemingly subtle changes like these, millions
(01:46):
more Americans may be making the most of government programs,
from farmers to veterans to college age students. Behavioral science
is the study of how and why we make decisions,
as well as how we develop our attitudes and beliefs
about the world. Maya Shankar is the host of the
podcast A Slight Change of Plans, and she founded the
(02:06):
White House's Behavioral Science Team, serving as an advisor during
the Obama administration to help develop strategy and implement government
policies by studying behavioral factors that influence decision making. Better
implementation of government policy is solvable but the help of
behavioral science. I think if you'd asked me as a
(02:30):
little kid, what do you want to be when you
grow up? I would have definitely not said cognitive scientists
because I had no idea what it was. I was
actually a violinist growing up. That was my passion. I
started playing when I was six years old, and I
really got on the speed train when I was nine
and started studying at the Juilliard School of Music in
New York. And then when I was a teenager, It's
(02:52):
a pearlman asked me to be his private violence student,
and so at that point I thought, Wow, I've gotten
a vote of confidence from the person I think is
the best violinist in the world. I might actually have
what it takes. Very Unfortunately, I had a sudden injury
in my left hand that basically ended my career overnight
when I was fifteen. So how did you make the
pivot from violinists to behavioral scientists. I was forced to
(03:14):
explore other avenues and other paths In that summer before college,
when I was supposed to be touring in China with
my friends Ronald and instead I was helping my parents
clean their basement. So equally cool summer situation, but I
ended up discovering a book on how the mind works.
I remember thinking, oh, my gosh, I had no idea
(03:39):
just how complicated our mental systems are and what goes
behind our ability to make decisions and learn language and
you know, interact with the world and the way that
we do. And I was just a light bulb moment
for me where I realized, I think this is what
I want to do. I think this is what I
want to study, because I felt completely in all of
(04:00):
the human mind. And you did it. You went through
a lot of schooling to immerse yourself in this stuff.
You studied with esteemed cognitive psychologist Lori Santo said, Yeo,
also a Pushkin co worker. Went on to get a
PhD and do a post doc and join the ranks
in academia. But after a number of years involved with
the research side of things, you realize that you didn't
(04:22):
love it. You know. It was like an o explotive moment.
What do I do next? And I actually ended up
calling up my underground advisor and I called her and
I said, Laurie, so, I know I've been doing this
whole you know, want to be a professor thing for
some time because I really admire you. But I actually
don't want to do that anymore. I'm thinking of becoming
a general management consultant. And Laurie, you could hear a
(04:44):
light gasp on the other phone, namely, oh no, I
did not invest all this time into my student for
her to leave my field. And so she said okay,
before she was very gentle before you explore that path, Maya,
I just want to let you know that there's incredible
work happening in the Obama White House right now that
is helping low income kids get access to free lunch.
(05:06):
But there's no actual job that hiring for. There's no
They're not like, yeah, we want to hire a behavioral scientist.
So I end up sending a cold email to a
former Obama advisor, Cass Sunstein, and I say, hey, Cass, like,
I'm Maya, I'm a post doc, i have no public
policy experience, and I've published nothing of significance, but I'd
(05:27):
really love to work at the intersection of behavioral science
and policy. Thankfully, he ignored all the insecurities seeping out
of my email and immediately got back to me and said,
let me connect you with Obama's science advisor and let
him know that I sent you along. And so within days,
Ronald like this was a crazy life change for me.
I was interviewing with Obama officials, pitching them on the
(05:49):
idea of creating a new position for me in which
I could translate insights about human behavior into the design
of public policy. So I packed up my bags and
I moved to DC, and you know, I started my
job at the White House at the beginning of Obama's
second term. Can you talk a little bit about what
behavioral factors are, what that looks like, and give a
few examples on how that played into the work that
(06:12):
you actually did. Behavioral science is the study of how
and why we make decisions, as well as how we
develop our attitudes and beliefs about the world. And the
reason why this field is so important in the context
of public policy making is that it reveals that we
are influenced by some very surprising factors that ought to
(06:33):
not influence our decisions, but absolutely do, sometimes outside of
our conscious awareness. So let me give you a concrete example.
