Behavioral Grooves Podcast

Psychology and neuroscience have proven that our minds do things on autopilot. These shortcuts (or heuristics) are laden with unconscious biases, which are juxtaposed to our self identity as a “good” person; one that isn’t racist, sexist or homophobic. Dolly Chugh believes we should set a higher standard for ourselves by being good-ish people. By implementing a Growth Mindset, a concept pioneered...

For many years, the general consensus by many researchers and practitioners was that providing people with short-term extrinsic rewards sapped their long-term motivation. This led to some organizations reducing or not using short-term rewards at all. However, this perspective has always had some detractors and now even more research shows that this belief is misleading. In this episode, Kurt and T...

The GodFather of Influence, Robert Cialdini joins us on Behavioral Grooves to share his motivation for expanding his bestselling book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion which now includes a completely new Seventh Principle of Influence: Unity. This additional principle can help explain our political loyalties, vaccine hesitancy and why media headlines can be so inflammatory. Another motivatio...

Priming studies have had some negative press over the past ten years - some of it justified, some of it not. In this groove track, Kurt and Tim examine a 2018 study done by Alexander Stajkovic, Kayla Sergent, Gary Latham, and Suzanne Peterson called “ Prime and Performance: Can a CEO Motivate Employees Without Their Awareness? ”  This field study, with real-world implications, demonstrated that th...

Shankar Vedantam is the host of the wildly popular podcast, Hidden Brain and esteemed author of the book Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain . We initially interviewed Shankar in mid 2021 but want to highlight this discussion for you again as it is one we still discuss in more recent episodes. Before reading Shankar’s book and interviewing him for this podcast we we...

Three things generate a sense of meaning IN life; Coherence - can you make sense of the world? Purpose - do you feel a sense of purpose with what you do? And Significance - does your life matter? Having meaning in your life is correlated with a sense of self certainty. Knowing who you are and having a sense of self, gives you structure and a stable way of seeing the world.   But how do you answer...

Incentives can improve motivation. But what actually happens when the incentive is removed? An influential body of research previously suggested that extrinsic rewards have a negative impact on intrinsic motivation. However, more recent studies show this not to be the case over the long term. Our guest, Dr Indranil Goswami PhD, talks us through the longer term effects of temporary incentives and t...

Groove Track | Why can’t you find a cab in the rain?  We take a deep dive exploring the 1997 study “LABOR SUPPLY OF NEW YORK CITY CAB DRIVERS: ONE DAY AT A TIME,” by  Colin Camerer, Linda Babcock, George Loewenstein, and Richard Thaler.   This paper shifts through piles of data to look at how NY city cab drivers behaved - and what they found was an economic anomaly - the cab drivers did not behave...

Love connects us to things in a deep way. But when we say we love our car, or we love our favorite beach, or we love our children, the love we express for each of those things is very different. So can we really love things as much as we love people?  Our guest is Dr. Aaron Ahuvia , the world’s leading expert on brand love, a topic he pioneered and has worked on since 1990. He is a Professor of Ma...

Disembarking people from a plane, row by row during the height of COVID, but then cramming all the passengers into a bus to the terminal…where is the common sense in that? Best selling author Martin Lindstrom laments that we are drowning in bureaucracy and that technology is contributing to the death of common sense in society. Founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, Martin Lindstrom is also th...

When making big decisions, people often go with what feels right - who we marry, where we live, what career we pursue. We base these decisions on our gut instinct. But what if our gut is biased, misinformed or quite simply wrong?  Economist, former Google scientist, New York Times bestselling author and friend of the show Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has mined through thousands of data sets to prove t...

Over the last 50 years, little has changed for the pharmaceutical management of mental illness. This is troublesome, but not unsolvable, according to The New York Times writer and author, Daniel Bergner. We talked with him about his most recent book, The Mind and the Moon: My Brother’s Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches , and some of the key themes he discovered along...

