Have you ever wondered why you or people you lead, people you know know exactly what to do and still don't do it? You know you should exercise or eat better, your team knows they should use a new system or new application or more AI. Perhaps you have coaches or patients uh who know they should book the screening, take the medication, and yet nothing happens. That gap between knowing and doing is one of the most frustrating puzzles in human behavior, and it turns out the solution isn't more information or more willpower or discipline or better intentions. It's something else. Something we're gonna talk about on this podcast. Welcome to Change Wired. My name is Angela Sharina, I'm your host, I'm your transformation in change, personal and collective evolution, your executive health and high performance coach 360, and just someone who's really passionate and obsessed with unlocking using more human potential, but also which is fundamental to the process of unlocking more human potential is learning how change works, understanding change better on a psychological, on a biological, on a human level, so then we can uh uh create uh more change more effectively because at the end of the day, uh any uh evolution, any uh improvement, any growth requires uh change. Today I'm joined by someone who has made it her mission to close this gap between knowing and doing, not just in theory, but in the real world and at massive scale. Hang Chin Dai is an associate professor of organizational behavior and behavioral decision making at UCLA Anderson School of Management and co-director of the UCLA Nudge Unit, where she works directly with UCLA Health to design and test interventions that improve patient outcomes and physician engagement. Her research has appeared in Nature, Management Science, featured in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Freakonomics. She's been named one of the world's 40 best B-School Professors under 40 by points and quants, and just this year received the 2026 Early Career Impact Award from the Federation of Association in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. In short, Hang Chun doesn't just study how to change behavior, she runs a real-world field experiment with organizations, hospital universities, pharmacy change. She finds out what actually works in the world why you should listen, guys. So if you're if you want to know why behavior change is never one size fits all, and how to use people's past experiences, your own experience, your own behavior as a simple powerful signal to use in the future interventions or behavior change or habit change so it is more effective. We're gonna talk a lot about what Hang Cheng Dai studied a lot, the fresh start effect, why New Year's Day, birthdays, work anniversaries, and even moving to a new desk or a new room, a new apartment give people motivational burst they need, and how you can deliberately time your initiatives or behavior change or habit change to ride that wave, that fresh start effect to create more consistency and more motivation. The hidden cost of friction or making things harder than they should be? Why a two-click, just two-click detour in a patient portal reduce cancer screen screening rates and what that means for every process you design. If you don't make it easy, it's a big chance that it's not gonna work. Why timing a message can matter more than the message itself? The fascinating experiment Hang Chen did where a pop-up after donating had near 100% engagement, while a text sent two minutes later had virtually zero. The monitoring paradox, what happened to hand hygiene in hospitals when electronic monitoring was removed, and the critical lesson it holds for any uh leader or anyone rolling out any change or rolling it back. How being watched is actually a big deal, and sometimes it works, but sometimes it backfires. How to make long-term goals feel rewarding right now, and why uh finding the fun in any behavior is one of the most underused tools, one of the most effective tools for consistent durable change. Whether you are a leader trying to get your team to adopt new habits, a healthcare professional designing patient programs, or simply someone trying to understand your own behavior and change your own habits better, this episode is for you. So let's get into it. Here is my conversation with Heng Chen and I. Dear Heng Chen, welcome to Change Wired Podcast. I'm so very happy to have you here because the topics that you are passionate about that you've been studying and working with, uh, it's I would say very fundamental or foundational for listeners of this podcast to understand and maybe get uh more masterful about. So thank you so much for coming to the podcast today.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much for having me here, Angela.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and uh uh to set a little bit of a uh backstory and give our listeners a little bit more context. Uh, where are you connecting from? Uh, what did you see you do? What what what do you live and breathe every day in your work?
SPEAKER_01Yes, so I'm currently based in uh Los Angeles. I am an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Broadly speaking, I am a behavioral scientist and I do research about motivation. So try to understand what motivates employees and customers to engage in activities that could be helpful for them in the long term. It could include a wider range of activities and things like exercising more, eating healthy food, getting preventive care, and save for retirement. Those are all the activities I have studied in various projects. And I usually work with companies to run field experiments or A-B tests to understand how one intervention, right? Some changes that organization can implement will affect people's willingness to engage in those kinds of beneficiary activities.
SPEAKER_00Such an interesting topic. I think we all need to understand a little bit more about how to motivate ourselves to do good behaviors that we want to do that benefit our life and do less of the things that uh don't directly don't lead our life to where we want to go. And uh also obviously, if someone is a leader, leads a team, an organization, or wants to affect uh the behavior of their customer, it's also very important to understand like why do people do what they do and how can we help them to do uh more of the things we want them to do or they want to do? So it's uh very like interesting topic, and I'm eager to hear uh all you know about that, or at least you know, some core details. Uh but before we jump into that, how did you come to study this and work in this field? Like, I don't know what did you like as a kid? How what did you study? How did you come to this career path?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, definitely. So I was majored in economics back at Peking University when I was an undergraduate student there. As much as I loved uh economics, or more precise, I was able to get uh a good grade, I feel like something's missing. And then I stumbled upon psychology courses. I realized, oh, that's not a missing piece I'm looking for because the psychology courses are giving me what I consider a more realistic understanding of how humans operate, right? Under humans operate under constraints, constraints related to information, time, and cognitive capabilities. So I did a major in a double major in psychology. And then the economics perspective and then the psychology training, psychological training are actually quite complementary. And then I find my interest in behavioral economics, and that's what I applied to PhD program. Like I applied for the PhD program in behavioral economics because I realized that is the interdisciplinary area that I'm fascinated. I was fascinated about and I would like to do more research in. I end up going to, I did not end up going to actually a PhD program in economics. I was lucky to find a slightly different but related path at Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. And there I was more broadly exposed to behavioral science. It could be a combination of insights from psychology, economics, marketing, management, and even operation management. Like all of those disciplines have scholars who do research that tries to understand the human behavior, to understand how we can influence their behavior, how we can motivate people. You just need to take the methodology and take the theories as you see fit for a given study. And I was so fascinated by the opportunity to draw insights from those different areas because the program I went to is a very interdisciplinary program. It's currently called Operation Information Management. And wait, sorry, currently it's called Operation Information and Decision Process. It used to have a different name, but the name already suggests it's actually combines scholars from different disciplines. So I was exposed to research from different fields. And that, and also my so that exposure and the opportunity to work with my formal PhD advisor, Professor Katie Milkman, really opens my door and leads me to where I am now. So there I had an opportunity to learn probably from one of the best field experimentalists. I don't even know whether people have used that. We we say, okay, maybe I will strike that. I don't know whether people really say that, but it's a very intuitive name for me. Okay. So Adam Wharton, working with Katie, I learned a lot about how to run complex field experiments with organizations to get deep to what drives people's motivation and how we can change it. And that has been a topic and a methodology that I focus on in the past decade. So that's pretty much where I came from, the combination of economics and psychology background, but also exposure to a broader set of discipline out of Wharton. And that has really shaped my interest and approach in doing research.