I think we'd all like to believe that when we
go into a voting booth, we'll end up voting for
the person we'd most like to see elected into office. Right,
That's pretty common sense. But research shows that the order
in which the candidate's names appear on a ballot can
(06:55):
exert a significant influence on our voting behavior, and so
when public policymakers become aware of this bias, they can
in turn design a solution, namely to randomize the order
in which the candidate's names appear across ballot. When you
don't appreciate that these factors are actually informing decisions, then
you might be engaging in suboptimal policy design. So my
(07:18):
intention joining the White House was to make sure that
we were designing public policies with our best understanding of
human behavior in mind. So, talk a little bit about
the work you did in those early days of the
second Obama administration. How did you figure out which policies
needed the help of behavioral science. I was knocking on
every single door saying, you know what problems are you
(07:40):
already trying to solve? Now, let me brainstorm how the
tools in my toolbox can help you achieve those goals.
So a good example of this is in an early
meeting I met with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and
they had built up this program that was trying to
help veterans reacclimate to civilian life after their time overseas,
(08:00):
and that transition, as you might know, can be very
challenging and fraught with lots of struggles. We ended up
changing just one word in an email marketing message about
the program, instead of telling veterans that they were eligible
for the program, we simply reminded them that they had
earned it through their years of service, and that one
word change led to a nine percent increase in access
(08:22):
to the veterans program. And it was based on a
behavioral science insight called the endowment effect, which basically says
that we value things more when we feel that we
own them or have earned them, and that again led
to a groundswell of activity and excitement for this work.
May do you think that your work is a result
of suboptimal policy making or suboptimal policy enacting. So the
(08:47):
policies themselves were fantastic, but there was a there was
an implementation gap, right. We weren't thinking about accessibility, availability
of the program, what it means in real life to
engage with the government in this way. Another name that
they had for your team was the Nudge Unit, And
when I read that, I was like, I don't want
to be nudged. I'm not trying to be nudged in
any direction, especially when it comes to the government. But
(09:11):
you talking about it being about policy implementation kind of
makes me understand it a little bit more. But what
would you say to detractors that say, I don't like
this policy. I don't want to be nudged into doing it,
and now they're using government science trickery in order to
get me to do it. I don't feel good about that.
How would you respond to those folks? Yeah, well, first
I would say there's no default less state of the world.
(09:35):
And what I mean by that is every program and
policy has a default design that will influence people one
way or the other. If you're a veteran and you're
asked to fill out a burdens and application form that
requires referencing fifteen different resources, well that's a default too.
That's a nudge too, right, And chances are those requirements
(09:56):
are nudging veterans away from accessing a program that can
actually be in their benefit. But nudges will not work
for people who don't want to take the action. An
example of this is, you know, sending an email reminder
about in rolling in a retirement savings plan will make
a difference for a military service member who wants to
enroll but just needs a reminder. It will not make
(10:17):
a difference for someone who doesn't want to enroll because,
for example, they want to use the money to make
a down payment on a home or they just want
the disposable income. So I think it's really important for
listeners to understand behavioral science is not a silver bullet, right.
