Behavioral Grooves Podcast

How can your organization improve its marketing messaging using proven behavioral science techniques? As part of our series on Marketing & Employee Engagement this month, we were joined by Melina Palmer on our latest interview episode (#242). Melina Palmer is the founder of The Brainy Business podcast and author of “What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You: Unlocking Consumer Decisions with the...

Do honest people steal? Our guest, Kelly Paxton investigates and researches low level crimes such as book-keeping fraud; also known as Pink Collar Crime. She discusses how a hostile work environment and the prospect of financial difficulties at home can lead “good” people to rationalize dishonest behavior. Kelly Paxton is a former federal agent who was used to dealing with “bad guys.” Once she sta...

Continuing our series on Marketing and Employee Engagement this month, we were joined by Kelly Paxton on our latest interview episode: Why Good, Honest Employees Really Do Steal With Kelly Paxton (#240).  Tim and Kurt discuss their fantastic conversation with Kelly who has authored Embezzlement: How to Detect, Prevent, and Investigate Pink-Collar Crime: https://amzn.to/3i57hN1 and is also the podc...

When did a colleague last thank you for your work? Managers generally underappreciate their employees, but more importantly, they tend to undervalue the benefits of expressing their gratitude. Best-selling author, speaker and executive coach, Chester Elton has a lighthearted discussion with us about the value of expressing gratitude. What makes gratitude different to recognition? And how do you cr...

What is the science behind capturing people’s attention? And what do you do after you have someone’s attention; what is your intention? Is our attention fleeting and fickle, like a goldfish? Or is it something that can be recaptured and rekindled easily? Our guest today, Ben Parr cleverly uses a great Bonfire Analogy to describe how we ignite, build and rekindle attention.  Ben Parr is an award-wi...

Continuing our series on Marketing and Employee Engagement this month, we were joined on our latest interview episode (#237) by Ben Parr, author of “Captivology: The Science of Capturing People's Attention” https://amzn.to/3ejByXB . His insights and research have valuable applications in marketing and entrepreneurship. We’re also doing things a little differently this month on Behavioral Grooves....

Welcome to our series of episodes on Marketing and Employee Engagement. We'll be sharing insights into how to apply behavioral science in business. And we’ve started the series off with award-winning marketer, Matthew Willcox. He understands the fundamental importance of using behavioral insights to help organizations align with how people choose. He is one of the pioneers of applying behavioral s...

We’re doing things a little differently this month on Behavioral Grooves. Instead of discussing Matthew Willcox’s interview in our Grooving Session at the end of the episode, we’ve decided to make it a separate episode. We suggest you listen to Matthew’s interview first (episode #235), and then join us on this episode where we discuss practical applications of Matthew Willcox’s fascinating work. A...

We’re doing things a little differently this week. Instead of discussing Katy Milkman’s research at the end of our interview (Episode 232), we’ve decided to make our Grooving Session a separate episode. We suggest you listen to Katy’s interview first in the previous episode, and then join us here where we discuss how Katy's work will help you find your behavior-changing groove! In this Grooving Se...

We all appreciate a fresh start. Time to start again. A clean slate. Maybe we want to go to the gym more often, eat more vegetables, or read more books. But why do we often fail to maintain our new healthy habits? Our guest today, Katy Milkman PhD, believes that we often focus too much on the final outcome, rather than the steps that will get us there. Thinking about what is going to trigger our a...

Today's guest is Dr. Larry Senn, PhD, a pioneer in the field of corporate culture. He founded Senn Delaney as a culture shaping firm back in 1978, based on his principle that organizations become shadows of their leaders. Larry works with CEO teams and organizations from top to bottom to create the behaviors needed to support strategies and enhance business results.  And he was recently named “The...

Dolly Chugh is an award-winning associate professor and social psychologist at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Her research focuses on the “psychology of good people”. How and why most of us, however well-intended, are still prone to race and gender bias, as well as what she calls “bounded ethicality.”   Dolly sits down with Kurt and Tim on this episode, to talk about the conc...