And can I ask you what was there maybe underlying like passion or interest and curiosity that you were maybe asking yourself, or I really want to understand this thing or how it works, like whether that's something about human behavior or maybe it's something personal, like was it something that maybe sparked that interest in the whole intersection of psychology and economics and this human behavior?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think early on it was a very broad interest, just trying to understand why psychologists see human behavior from a different lens, from economists, right? Why they have very different assumptions. Like even that was already fascinating for me. And both are long-standing fields that have existed for so many years, but they are modeling human behavior using different methods, different models, different assumptions. So like that contrast was sufficient to get me hooked. And then later on, I think while I was working with Professor Katie Milkman, what I got very excited about, or indeed the reality that there are a lot of activities that could have benefited people, right? Just taking vaccine. Like vaccine has been very like, for example, COVID vaccine, right? So it has gone through different phases of clinical trials. It's approved vaccine to be safe by FDA. Or maybe I don't, I think FDA said it's authorized for emergency use. So maybe let's not go into that detail in case that's not exactly wording. But anyway, I will just say, but if we think about vaccine, right? So like the COVID vaccine, it has gone through rigorously, gone through those different phases of clinical trials have been verified to have effectiveness. Yet why people are not taking up, and even among those people who have intention to get the COVID vaccine, they may not do it right away, right? But then in this context, if you can accelerate vaccine take up, get people to do it earlier, you can help to reduce the disease transmission. So this is one example of an activity that fascinates me because it's to me there are benefits to the individual, to the organization they work for, and to the society. Yet people have different views about how effective they are. And even for those people who believe it is an effective and useful thing to do, they do not necessarily do it or they do not do it right away. So trying to understand what contributes to different beliefs and different uptake behavior and how we can change behavior via either changing belief or changing the connection between belief and behavior, like that is broadly speaking what I'm very interested in.
SPEAKER_00And what did you learn so far? Maybe share with our listeners like what may be the most interesting, fascinating discoveries, insights that you got so far.
Yeah, I think there are a number of lessons I'm happy to share. I think one lesson related to my recently published work is one it's behavioral change is not one size fit all. The idea is we cannot just change people's behavior with we cannot change everyone's behavior with the same intervention because their underlying belief is different, their underlying motivation is different, the barrier to the adoption of the beneficial activity is also different across people. So in a recent paper led by my amazing students and my amazing co-author Ilana Brudi at UCO Edison, as well as Silva Sicato at CMU and Katie Milkman, Angela Duckworth, and Dana Grohman. And there is one more. Oh yeah. And also, I feel like that's really long. So maybe I'll just say who led it. Okay, never mind. Okay. So this paper is co-led by amazing co-author Ilana Brudi and Silver Sicato. There, we actually looked at how people's past adoption of a given activity such as vaccination affects their reactions to different types of behavioral intervention, right? So the idea is okay, sure, maybe it's obvious behavioral interventions are not going to be a one-size-fit-all. But then the question is, how can we target people differently? What are the factors about a population that we can use so we know the right intervention to deliver to a given population? So what we focus on there is people's past adoption of a given activity. So in the flu shot context, it would be okay, did they get the flu shot in the prior year? Right? So if they got flu shot in the prior year, then that means those people probably have some recognition of the value of getting a flu shot, right? Because last year they bothered to take action. So they probably have some agreement with the effectiveness of the vaccine, the usefulness of getting vaccinated. But if they have not yet got vaccinated this year, then the barrier for them to adopting vaccination this year may be forgetfulness. Maybe they just forgot to do it. Or maybe they have put it off and they they plan to come to do it later, but then the later never come because they keep forgetting, keep procrastinating, right? Versus the other set of people who did not get a flu shot in a prior year. And those people may not got it because may not get it because they don't recognize the value of getting a fruit shot or they don't agree with uh the value of getting flu shot. For those people, it would be a different barrier. The barrier would be the underlying belief they have about the benefits and the cost of getting vaccinated. So once you recognize the potential difference in the barrier that are the barriers that are faced by those two groups of people, you can send them different interventions. So for people who get vaccinated in the prior year, who presumably just need to be reminded, they just need to uh combat present bias to not procrastinate. What we could do is to send them a reminder to make it a very top of their mind. And we could also make the process of scheduling an appointment and getting vaccinated easier, right? So maybe we can bundle our intervention right before a doctor's appointment they have. So before they get a doctor's appointment, we just remind them look, it's a flu season, get vaccinated at your upcoming doctor's appointments, it's easy and quick. So once people know there is an easy way to take the action, and then it's a very sale in the top of mind for the upcoming doctor's appointment, they may be able to get it down. On the other hand, for people who do not get a flu shot in prior year, whose minds need to be shifted and persuaded, you cannot just use the intervention I described. And instead, you need to think about what you can do to convince them of the value of getting vaccinated. So it could be a very powerful informational video, or it could be very well-structured pamphlets with opportunity for people to do a send a text message to hospital and do an interactive QA. Like all of that probably are more helpful for this subset of people. So in our paper, we did online experiments and then field experiments at a different scale, like one field experiment with a healthcare provider, and and and they provide some evidence suggesting this platform, no, sorry, suggesting this framework could be a useful approach for us to think about how to customize behavioral interventions.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01So that is one lesson. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'd imagine it's quite challenging to also understand what's exactly happening here in people's minds, like in a sense that yeah, they might some subset of people might not have flu shots or other shots uh in their history, but then they also might have different reasons why they might not be getting you know any other sort of vaccine, right? Uh do you usually, like I'm just curious, try to hit as many points that people can be going through in their minds in some sort of information materials or maybe some questionnaires would be more useful. Like, did you find anything more effective or less effective to figure out, I guess, what's on people's minds?