It helps to enable people to reach their long term
goals who are seeking that long term goal, but it
(10:37):
will not make a difference for those who don't want
in So, how do you decide that your approach is
helping enough people to bother doing it? Leadership and government
(10:57):
and in the White House put in a lot of
effort to figure out, you know, what are our goals
for this year. Then we wanted to make sure that
we were responding to those goals and we were leveraging
what we knew from behavioral science to help them achieve
those goals more effectively. So this might involve helping student
loan borrowers repay their loans in a more effective way
or understand what their options are, or helping farmers get
(11:20):
access to loans with the US Department of Agriculture. And
then we would also look at other factors. How many
people are we going to be able to help through
this project? Right, are we operating in the millions? Because
if so, yes, that makes a lot of sense for
us to work on. And then we also wanted to
make sure that the outcome that we are trying to
change was significant from a policy perspective. So things like
(11:42):
helping workers find jobs, getting more people to sign up
for clean energy plans, or health insurance, these are all
outcomes that are of huge significance. Some of the policy
solutions I've read about, which come from studying human behavior,
kind of sound like common sense. Talking to students telling
them to sign them for class by text message, having
the opt in program or the opt out program. Do
(12:05):
you think that it's necessary to have a government team
dedicated to behavioral science for these policy tweaks to actually
be implemented, Like I'm imagining if I'm a member of Congress, Yeah,
and I'm looking at this line item for this team,
I'm wondering, do we need a whole team to carry
out little tweaks like this? Yeah? So I think one is,
you know, some of these insights can absolutely seem like
(12:27):
common sense after the fact, but the reality is that
they weren't being implemented in our absence. And it's also
important to note that behavioral science is a very context
specific space to work in. Not all insights will work
in all areas. And you need trained behavioral scientists in
order to make the right prescriptions, right to design meaningful
(12:48):
experiments to teach us what is working in what context
in the ideal world some decades from now. It would
be amazing if our team was rendered obsolete because agencies
were just hiring the relevant people with the relevant skill
sets to do this work. As a matter of course,
just good government, that is the goal to drive yourself
out of existence. But at the time, and it continues
(13:10):
to be the case today because the team is very
much still around and the Biden administration and was around
during the Trump administration doing great work to help you
on topics like the opioid epidemic and wildfires and whatnot.
It's important to sometimes have these dedicated teams that are
exclusively focused on the particular goal of translating human behavioral
(13:32):
insights into public policy improvements, because otherwise it's too easy
for it to get ignored. How do we apply these
ideas when there's not a dedicated office, Like, how would
state and localities apply some of these principles. Well, the
nice thing is actually there's been a flurry of activity
in state and local government in which nudge units are sprouting.
So lots of state and local governments now have their
(13:55):
own nudge units or they are using insights from behavioral science.
But there's no one size fits all approach with behavioral science.
You can't just say, oh, here are my favorite ten insights,
let me just apply them to all the policies and
programs there. There is a rigorous science behind it, and
you need to make sure that you do have experts
who are looking at those optimal translations. Is there anything
(14:18):
our listeners can do if they want to, If they
they're listening to this and they're like, man, I want
more science in government, I want to inject more What
do you, well, what can they do to help if
they want to be a part of this now? So
I would say, like, the bible of behavioral science and
policy is this book called Nudge. And actually Richard Taylor
and Cass Sunstein, the authors of this book, came out
(14:38):
with a final edition version just recently. It actually references
the work that's happened in the UK and the United
States to try to increase the translation of behavioral science
into policy. So I would send listeners to that book
first and foremost on my podcast, A slight change of Plans.
I had a chance to interview some science experts where
we talk about the science behind changing people's minds with
(14:59):
folks like Adam Grant, the science of behavior change with
doctor Katie Milkman, and I would point folks to those
specific episodes because I think it's a really nice primer
for where the science is at right now when it
comes to human behavior. Maya, thank you so much for
being with us today. Thanks so much for having me Ronald.
(15:20):
It was so much fun to chat with you. Doctor
Maya Shankar is the founder of the White House's Behavioral
Science Team. She served as a senior advisor in the
Obama White House. In twenty sixteen, Shanker served as the
first Behavioral Science Advisor to the United Nations under Bond
Ki Moon. She's also the host of A Slight Change
(15:40):
of Plans, another great Pushkin podcast. You should check it out.
It's available everywhere you listen. Solvable is produced by Jocelyn Frank,
research by David Jack, booking by Lisa Dunn. Special thanks
to Keishell Williams. Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and
our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. I'm Ronald Young Jr.
(16:02):
Thanks for listening,
Pushkin, this is solvable. I'm Ronald Young Junior. What do
you get when you put a behavioral scientist in the
room with policymakers? Every program in policy has a default
design that will influence people one way or the other.
If that behavioral scientist is Maya Shankar, you may get
(00:37):
an analysis of how our complicated human minds impact our
participation in government programs. We are influenced by some very
surprising factors that ought to not influence our decisions, but
absolutely do. Effective government policies are tricky things to get right.