Talk about a unique career path! From performing at Woodstock before Jimi Hendrix, with his band Sha Na Na, to now being a Forensic Linguist, testifying for infamous court cases, one theme runs throughout the life journey of our guest Rob Leonard; his love of language.  Rob Leonard started his unique career as a band member of Sha Na Na, one of only 32 bands who played at Woodstock in August of 19...

This episode is a Behavioral Grooves first: we bring you our first ever joint podcast! Mid-way through the episode the tables turn and our guest interviews us! Our guest is the amazing Kelly Leonard, host of the great podcast called “Getting to Yes, And…” presented by Second City Works and WGN in Chicago. This unique conversation with Kelly, Kurt and Tim gives us a glimpse of the people behind the...

On this episode of Behavioral Grooves we chat with the founder of the engaging new app PIQUE. Bec Weeks is a behavioral scientist turned accidental entrepreneur! By joining forces with some of the brightest minds in behavioral science, including partners Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir and Mike Norton, they have developed an amazing app that accompanies your favorite books. Pique takes users' i...

The GodFather of Influence, Robert Cialdini joins us again on Behavioral Grooves to share his motivation for expanding his bestselling book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion ( https://amzn.to/3tyCpZ6 ) 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...

Linnea Gandhi is one of our favorite people to talk with and we had the pleasure of welcoming Linnea back to Behavioral Grooves recently. We last spoke to her in 2018 when she confessed to having a crush on statistics (a crush she clearly still harbors!) Since that time though, she has made a significant contribution to the infamous new book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Oliv...

NOISE is set to be the next behavioral science bestseller. Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein and Olivier Sibony describe noise as the unwanted variabilities in our judgments. In our exclusive interview with co-author Olivier Sibony ( https://oliviersibony.com/about/ ) we delve into the fundamentals of noise. What different types of noise are there? Where do we find noise? Why does bias get more atten...

Allison Zelkowitz seized the opportunity to use behavioral science at Save The Children to make a big impact on global projects. By building a world-first “nudge unit” within the organization, her story is an inspiring example of how application of behavioral science principles can make a real difference in the world.  Allison Zelkowitz is the Founder and ‎Director of the Center for Utilizing Beha...

In this episode, we are delighted to welcome Shankar Vedantam, host of the wildly popular podcast, Hidden Brain and esteemed author of the new book Useful Delusions ( https://amzn.to/2PUkzlv ).  Before reading Shankar’s book and interviewing him for this podcast we were, as Shankar describes himself, card-carrying rationalists. We were firmly in the camp of believing rational, scientific findings...

Tim Kachuriak is the founder and Chief Innovation and Optimization Officer for NextAfter ( https://www.nextafter.com/) , a fundraising research lab and consulting firm that works with businesses, nonprofits, and NGOs to help them grow their resource capacity. By his own admission, Tim is not a behavioral scientist, but what we love about Tim’s work is that he is using knowledge and research from t...

Our guest, Jon Levy, is arguably one of the most influential behavioral scientists in the world. Over 10 years ago, Jon founded The Influencers Dinner, a secret dining experience for industry leaders ranging from Olympians, Nobel laureates, executives, to musicians. Over the course of the last decade, these dinners have developed into a wide community of influential people.  Our opening speed roun...

In this episode we are thrilled to be discussing our two favorite topics: human behavior and music. We learn that music, more than any other activity, can help lift our mood, during COVID. Our guests Pablo Ripollés PhD and Ernest Mas Herrero have spent years studying how the brain responds to rewards, learning and memory. Early in the pandemic, they decided to conduct research on a long list of ac...

Our guest this week, Sandra Matz PhD exposes the truth behind our online presence. In our conversation, Sandra reveals that with simple analytics, the digital footprints we leave behind online (our Facebook Likes, our credit card transactions, our Google Map searches) add up to paint a very revealing picture of our personality and state of mind. Sandra Matz PhD is an associate professor at Columbi...

Research is showing that there are four broad groups of people who are the most vaccine hesitant: African Americans Latinos Women between the ages of 20 and 36 Rural Americans and Republicans Many of us have a family or friend who feels hesitant about the vaccination. In this episode, Kurt and Tim address how you can have a positive conversation with them, using proven behavioral science technique...