Yeah, that's a great question. I think there are a couple of things in this great comment. One is I am obviously just separating people into two buckets, depends on whether or not they engage in something in the prior year, right? So that is the data I have in my study. So that's the one I'm able to leverage. But in reality, you could imagine having access to people's past records for a longer time period, which would allow you to separate people into different buckets even more precisely, right? So you could look at people who never get vaccinated versus people who got vaccinated periodically, versus people who got vaccinated in like a long time ago and now they're not doing it, versus people who consistently do it. And I suspect those different buckets of people would differ from each other in a more nuanced way than the story I was telling you earlier. So I think with more granular data, you can shed lights and do some phenotype more precisely. But then the other thing is your point about what is belief, actual fundamental difference in belief, I think then it's super interesting to understand the underlying belief. But as a policymaker, if what you are trying to do, right, or as an institution or as a healthcare provider, if all what you are trying to do is to influence people's behavior based on whatever you know about them, then you might have to accept the trade-off. In a sense, you would only have a very coarse proxy based on their behavior. You would have some coarse proxy for what might be a barrier, but understand, but you have to understand that this proxy is not perfect, right? So even if you look at people who did not get vaccinated in the past 10 years, it doesn't necessarily mean that they do not value it. They could just keep forgetting every year they procrastinate. Or maybe they're allergic to something that makes them hesitant to try it, even though they believe COVID vaccine could be valuable. It's not like they have misperception or misbelief. It's just that there are some idiosyncratic reasons that we're not capturing here. I totally agree. But if your goal is to do a large scale intervention, you won't be able to know the underlying belief. That said, as a researcher, you can of course run surveys and then look at based on your sample within your sample, how would people's self-reported behavioral history correlate with their beliefs? Right. So you could imagine I ran a survey with thousands of people that is national in a nationally representative sample. And then I could ask people to self-report whether they get vaccinated in the past five years, say, because it's gonna be hard for them to remember what they did 10 years ago. So let's say five years. And then I could also ask them a bunch of questions to understand how their belief about different aspects of getting vaccinated, a belief about side effect, belief about severity of the flu, the easiness of getting contact, getting the flu, and also their belief about the cost, right? Once we assess all of the aspects of the beliefs related to flu and the flu shot, we can connect it with people's self-reported behavioral history. That may give us some sense about how the consistency of getting vaccinated in the past correlates more precisely with different beliefs. And then that insight can be shared with policymakers. And then to the extent they are comfortable with extrapolating from my survey to the population they are trying to influence, they could also look at people's behavioral history and then say, okay, based on this research, maybe people who get vaccine once in a while tend to have this set of belief that we can target. So that's another thing I will say. Like it's feasible, but it may have to be a separate process because it's harder for organizations to run survey among their population. So it might have to be a separate activity, right? Like you can collect that outline. The third thing I will say is what I was trying to say. Oh yeah. The third thing I will say is yes, I share an intuition that maybe the informational material can be more, one, more targeted, right? If you know people's underlying belief, and two, maybe it can be more comprehensive to capture possibly different types of misbeliefs people may have. Obviously, the trade-off is when you implement in the field, if your information intervention is too comprehensive, too long, then people may not engage, they may too well as well. So it's a balance. In our study, we tried a two-minute, very engaging video right before people's doctor appointments, which seems to have some traction. And because it comes at the right time, right time, meaning it's right before a doctor's appointment, you may feel like it's something related to a doctor's appointment. You are more willing to engage, you'll trust the health system. So finding the right time to target people may be helpful. And a two-minute video is probably more engaging than having people read a plain text on brochure or pamphlets. And in fact, that is connected with another thing I will say. In the same paper, we did another field experiment with a national pharmacy chain involving three million people, which we consider as a very scaled test of the lessons we learned in a smaller scale experiment with a hospital. And then when we collaborated with the national pharmacy chain, we do not have the ability to send a video anymore. They don't want to embed the video in the text message. And also, it would be a crazy process to go through if we have to get a video verified and approved by the organization. So we just end up sending people a brief text message. The text message is a very, very condensed version of the two-minute video we created. It still hit on a few key insights, including the prevalence of the flu, the severity of the flu that people tend to underestimate. Because we did a survey early on, which tell which suggests to us in the US, people tend to underestimate how prevalent the flu is and how easy it to contact to get contacted, to get contracted with the flu, how severe the flu symptom can be. So this goes back to your point of actually understanding people's belief or misbelief, and then you write intervention to target at that at that. So we did make sure to include those elements in the brief text message. And we also know that people tend to underestimate how effective the flu shot is. So we made sure our text message also touched on that, just like our video did. However, it had no effect. Our text message that contain those strike those key points, like include those key points, has absolutely no effect, right? Because we have three million people, it's very well powered to detect even tiny effects, but even a tiny effect we cannot detect. So the way the one way to interpret this is you have to be mindful when you translate an intervention that seems to work in one setting and then like translate it to another setting, you have to be mindful about the lossing translation or the transferability of the knowledge. So in this case, when we transfer the knowledge from our earliest study to this like scaled up version, there are a few things that changed. Uh, one, the dose of the treatment, right? So we went from a two-minute video to a brief text message in total that adds up to something like 320 character, right? And