To begin with, there's lobbying and then rigorous debate around
whether a policy or program should exist at all. That's
(01:00):
followed by, as we've seen recently, a lot of argument
about how much money to spend. But once the budget
has been settled and the money allocated to federal programs,
there's the important step of designing programs that truly serve
the people and reach them, and that's where studying human
behavior can help. Small changes can be the difference between
successful engagement or a low participation rate. So the government
(01:24):
ended up leveraging an insight known as the power of defaults,
and basically it changed the school Lunch program from an
opt in program to an opt out program. The National
School Lunch Program reaches nearly thirty million children each year.
Thanks to smart, sometimes seemingly subtle changes like these, millions
(01:46):
more Americans may be making the most of government programs,
from farmers to veterans to college age students. Behavioral science
is the study of how and why we make decisions,
as well as how we develop our attitudes and beliefs
about the world. Maya Shankar is the host of the
podcast A Slight Change of Plans, and she founded the
(02:06):
White House's Behavioral Science Team, serving as an advisor during
the Obama administration to help develop strategy and implement government
policies by studying behavioral factors that influence decision making. Better
implementation of government policy is solvable but the help of
behavioral science. I think if you'd asked me as a
(02:30):
little kid, what do you want to be when you
grow up? I would have definitely not said cognitive scientists
because I had no idea what it was. I was
actually a violinist growing up. That was my passion. I
started playing when I was six years old, and I
really got on the speed train when I was nine
and started studying at the Juilliard School of Music in
New York. And then when I was a teenager, It's
(02:52):
a pearlman asked me to be his private violence student,
and so at that point I thought, Wow, I've gotten
a vote of confidence from the person I think is
the best violinist in the world. I might actually have
what it takes. Very Unfortunately, I had a sudden injury
in my left hand that basically ended my career overnight
when I was fifteen. So how did you make the
pivot from violinists to behavioral scientists. I was forced to
(03:14):
explore other avenues and other paths In that summer before college,
when I was supposed to be touring in China with
my friends Ronald and instead I was helping my parents
clean their basement. So equally cool summer situation, but I
ended up discovering a book on how the mind works.
I remember thinking, oh, my gosh, I had no idea
(03:39):
just how complicated our mental systems are and what goes
behind our ability to make decisions and learn language and
you know, interact with the world and the way that
we do. And I was just a light bulb moment
for me where I realized, I think this is what
I want to do. I think this is what I
want to study, because I felt completely in all of
(04:00):
the human mind. And you did it. You went through
a lot of schooling to immerse yourself in this stuff.
You studied with esteemed cognitive psychologist Lori Santo said, Yeo,
also a Pushkin co worker. Went on to get a
PhD and do a post doc and join the ranks
in academia. But after a number of years involved with
the research side of things, you realize that you didn't
(04:22):
love it. You know. It was like an o explotive moment.
What do I do next? And I actually ended up
calling up my underground advisor and I called her and
I said, Laurie, so, I know I've been doing this
whole you know, want to be a professor thing for
some time because I really admire you. But I actually
don't want to do that anymore. I'm thinking of becoming
a general management consultant. And Laurie, you could hear a
(04:44):
light gasp on the other phone, namely, oh no, I
did not invest all this time into my student for
her to leave my field. And so she said okay,
before she was very gentle before you explore that path, Maya,
I just want to let you know that there's incredible
work happening in the Obama White House right now that
is helping low income kids get access to free lunch.
(05:06):
But there's no actual job that hiring for. There's no
They're not like, yeah, we want to hire a behavioral scientist.
So I end up sending a cold email to a
former Obama advisor, Cass Sunstein, and I say, hey, Cass, like,
I'm Maya, I'm a post doc, i have no public
policy experience, and I've published nothing of significance, but I'd
(05:27):
really love to work at the intersection of behavioral science
and policy. Thankfully, he ignored all the insecurities seeping out
of my email and immediately got back to me and said,
let me connect you with Obama's science advisor and let
him know that I sent you along. And so within days,
Ronald like this was a crazy life change for me.
