Behavioral Grooves Podcast

Dr. Melanie Green is a professor at the University of Buffalo. She joined us on the podcast to explain how the power of a compelling narrative, including the effects of fictional stories, can be used to change beliefs and attitudes. Her theory of "transportation into a narrative world" focuses on how immersive storytelling is a mechanism of narrative influence. It was an in-depth conversation that...

Leidy Klotz is the Copenhaver Associate Professor of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia. His research fills in underexplored overlaps between engineering and behavioral science, in pursuit of more sustainable environmental systems. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles in venues that include top academic journals in built environment engineeri...

Rohit Bhargava is on a mission to help everyone in the world become a non-obvious thinker. In this episode, he talks with us about how intentionality is the key to seeing the non-obvious and how he uses The Haystack Method to gather insights from the world. He also shared how he has become a speed-understander and the benefits that go with it. In 2011, Rohit embarked on the annual task of document...

Tim Ash is a very interesting guy. He is both an authority on evolutionary psychology and digital marketing, which puts him in pretty rarified air. He is the bestselling author of Unleash Your Primal Brain and Landing Page Optimization (with over 50,000 copies sold worldwide and translated into six languages). He has been identified by Forbes as a Top-10 Online Marketing Expert, and by Entrepreneu...

Michael F. Schein is a hype specialist and the author of The Hype Handbook: 12 Indispensable Secrets from the World’s Greatest Propagandists, Self-Promoters, Cult Leaders, Mischief Makers, and Boundary Breakers. He is also the founder and president of MicroFame Media, a marketing agency that specializes in making idea-based companies famous in their industries.  We caught up with Michael recently...

AJ Jacobs is an author, journalist, lecturer, and human guinea pig. He has written four New York Times bestsellers, including The Year of Living Biblically, that combine memoir, science, and humor with a dash of self-help. AJ has said that he sees his life as a series of experiments in which he immerses himself in a project or lifestyle, for better or worse, then writes about what he learned. His...

Linda Thunstrom, PhD is a Swedish economist working as an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wyoming. (That’s in Laramie, Wyoming, not Wyoming, Sweden.) Her research interests include behavioral, experimental, public, and health economics. Her interests merged after Hurricane Florence when she became curious about the effect that offering thoughts and prayers might have on poten...

GAABS is an organization that was recently founded to act as an accrediting body for applied behavioral scientists. GAABS is The Global Association of Applied Behavioral Scientists and is open for membership for those who demonstrate their ability to ethically apply behavioral science to their work. In this episode, we spoke with co-founding members Nuala Walsh and Steve Martin. Nuala is a contrib...

Dessa is a singer, rapper, writer, speaker, science and philosophy connoisseur, podcast host, and ice cream flavor inventor. (Her flavor is Dessa’s Existential Crunch which consists of crème fraîche, brown sugar ice cream, Jameson Irish Whiskey, Disaronno Amaretto Liqueur, and a cashew and praline pecan brittle crunch). Dessa has made a career of bucking genres and defying expectations — her résum...

Can you design an experience for someone else? Jonathan Mann, the Vice President of User Experience at Renaissance Learning says, “Umm, not really.” Prior to joining Renaissance, Jonathan led user experience teams at Target Corporation and PayPal. And as a practitioner, he’s always valued good research to help him, and his teams, deliver better work. Our discussion centered around the question, “i...

Bertram Malle, PhD teaches social cognitive science and social psychology at Brown University, he’s the author of dozens of articles and has focused his recent work on how humans feel about robots, and researches how the etiquette and facial abilities of robots impact how we perceive them. His research indicates that the more human-looking a robot is – especially in its “face” – the more humans ar...

Logan Ury studied psychology at Harvard, was a TED Fellow, then became a behavioral scientist at Google, where she ran Google’s behavioral science team – which we now know as The Irrational Lab. She became a dating coach and is currently the Director of Relationship Science at the dating app Hinge, where she leads a research team dedicated to helping people find love. Her work has appeared in The...