then the other thing that changed is the context. We went from a very engaged context, like people who got messages right before their doctor appointments, like one to three days before their doctor's appointment, presumably it's a more credible source that they are waiting to engage more with. So they are waiting to watch the video, versus it's a text message from a pharmacy. Yes, you still have relationship with the pharmacy because you have got the medicine there, presumably, for example, but it's not at the time that right before you are going to pick up your prescription, right? Like you don't feel the need to necessarily engage. So I think that context may lead us to be testing the idea in a more low intention, low engagement setting to begin with. So both of those differences across studies may contribute to the lack of an effect of the information intervention in the scale test. And interestingly, in the same study, if we look at the basic effect of sending a reminder, the basic effect of sending a reminder and including a link to directly schedule a vaccine appointment on the pharmacist website, like that type of intervention still works. And that type of intervention works better on people who got flu shot in prior year than people who did not. So part of my story still holds. And so that suggests well, different types of behavioral intervention may translate differently, right? So the reminder has effects across my studies, whereas the information intervention seems to be more sensitive to how you deliver it, where you deliver it. Yes. So that's my long, that's that is my long spiel about the second lesson I want to share is when you take knowledge from the literature and when you implement it in your setting, you want to be mindful of the design and how much it can translate in your sample in your setting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. And I guess you know, testing first before rolling out it to full scale probably would be a good idea with any intervention that organization can try, or yeah, definitely policymaker. But yeah, it also makes me think about just a couple of things. Context in which people receive any message and how easy it is to take action then on that message. And as you mentioned, like the right time. It seems to be like something that's coming up a lot in my work. Like it's one thing to let's say if somebody's trying to eat better, to send the message right before their meal. It's another one when they're like, you know, about to go to bed, and by the time they wake up, they already forgot what to what you send them, right? So I feel like that is such an important. Yeah, go ahead.
Oh, sorry, go ahead. Yes, I just want to say, like, induestly, I agree with you, and there are more evidence suggesting that we should be mindful not only just what we send people to whom, but also when where we're sending them. And in fact, I will maybe give you two examples. Like, one is research done by Edward Chan and his co-authors. Sorry, I would say Edward Chan, Oliver Hauser, and uh is Oliver Hauser? Let me let me double check. That would be embarrassing if if we if I say it wrong. Sorry, hold on. So yes, Oliver Hauser. Okay. So I would say, okay, so one example is research conducted by uh Edward Chan and Oliver Hauser. They have a paper published last year at Science looking at how diversity training could more effective how to design diversity training so it actually works. And one of the elements they tried is to put diversity training right before managers are going to make a hiring decision. So instead of having people do the diversity training once a year and then forget about it, they have yeah, managers do the diversity training. It's a short one before they're going to create a short list for their position. And that is very much in line with your proposal. It should be a very timely intervention, right? So that's one example. The other is research done by uh Craig Fox at UCLA Anderson and Megan Weber, who is currently a PhD student at Anderson. They also find some fascinating evidence in line with uh this idea of leveraging people, meet people where they are, send them the intervention where their attention is likely to be the highest. So basically, they collaborated with a website that rents. So, like on our website, it's basically, I think you would uh what did it do? Oh, yeah, so it's kind of like the website where you would donate some money in exchange for the opportunity to have some fun activity, like meet a very popular celebrity, right? So it's kind of like the the celebrity is willing to volunteer their time, but then the fans would have to donate and then exchange for chances to meet with the celebrity. Um so they varied when people are contacted to register, to become a registered, uh, how to say? Oh, to register to vote in the US. Right. Okay, so maybe I will say that again. Okay, so basically they collaborate. So Craig Fox and Megan Weber collaborated with a platform where people can donate money in exchange for chances to engage in some very fun events, such as meeting with a celebrity. And after people just donated, they uh Craig and Megan send people text message to actually it's not text message, I would correct myself because that's an interesting point. I will come back later. They actually uh have the app on the website immediately have a pop-up that asks people to become a registered voter, right? So to complete their registration in 2024. And they find that the timing really matters. If you catch people's attention right after they finish the donation, before they left the platform, people are much, much more likely to finish the registration than if you send them a text message right after they completed registration. So it's like just a couple of minutes difference. So one is immediately pop up on the screen while you are about to leave, versus after you leave, one minute later, I send you a text message, and then the text message leads to my recollection, it's like close to zero percent engagement. Whereas on the platform, people are much more likely to register as a result of getting that pop-up reminder. So I think that's that's a way to say it's it's you have to meet people where they are most likely to pay attention to the material you send them. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I guess also it's this same that uh there is less friction, so to speak. Exactly, that's true. I think people are in general very uh lazy for the things they don't care that much about, especially if it's somebody else asking them to do something. And so if it's out of the context, it seems like it's right there, but for the person, it's like I don't know, they're already doing something else and they don't want to be doing some extra effort to get back to doing this thing that they might not even care that much about. Yeah, so it's just such a great, I guess, insight for people to just grasp this idea, and whenever like we sometimes get mad at ourselves so that we don't do certain things, it's like, well, did you make it like really really easy, right, for yourself? Whether that's doing some the donation, voting, you know, eating better or exercising, like it works when you put your shoes right by your bed or uh ext instead of. Yeah, uh such a great content.