I was interviewing with Obama officials, pitching them on the
(05:49):
idea of creating a new position for me in which
I could translate insights about human behavior into the design
of public policy. So I packed up my bags and
I moved to DC, and you know, I started my
job at the White House at the beginning of Obama's
second term. Can you talk a little bit about what
behavioral factors are, what that looks like, and give a
few examples on how that played into the work that
(06:12):
you actually did. Behavioral science is the study of how
and why we make decisions, as well as how we
develop our attitudes and beliefs about the world. And the
reason why this field is so important in the context
of public policy making is that it reveals that we
are influenced by some very surprising factors that ought to
(06:33):
not influence our decisions, but absolutely do, sometimes outside of
our conscious awareness. So let me give you a concrete example.
I think we'd all like to believe that when we
go into a voting booth, we'll end up voting for
the person we'd most like to see elected into office. Right,
That's pretty common sense. But research shows that the order
in which the candidate's names appear on a ballot can
(06:55):
exert a significant influence on our voting behavior, and so
when public policymakers become aware of this bias, they can
in turn design a solution, namely to randomize the order
in which the candidate's names appear across ballot. When you
don't appreciate that these factors are actually informing decisions, then
you might be engaging in suboptimal policy design. So my
(07:18):
intention joining the White House was to make sure that
we were designing public policies with our best understanding of
human behavior in mind. So, talk a little bit about
the work you did in those early days of the
second Obama administration. How did you figure out which policies
needed the help of behavioral science. I was knocking on
every single door saying, you know what problems are you
(07:40):
already trying to solve? Now, let me brainstorm how the
tools in my toolbox can help you achieve those goals.
So a good example of this is in an early
meeting I met with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and
they had built up this program that was trying to
help veterans reacclimate to civilian life after their time overseas,
(08:00):
and that transition, as you might know, can be very
challenging and fraught with lots of struggles. We ended up
changing just one word in an email marketing message about
the program, instead of telling veterans that they were eligible
for the program, we simply reminded them that they had
earned it through their years of service, and that one
word change led to a nine percent increase in access
(08:22):
to the veterans program. And it was based on a
behavioral science insight called the endowment effect, which basically says
that we value things more when we feel that we
own them or have earned them, and that again led
to a groundswell of activity and excitement for this work.
May do you think that your work is a result
of suboptimal policy making or suboptimal policy enacting. So the
(08:47):
policies themselves were fantastic, but there was a there was
an implementation gap, right. We weren't thinking about accessibility, availability
of the program, what it means in real life to
engage with the government in this way. Another name that
they had for your team was the Nudge Unit, And
when I read that, I was like, I don't want
to be nudged. I'm not trying to be nudged in
any direction, especially when it comes to the government. But
(09:11):
you talking about it being about policy implementation kind of
makes me understand it a little bit more. But what
would you say to detractors that say, I don't like
this policy. I don't want to be nudged into doing it,
and now they're using government science trickery in order to
get me to do it. I don't feel good about that.
How would you respond to those folks? Yeah, well, first
I would say there's no default less state of the world.
(09:35):
And what I mean by that is every program and
policy has a default design that will influence people one
way or the other. If you're a veteran and you're
asked to fill out a burdens and application form that
requires referencing fifteen different resources, well that's a default too.
That's a nudge too, right, And chances are those requirements
(09:56):
are nudging veterans away from accessing a program that can
actually be in their benefit. But nudges will not work
for people who don't want to take the action. An
example of this is, you know, sending an email reminder
about in rolling in a retirement savings plan will make
a difference for a military service member who wants to
enroll but just needs a reminder. It will not make
(10:17):
a difference for someone who doesn't want to enroll because,
for example, they want to use the money to make
a down payment on a home or they just want
the disposable income. So I think it's really important for
listeners to understand behavioral science is not a silver bullet, right.