Shellye Archambeau is the author of “Unapologetically Ambitious: Take Risks, Break Barriers, and Create Success on Your Own Terms.” It’s part memoir, part inspiration, and career guidebook. While Shellye argues it’s for everyone, we reckon it’s really best suited for the most ambitious among us. In the book, Shellye shares how she went from being the only black girl in her high school to being the...

Nuala Walsh is a strategic adviser with MindEquity, working with organizations to create reputation, commercial and cultural change. She is a global leader, an award-winning marketeer, and a behavioral scientist. Nuala has nearly 3 decades of strategic, commercial, and governance experience in asset management, investment banking, and consulting. All her strategic solutions are informed by decisio...

Chaning Jang is the CSO of the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics and has helped lead the organization since 2013. He is responsible for strategy, and a portfolio of projects, primarily focused on research. Prior to joining Busara, Chaning worked as an English teacher in the Czech Republic and an equities trader in Los Angeles. Chaning completed a Postdoc at Princeton University in Psychology...

Jonah Berger is a marketing professor in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the internationally best-selling author Contagious and Invisible Influence. He consults with some of the largest corporations in the world and derives great insights from his interactions with business leaders wrestling with strategic issues. In this episode, we caught up with Jonah to discuss his mos...

Recently, NPR’s Planet Money penned an article about how much our time is worth based on some research that was sponsored by the rideshare company Lyft. According to the article, Lyft economists tried to determine how much people were willing to pay to save some time. After crunching data from nine different cities, Lyft estimated the average value of time is $19.00 per hour. In this episode, Kurt...

Have you ever been caught in an avalanche or spoken to someone who survived? In this episode, you’ll hear what living through an avalanche is really like. Audun Hetland (a psychologist) and Andrea Mannberg (an economist) are researchers at the White Heat Project in Tromsø, Norway. The project is a collaboration between The Arctic University of Norway, Montana State University, and Umeå University,...

Joel Weinberger is a Professor of Psychology at the Derner Institute at Adelphi University with Postdoctoral training in motivation at Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of the American Psychological Association. His research has focused on unconscious processes and worked closely during his post-doc with motivation guru David McClelland. Joel is th...

If you’re like the rest of us, your new year’s resolutions don’t last beyond St. Valentine’s Day. That’s okay – it’s normal. The trouble is it’s not what you want. If you WANT success with your resolutions – to accomplish your goals – then listen to this podcast. We’ve broken down the best behavioral science advice into 4 easy-to-follow tips that will help you achieve what it is you’re passionatel...

Max Bazerman is the Jesse Isidor Strauss Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and is the author of “Better, Not Perfect.” It is the latest in a string of 21 books Max has authored and stands on the platform of hundreds of peer-reviewed papers on decision-making, negotiations, and ethics. Max began by discussing the Myth of the Fixed Pie problem, which is quite common in...

This is THE episode to listen to if you have missed the last 90 episodes. We can all agree that 2020 has been one hell of a year. Many people have been severely impacted by the pandemic, by financial uncertainty, with civil unrest, and the general malaise that the year seemed to have. Many are excited to say, “Good riddance!” The same goes for us, but Kurt and Tim have also used 2020 to surpass se...

Pretty much everyone around the world agrees that 2020 was a challenging year and we’re glad it’s all but over. However, 2020 was a year we upped the number of guests (to 90), upped our reading habits (20+ books for the show), and had more authors as guests than in any previous year. In short, Kurt and Tim read a lot of new books. And because we read bunches of them, we’re here to save you time by...

Are the new COVID-19 vaccines are safe? It will probably take time to know for sure; however, this week Kurt and Tim discuss the behavioral aspects of the transition. Kurt was engaged by an article in Bloomberg called “Vaccines May Have Social Side Effects,” by Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University. Professor Cowen raised the idea that the mere presence of vaccines may g...

Amy Bucher, PhD is the Vice President of Behavior Change Design at Mad*Pow and the author of “Engaged” a new book on how to apply behavioral science to the design and development of products. At Mad*Pow, she designs motivating interventions to help people live healthier and happier lives and, in her spare time, knocks 150 books off her reading list every year. (OMG!) Amy was recently recognized as...