Yeah, I I I definitely agree with that insights. You're you're spot on. I like your example. Like we it it's it's a it's a tool we can leverage to influence ourselves, right? If you just make things easy for yourself, and then that would reduce the friction. And similarly, organization can try to reduce reduce this type of friction. And in in one of my research papers with Silver Sakato, we actually find that we have some suggest evidence in the COVID-19 context where like you vary how easy it is for people to even make appointments for the vaccine could uh make a difference. So, in our two experimental conditions, like in one condition, we include a link to CVS. So people can just click the link and schedule appointment at CVS. In another condition, we people we give people a broad link. The broad link would take people to vaccine.gov where they can put their zip code and then find a list of pharmacists close to them, right? So economists would say probably the second one is better because it'll give you a variety of choices. You can choose your preferred brand location, give you more flexibility. But if we think about your point related to friction, then the broader link actually adds more friction because now you have to spend or it adds some cognitive burden. Because now you have to think, okay, which one do I go to? Oh yeah, this one is close to me. I will go to this one. Oh yeah. Well, but now they I'm not actually at home. So okay, that's not the right address to enter. So it adds more burden for selecting the right location, it adds cost. And and and we find that actually the first link that directs people to only just one pharmacy, it's like just CBS, just go ahead, just book it, don't think too much about it, leads to higher vaccine take up than sending people the broad link. And I think that's also a way to think about the friction from a more cognitive perspective.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that also reminds me, I don't know if you did any work or research on that, but very often the I I I work with teams in companies and organizations, and they would say, well, we uh create this algorithm or like we tell people what to do, and they know what to do, like use this new software or use this new system, right? Or or a process, but they just don't do that. It's like why they you know they are motivated, they're smart, etc. And very often when you start looking into the process, there is like you know, a few more clicks away from what they usually do, and that's it, right? People are just like, Well, I already have to do all of these things when I'm at work, like now I have to also click through all of these things to find the thing.
Such a great example. I feel like every example you give, I have something from my own research that can support. You are absolutely right, friend. So, one in one of the uh recent experiments, my team and and my collaborators and I did at UCWA Health speak exactly to that point. So basically, UCWA Health is doing an initiative that targets at people after their birthday and encourage them to come to complete the preventive care activities, such as like cancer screenings and annual physicals, right? And then they send out an email to other patients who are eligible every month. And then the email would direct people to a patient portal, right? So people go to the patient portal and then presumably they should read the letter created by UCRA Health that details the different things you are due for, the steps you should take. Okay. So what the default setting UCRA's electronic communication system has is once you click on the link to go to the patient portal, you will actually go to the home page, that is the landing page, which you don't directly go to the letter. So what our team thinks, our team thought, wait, if you go to the homepage, the patients still have to go a few clicks to find that letter. Wouldn't that be easier if we just show people the letter as the first thing they see if they log in? So that's exactly what we pitched. And then we uh we actually assign people into two conditions. Either they will get the status quo pathway or they will get the simplified pathway. And then we find that one, the simplified pathway increases people's likelihood of reading the letter, and then two, it also increases people's likelihood of completing the subsequent action, that is, to actually getting the screening six months later. So it's to us, it's like such a simple change that leads to a meaningful effect in a clinically relevant and impactful behavior. And what is quite interesting is we asked early on, multiple uh IT folks, we asked them like, is that possible to change the pathway? They were like, no, no, no, this is this is the the fixed pathway. Like, no way, you just have to go to the landing page. And so we're lucky enough to find one specialist who said, Yeah, of course, let's try it. So sometimes you see this inertia in organization where it's a default for so long that not only people never thought about it to change it, but also when you propose the idea to them, their first reaction is it's not possible to change. But we're lucky to finally find someone to change it and to showcase the value of simplify this seemingly trivial logistic process, right? Like the barrier seems trivial. You just need to go from the landing page to the communication center, find the letter. But that is sufficient to deter some people from taking up the subsequently valuable action.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, especially you know, taking into account that most people are these days distracted and they are not really might be native to this website, and like, should I go this or that here or there, right? And all this like thinking process on top of what they're already doing. So I guess what I'm you know hearing also from what you just said, whenever a leader or somebody else tries to change behavior at work of people, let's say, even you know, things like AI adoption, etc., you really want to think about like what's the friction? What how can I make it super, super easy to do this thing, right? Instead of hoping that people will get it, think, and will be more motivated enough to actually do that change.