Customer feedback lacks two fundamental pieces of information: context and behavior. Traditional methods of insight, like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer feedback surveys have their limitations. Andrea Belk Olson, our guest on this episode, challenges organizations to adopt a different approach to customer behavior by delving into the WHY and the WHAT, then coming up with a WOW hypothesi...

Utilizing the power of identity by proudly declaring yourself as indistractable can be a persuasive step in becoming the kind of person we want to be. By changing the language we use to describe ourselves, we can actually influence our own behavior.    This is just one of the techniques that our popular guest, Nir Eyal describes in his new book, “ Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and...

Mitt Romney once mistakenly quipped that people were either "makers or takers" echoing a common sentiment among US politicians that by working we provide society with value and are rewarded with a sense of dignity. But what if we considered that each of us had dignity that wasn't engulfed in our work identity? Would we be less susceptible to burnout if we accepted ourselves as enough as we are, re...

We’ve been programmed to treat burnout as a self-care issue, as if we’re just one yoga session or a relaxation app away from fixing the problem. Jennifer Moss , however, describes the solution to burnout as an organizational issue, not an individual hurdle. Creating a workplace culture where leaders model healthy work behavior, engage with empathy and cater for employees' individual needs can fost...

We all know someone who believes in conspiracy theories and we wish we could change their mind. It is possible. There are techniques that can work to transform how people think. But what we love about our conversation with David McRaney is that he adds in a Step 0 to the process and asks “why do you want to change their mind?”    Are you open to changing your own mind? If you have any interest in...

What if we were so optimistic, nothing ever felt like an obstacle, only an opportunity? As an unapologetic optimist, Patreon page. If donating isn’t an option for you, don’t worry, you can write us a podcast review which will help promote our show to other listeners. Thank you. Topics (4:07) Welcome and speed round questions. (7:06) Should we rewrite the American constitution? (11:17) Paul is affe...

Many of us struggle with the demands of parenting. Our response to feeling overwhelmed can be to try and control our kids’ behavior. But guest Sue Donnellan challenges us to lessen our parenting load by giving our children more control, more responsibility and ultimately more respect. While this might go against our instincts, when we take ownership of our own behavior, rather than controlling our...

World-class pediatric surgeon, social scientist, and best-selling author Dr Dana Suskind MD talks about the Three T's (tune in, talk more and take turns) that parents can do to nurture their children’s brain development and the key ways that society needs to change to invest in the next generation. Dana is the founder and co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning & Public Health , and Profe...

Lots of us have good ideas, some even back their ideas up with successful research. So why do these good ideas fail to scale into great, big ideas? John A. List shares the personal example of his highly successful kindergarten reform in South Side Chicago which then didn’t scale across the nation. His intrigue into this case led him to pen a phenomenal new book about scalability, “ The Voltage Eff...

Innovation doesn’t always require inventing new solutions to problems; chances are that evolution has already solved the issue with a unique design. This simple notion of looking to the natural world for design inspiration is called biomimicry. Guest, Sam Tatam uses biomimicry in his creative application of behavioral science.   Friend of the show, Sam Tatam is the author of a fantastic new book c...

A goal is a stepping stone on the way to a higher achievement, not an end point. By reframing our expectations, we can transform our mindset into an incredibly powerful psychological tool.   Our guest on this episode is Paul Szyarto who has overcome some heartbreaking personal adversity to become an incredibly successful entrepreneur.   Paul speaks with us in detail about the blind spots entrepren...

Women are more likely to volunteer for a non-promotable task at work, than men. But why do women volunteer themselves more? What repercussions does this have on women and on the organization? And how can workplaces fix this inequity?   Non promotable tasks (NPTs) are the pieces of work that are good for the organization, but not so good for the individual. It’s the request from your boss to organi...

The culture we live in has an invisible influence over our individual and collective behaviors. The tendency towards openness or order in a society is expressed by Michele Gelfand, as the looseness or tightness of a culture. How loose or tight a country is can be correlated to the amount of threat the nation has faced in the past, and in turn, can indicate how its people will respond to a new thre...