It helps to enable people to reach their long term
goals who are seeking that long term goal, but it
(10:37):
will not make a difference for those who don't want
in So, how do you decide that your approach is
helping enough people to bother doing it? Leadership and government
(10:57):
and in the White House put in a lot of
effort to figure out, you know, what are our goals
for this year. Then we wanted to make sure that
we were responding to those goals and we were leveraging
what we knew from behavioral science to help them achieve
those goals more effectively. So this might involve helping student
loan borrowers repay their loans in a more effective way
or understand what their options are, or helping farmers get
(11:20):
access to loans with the US Department of Agriculture. And
then we would also look at other factors. How many
people are we going to be able to help through
this project? Right, are we operating in the millions? Because
if so, yes, that makes a lot of sense for
us to work on. And then we also wanted to
make sure that the outcome that we are trying to
change was significant from a policy perspective. So things like
(11:42):
helping workers find jobs, getting more people to sign up
for clean energy plans, or health insurance, these are all
outcomes that are of huge significance. Some of the policy
solutions I've read about, which come from studying human behavior,
kind of sound like common sense. Talking to students telling
them to sign them for class by text message, having
the opt in program or the opt out program. Do
(12:05):
you think that it's necessary to have a government team
dedicated to behavioral science for these policy tweaks to actually
be implemented, Like I'm imagining if I'm a member of Congress, Yeah,
and I'm looking at this line item for this team,
I'm wondering, do we need a whole team to carry
out little tweaks like this? Yeah? So I think one is,
you know, some of these insights can absolutely seem like
(12:27):
common sense after the fact, but the reality is that
they weren't being implemented in our absence. And it's also
important to note that behavioral science is a very context
specific space to work in. Not all insights will work
in all areas. And you need trained behavioral scientists in
order to make the right prescriptions, right to design meaningful
(12:48):
experiments to teach us what is working in what context
in the ideal world some decades from now. It would
be amazing if our team was rendered obsolete because agencies
were just hiring the relevant people with the relevant skill
sets to do this work. As a matter of course,
just good government, that is the goal to drive yourself
out of existence. But at the time, and it continues
(13:10):
to be the case today because the team is very
much still around and the Biden administration and was around
during the Trump administration doing great work to help you
on topics like the opioid epidemic and wildfires and whatnot.
It's important to sometimes have these dedicated teams that are
exclusively focused on the particular goal of translating human behavioral
(13:32):
insights into public policy improvements, because otherwise it's too easy
for it to get ignored. How do we apply these
ideas when there's not a dedicated office, Like, how would
state and localities apply some of these principles. Well, the
nice thing is actually there's been a flurry of activity
in state and local government in which nudge units are sprouting.
So lots of state and local governments now have their
(13:55):
own nudge units or they are using insights from behavioral science.
But there's no one size fits all approach with behavioral science.
You can't just say, oh, here are my favorite ten insights,
let me just apply them to all the policies and
programs there. There is a rigorous science behind it, and
you need to make sure that you do have experts
who are looking at those optimal translations. Is there anything
(14:18):
our listeners can do if they want to, If they
they're listening to this and they're like, man, I want
more science in government, I want to inject more What
do you, well, what can they do to help if
they want to be a part of this now? So
I would say, like, the bible of behavioral science and
policy is this book called Nudge. And actually Richard Taylor
and Cass Sunstein, the authors of this book, came out
(14:38):
with a final edition version just recently. It actually references
the work that's happened in the UK and the United
States to try to increase the translation of behavioral science
into policy. So I would send listeners to that book
first and foremost on my podcast, A slight change of Plans.
I had a chance to interview some science experts where
we talk about the science behind changing people's minds with
(14:59):
folks like Adam Grant, the science of behavior change with
doctor Katie Milkman, and I would point folks to those
specific episodes because I think it's a really nice primer
for where the science is at right now when it
comes to human behavior. Maya, thank you so much for
being with us today. Thanks so much for having me Ronald.
(15:20):
It was so much fun to chat with you. Doctor
Maya Shankar is the founder of the White House's Behavioral
Science Team. She served as a senior advisor in the
Obama White House. In twenty sixteen, Shanker served as the
first Behavioral Science Advisor to the United Nations under Bond
Ki Moon. She's also the host of A Slight Change
(15:40):
of Plans, another great Pushkin podcast. You should check it out.
It's available everywhere you listen. Solvable is produced by Jocelyn Frank,
research by David Jack, booking by Lisa Dunn. Special thanks
to Keishell Williams. Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and
our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. I'm Ronald Young Jr.
(16:02):
Thanks for listening,
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