SPEAKER_01Totally. Yeah, I 100% residents. I'm just uh thinking in my own case, like I want to consume more news, and and a good time to do it is when I'm dropping off kids and driving back. But now talking to I realize my podcast, the app, is actually on a second page of my phone, it's actually hidden, and I have to go into a category of news category and then click on it, and often as a result, I just forgot to do it. I already started driving. I was like, oh, now it's too hard for me to actually go to the second page and then click on the right button. Now you remind me I should put it on the first page, since that's my goal to consume news in the morning. I could actually leverage this for myself. Yeah, thanks for the inspiration.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I always uh just remind myself of that. That whenever I say uh start skipping certain behavior, it can be not maybe submitting certain information either to my clients sometimes or to like my tax person, right? And it's very often this like friction, I don't know, a wrong email tab, or like the processes I have to click to links or something like that, right? Or it's just uh or there is no reminder, what's like simple things like that. It's not like I'm a different person, it just like don't always have this like simplicity of following through on my intention. So the yes, the thank you for that. Um I also uh remember uh reading in your work that you study a lot uh short term and long term motivation and what can affect uh people. Yes, mm people's motivations so they don't just think about short-term things but also think about long-term. Like, what is maybe the most important uh knowledge or insights that you got in in this area? Like we all want to get some benefit things now and pleasure now, but we also gotta do those long-term things, the no not long-term things, but behaviors that contribute to long-term benefit, whether that's exercise, whether that's again submitting taxes or working on the or savings, right? What did you find perhaps that affect that part of our brain? How do we become more long-term doers on not just going after short-term gratification?
Right. I think I think and some of my research early on speak to that, and my research about the fresh star effect. Well, now it's already February, so it doesn't feel as timely as if we talk about this in January. So the fresh star effects that I've worked on, uh it's initially in collaboration with Katie Milkman, my advisor, and Jason Race, we find that people are more likely to pursue their long-term goals, to uh pursue their aspiration at a certain point that mark the beginning of a new time period. So, for example, at the beginning of the year, the new year resolution, everyone knows about that. But we also document other time periods such as the beginning of the week, the beginning of the month, the beginning of a new season, or for students, the beginning of a school year, and also after people's birthdays. So those time periods are what we call first starts because those signal the start of a new time period that make people feel psychologically disconnected from the past period, right? And then that give people a burst in motivation. And we looked at this by examining when people are more likely to search for the term diet on Google, when people are more likely to go to the gym, when people are more likely to create a goal commitment contract online for other people to monitor their progress to hold themselves accountable, right? So for all of those activities, we find that people are more likely to engage at the various points I mentioned. And also in our subsequent study, we find it's not just about those calendar events, right? So there are also some personal events that would mark the beginning of a new time period. Birthdays, one example, especially some milestone birthdays, round number birthday, or in Chinese culture, 12, 24, 36, those birthdays are culturally meaningful and they tend to be more motivating than the regular birthday. We also find things like moving to a new city or even moving the first time moving to an office, right? So those events also help make people feel refreshed, make them feel I'm no longer the old self who is late, who does not go to bed early, who biting the nails. I know that was that was a silly example I gave KD when I was a PhD student working on a project. I said, I will quit this. I need to quit this. That was my goal. Okay, maybe we don't have to mention that in the podcast, but never mind, just to share a little bit to you. But anyway. So, okay, so what did I say? Then I get confused. Okay, what I say, what I was trying to say is fresh start. Yes. So those time periods also right mark the beginning of a new chapter individually, and that makes you feel you are no longer the old self who has some bad habits, you want to quit, or who has failed to achieve a goal that you want to pursue again. So the separation between the old self that has imperfection and the new self that is more competent is psychologically contribute to the fresh start effect. And we looked at how we can leverage the fresh start effect to get people to do some beneficiary activity in the long term. So we collaborated with four universities in the US. We send mails to employees who are under saving in the university-sponsored retirement savings program. And we varied the framing of the mail. In one condition, we tell people, okay, how about sign up either now or if you prefer, you can sign up like in five months, right? So we try to give people a potential delay because we know people may not want to increase their savings now and sign up for the program now, but they would feel more comfortable doing it later. But in another condition, we varied how we describe the delay. Instead of saying in five months, we said after your next birthday. And we made sure the next birthday corresponds to a five-month delay, right? So we hold the objective time the same, but we vary whether or not people are reminded of upcoming milestone, such as the birthday. And we find that leveraging this framing, this fresh start framing for new year and for the first day of spring, spring equinox, actually make people more likely to sign up and increase their retirement saving rates relative to describing the same delay using the objective time lab. Yeah. So so that that's one way to get people, pay attention to first start. And this is a tool managers can use. And at the first start moment, people are more likely to not only experience this separation from the past itself, but also have a more big picture view, right? Because those are the moments, it's the beginning of a new time period that prompt people to take stock of where they are, what they care about. And that could also be a mechanism that contributes to the increased attention to long-term goals.
SPEAKER_00Yes. And in general, you know, besides the fresh start, the fact that, you know, we can leverage in many different ways. It can be even like, you know, well, that's the beginning of the afternoon. At least I, you know, sometimes talk to myself like that. Well, I'm not feeling you know great about that, but you know, it's uh the the it's like this the first part of the day is finished, and now it's the second part, and I can have my fresh start and the second chance, so to speak, right? Besides that, you know, like you're using it and leveraging in many different ways uh to get yourself think about long-term and maybe work a little bit harder on your long term. What are some other maybe insights that have you studied or know of that help people think more long term and contribute to a benefit of the future self, not just the pleasure of present self?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think as that's that's yeah, that's interesting. I I was like, well, most of my work are either about fresh start or about behavior change. Okay. I'm trying to think whether there are more.
SPEAKER_00Well, if this is that's you know, not not in your exactly like expertise, and uh don't don't forget about that. You know, another question that I really wanted to ask you about was um what uh from your knowledge, your experience, can you recommend to people leading teams or maybe organizational change? Like uh what can they leverage to help people change their behavior easier and so to speak, stickier so the the change actually lasts? Like what are you what do you know of that managers and leaders can leverage from behavioral science to make this the change and transition easier and more lasting?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm I'm trying to think what can I share beyond what we're already talking about. Let me think because I feel more comfortable with drawing from my own research rather than just like probably speculating okay, so right, so so what uh usually I got interviewed more directly about the first star effect. So if you don't mind, I probably was still tired with the first star effect just to think about organizational change. Yeah. So so I think one, okay, so one idea I would uh recommend organizational leaders to think about is the timing of the change, right? So if the timing of the change is a resonance with the start of a cycle, like it's a physical cycle, and then the start of the cycle would give people a sense of freshness that makes them more open to change, then I think the change may be more receptive, at least based on my own research at the beginning of a new time period. People seem to be more open to self-improvement efforts. And I think the same logic may apply to organizational initiatives that are designed to be self-improvement for the team, for the organization, and people may just be more open to embark on such an initiative. So, one thing I would highlight is think about the timing. Can it be for individual employees? Can it be maybe the beginning of a new, like right after their work anniversary? So just say congratulations. This is your 10th year, you're starting your 10th year. This is what we would encourage you to consider, right? Or a new physical at the start of a new physical quarter, rather than trying to do things in the middle of the month, in the middle of the week, in the middle of the year, try to leverage those moments that could better resonate with people's willingness to change. So I think that's one lesson that I would like to share. And the other thing I would like to share is I I think the some sense of social accountability in some recent research has some empirical evidence suggesting when you have individuals pursue a goal, instead of having them just do it with themselves, finding a buddy and then have them hold each other accountable, right? So, like say that the company really wants employees to learn some new AI tools, and then it's required training, require you go back home and still learn, and then try to leverage the social accountability, have people as buddies to check in each other's process. That may be more fun than having people do it themselves. And so, one research evidence comes from a research paper uh led by Rachel Gershon at UC Berkeley. She finds that if you incentivize people to go to the gym, it is helpful, but it's more helpful if you tell people if you go to the gym with your friends, you will get this reward. So, in both cases, people get the same um amount of dollar, but in the friend condition, it's actually harder to get the reward because you have to also bring your friends. But they find that actually this type of incentive makes people more likely to exercise than the easier incentive that only requires yourself to show up in the gym. And one reason I think is well, it's more fun for you to bring people to the gym, but then also it's created this accountability, right? So I think that's that's one insight that I think we can also apply in the work setting when you want people to learn new skills. Can you create a social context where people hold each other accountable? And I think the other thing that I will borrow from Professor Ayelet Fischbacher's research is often you want to think about the fun aspect of the activity you want people to do. So rather than instead of thinking about this, this is an exercise. There are long-term benefits that I don't know when will be realized. Instead, you think what is the fun part of doing this that I can experience right away? Is that the fun of just being able to lift something heavier than what I did before? It's fun to learn a new movement. So, like, because the fun aspect can be experienced right away. So it becomes a very immediate reward that you can experience and create a positive reinforcement. So I think going back to your question about when organization wants to encourage a certain activity that have long-term benefits but not find the short term, I would say, let's let's reframe this, right? Let's think whether there is any elements that they are exploring in the short term that can be framed as fun, as exciting. So people don't think I'm just doing this for uncertain benefits that I don't know, I don't know when would occur. But rather I'm just doing it for the sake of, even just for the sake of doing it now and enjoying that exciting element, it's sufficient as a reason to give it a try. I think that's that's another thing I would highlight.
SPEAKER_00No, that's this is such a great insight. And very often, you know, what I why I love what I love about human psychology, it's so actually easy to reframe think things when we try to do so. Like when we want to find fun in something and frame it as fun, we'll actually are quite capable of that, right? Uh so that I find that's actually the easiest hack to human motivation is just learning the this art and science of reframing things in a way that suits the ultimate goal that you're trying to achieve.
SPEAKER_01Definitely, yeah. So vision, of course, is important, right? Telling people vision, giving them compelling stories of why in the future would make an organizational better. But then at the same time, to your point, like the day-to-day details can be daunting in terms of what you have to accomplish, the change you have to make at a day-to-day level. So that persistence requires a different framing. So it feels it's complementary. Like you have a vision of people buying the long-term goal, but for the daily changes, you do need something more like what's the short-term pleasure.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that can be short-term pleasure and what you mentioned already, you know, different uh ways to make the friction less, different ways to remind people of things. So yeah, obviously, you know, the timing of things gotta be right, the context of things, we gotta think about that, and also people's pride history, like as much as possible. Think of that as well, day to day. If I were to sum up what I learned today from you.
Yes, definitely. And I think this uh you you tied our earlier conversation very nicely into this broader question, right? So I think earlier I was giving an example about let's say if we want to do intervention at the individual level, right? Just to get them to do something that helps them themselves. But I think the same lesson applies when you think about driving organizational change and getting people to engage in activities that help organizations. I think another thing I will add is also just a little bit more about the context. I think when organizations implement an intervention, okay, now I, yeah, there's one more thing from my research. I feel very comfortable with talking about, but I totally forgot about it. Okay, yes. I think also when organizations introducing a change, right? It's a new initiative, a new strategy, they have to be mindful about the signal they're sending to people in terms of how managers, how much managers are really committed to this change. So, for example, in my research look at electronic monitoring, I find that in hospitals that implemented electronic monitoring of individual healthcare workers' hen hygiene behavior, we do see an increase in hen hygiene compliance as a result of monitoring, right? Not surprisingly, if you monitor individuals, that could make them feel more accountable, they're more likely to wash their hands. But what is very interesting is when those hospitals remove the electronic monitoring, when they are no longer monitoring individuals' hen hygiene behavior, we see an immediate drop and it leads to a hen hygiene compliance level that is even lower than the pre-implementation, the pre-monitoring level. Okay, so why am I explain that? One explanation could be a crowd out in a sense, like in the past, I wash my hands because as a doctor, I realized it's important to wash my hands to protect myself, protect more importantly, protect my patients. Now you are monitoring me. You crowd out my original intrinsic motivation for washing my hands because now I'm like, I'm washing my hands because the boss is watching. And then you take away the monitoring. So you take away this extrinsic motivation without adding back my intrinsic motivation. So we see a drop in hand hygiene compliance to be even worse than before. And this is related to my point about managerial commitment because you implement the monitoring for a bit, you experiment with this, and then you take it away without explaining to people why you take it away. In our setting, it's actually because of funding reason. Those hospitals no longer have grants to support the monitoring program, so they remove it. But for people, it may feel a lack of managerial commitment to hand hygiene compliance. Like, wait, they monitoring me for a while, now they remove it. We don't know why they remove it, and it's probably they're not serious enough. Yeah, it's a funding issue, but if they really care about this, I bet they're gonna find money for it. So the fact that they cannot put together resources to continue the program suggests they don't care this as much as we thought. So why should we care? Right? So we want to think how, think about when you experiment with different changes, every experimentation doesn't come in a social vacuum. Instead, the experimentation comes within a social context with some signal sent about the intention of the manager. And that may not be the actual intention of the manager, but people make inferences, right? The fact that you remove it to make people draw some inferences about how much you care about it, even though the manager may think I truly care, I just don't have the resource anymore. So I think that's another thing I would recommend the managers to be mindful of is the signal they send with how they implement as as well as remove any initiative.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and maybe a listen from here and also learn how to communicate well so people don't guess and create their own stories, but instead you give them some story to to think of when implementing all of these changes, so they have less chance of backfiring. Yeah, such an important you know aspect because uh a lot of like I I also work with managers and they would say, Well, we did this that, and like, but did you communicate that? And like, no, but it's obvious. I'm like, obvious to who, right? We all have our own stories in our hands and our heads. So, yeah, thank you so much for sharing this, Henk Chen. And I think on this note, um, we can maybe wrap up the podcast. Is there anything that you would like to the overall message, maybe something to our listeners to take away, to think about, to be more effective in this behavior change, thinking more long term, doing and influencing different uh initiatives for the betterment of people? Yeah, anything.
Yeah, that's uh that's a great, great, great question. But before we get there, I do want to quickly just say I I don't I'm I I it's uh only uh working paper, so I don't think it's necessary, necessary you have to include in podcasts, but I just want to echo, I really like your point about the illusion of transparency. Like managers think they're already out and clear about the changes they have made, for example, in response to employees' voice. But employees, like, wait, what did you really change because we have voiced our concern? Like how you said you listen to us, but what did you do that demonstrated listen to us? That is actually an example from my own research in the project at UCL Health, where like the quality improvement team made changes to their physician incentive program in response to physicians' suggestion. But when you survey physicians, physicians keep saying, like, my voice was not heard. And I like I don't even know why I'm feeling this survey. I bet nobody would read what I wrote. Right? So like people don't think their voice has been heard. Well, the quality improvement team feels like we did a lot of changes every year. We we do changes to the incentive program because we heard from you guys. So we actually tried experiments where we either made a change without communicating to people what the changes are, or we made the change and we also told physicians look, those different changes are made in response to physicians' feedback from which survey in which year. We make it very concrete and verifiable. And we find that when you communicate the change to people, people express more positive attitudes towards the program. They're more likely to engage in organizational citizenship behavior. That is, they're more willing to volunteer their time to help improve the initiative. So I think this goes back to a point about when organizations implement the initiative. What to keep in mind, the transparency in communication is important, your intention. And also if you have done something to improve because your employees ask for it, make sure, let them know, uh, rather than assuming yeah, they already know what you have done for them.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, people forget. I always you know remind myself of that when I forget a thing, like everybody forgets, and you and your initiative and whatever you're doing is not top of people's mind. And unless you tell it many times, it's not going to be noticeable remembered. So yeah. Thank you for sharing this.
SPEAKER_01Of course. Yeah, in terms of the overall lesson, maybe one thing I will say is I encourage people to experiment, experiment with themselves, experiment with their teams, with their organizations. It doesn't have to be a very formal experiment, but I think the spirit of trying out different tools from the scientific research and the tools they have learned from Angela's podcast, and then actually document, right? Document the progress and compare notes is a helpful way to learn. And obviously, this type of experiment is not going to be perfect if you do not actually have a control condition. But I think it's going to be better than not keeping track of the different things you have tried at a different time and then an outcome. I think there is a lot you can learn by this self experimentation.
SPEAKER_00Yes, 100%. Thank you for for saying this. Because yes, indeed, in order to grow, in order to develop, in order to improve, we need to try different things. And we need to keep a tracker to understand, you know, whether that's working better, not working, what to try next. So we could all improve and grow and do better. So thank you so much, Hingchen. And the last but not least, where do people go to maybe learn more about your work, connect with you, ask a question? What are some best places?
Wonderful. Yeah, I I think my website, www.henschendi.com, is the go-to place where I update regularly my research, the media interviews I received or articles, news articles that feature my research, they're all uh linked on that website. Um also feel free to send me an email at henchin.dai at uca. Sorry, that's okay. Also feel free to send me an email at henchin.dai at anderson.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we'll wing this also in the channel.
SPEAKER_01Never mind. So then don't worry about it. And feel free to just email me if you want to chat about your organizational context and and any challenging you have that I may be able to help with.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Yes, highly recommend everyone to reach out who wants to get better and introducing changes that work or run better experiments. And Heng Chen, thank you so much again for your time. Really appreciate it. And uh yeah, wishing you all the best with further research. So we all learn from you to get even better at changing our behavior. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much for having me, Angela. This is a wonderful opportunity to share my research with your audience. Thank you.