Behavioral Grooves Podcast

Margaret Robinson Rutherford, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice with more than twenty-five years of experience treating individuals and couples for depression, anxiety, and relationship issues.  She also offers her compassionate and commonsense therapeutic style to the general public through her popular blog and podcasts, with the goal of decreasing the stigma around psychologica...

We saw an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “When Workers Can Live Anywhere, Many Ask: Why Do I Live Here?” and it got us thinking. Millions of white-collar workers have been displaced from their offices and are being told they are on indefinite work-from-home status. And many of those workers are opting to leave the big cities where the virus has been most aggressive. In addition to the t...

Elizabeth Gilbert, PhD is the Head of Research at PsychologyCompass, a content platform that uses insights from psychology and neuroscience to teach people how to be happier and more productive. She has a PhD in social psychology from the University of Virginia and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Medical University of South Carolina. And she’s been engaged in the replication of studies that were,...

John Bargh, PhD is a Professor of Psychology and Management at Yale University. His name may be familiar because of the replication crisis, but there is so much more to John Bargh than a couple of experiments that were challenged during replication. John has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, chapters in over 30 books, and he founded The ACME lab at Yale in order to research the uncons...

Howard Friedman is a data scientist, health economist, and writer with decades of experience in both the private and public sectors, as well as academia. He is widely known for his work as a statistical modeler and he currently lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.  Howard's new book, Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life, is about how the monetary values assigned to our...

On May 25, 2020, a white Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by holding him down with a knee on his neck for over 8 minutes. This was done while three other officers either helped in holding down Mr. Floyd down or stood by watching.  Mr. Floyd’s death is an unimaginable horror as it was not the result of a split-second or hair-trigger decision, but a callous, calc...

Chris Pfeiffer is a Senior Business Analyst at Tegra Analytics. Chris specializes in salesforce effectiveness in the life science industry, which includes incentive compensation, targeting and segmentation, sales force sizing and optimization, statistical analysis, and business intelligence.  Chris graduated from The Johns Hopkins University, where he received his Master of Science in Government A...

Dan Hill, PhD is an internationally recognized expert on the role of emotions in politics, business, sports, and popular culture. He pioneered the use of facial coding (the analysis of facial expressions) in market research and has done work for over half of the world's top 100 consumer-oriented companies. He’s even received seven U.S. patents related to facial coding and he is an author on top of...

Claire Bidwell Smith is a licensed therapist specializing in grief and the author of three books of nonfiction, most recently ANXIETY: The Missing Stage of Grief. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and a variety of other publications.  She received her Master’s Degree in clinical psychology from Antioch University, and has recently transitioned her therapeut...

Kristen Berman is the co-founder of Irrational Labs and co-founder and principal at Common Cents Lab,  a non-profit behavioral consulting company, with Dan Ariely. They work focuses on the financial well-being of low-to-middle-income Americans. She was also on the founding team for the behavioral economics group at Google and hosts one of the top behavioral change conferences globally, StartupOnom...

Stephen Curtis, PhD is a Clinical Psychologist with a doctorate in Neuroscience Experimental Psychology. He specializes in Performance Psychology with professional and college athletes, musicians, and corporate leaders to help them reach their highest levels of performance.  Steve is the author of the proprietary Clarity Survey which has become a business research best practice instrument with For...

Gary Latham, PhD is the Secretary of State Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the Rotman School of Management in the University of Toronto. His research in the field of organizational psychology has yielded over 200 peer-reviewed publications and he has written several books on the topic of goal setting. He and his lifelong research partner, Ed Locke PhD, are responsible for Goal Setting The...

Mariel Beasley is the Co-Director of the Common Cents Lab at the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University. She works on applications of behavioral research, primarily in the financial services sector and public policy arena. She holds a Master of Public Policy degree from Duke University and her previous work experience includes a variety of nonprofits and charitable foundations.   As the...

Samuel Salzer is a leading behavioral strategist and habit expert, having worked with organizations across Europe, Australia, and North America. Among other things, he’s one of the first Chief Behavioral Officer's (CBO) in tech, applying insights from behavioral science and behavioral economics to build user-centered and habit-forming products and services.  At the forefront of the emerging field...

Kaveh Yazdifard is the Chief Innovation Officer at Sahab Pardaz located in Tehran, Iran. He is also the Director of Urban Innovation for the city and COO of Avatech Accelerator, a firm focused on empowering business startups through a values-driven culture.  While much of Kaveh’s work is focused on collaborating and creating value through Innovation, we were particularly interested in speaking wit...

Gretchen Chapman, PhD researches how we make decisions about vaccines. She is a Professor in the Social & Decision Sciences department at Carnegie Mellon University and works across disciplines in both fields of judgment and decision making as well as health psychology. She is the recipient of an APA early career award and an NJ Psychological Association Distinguished Research Award, a fellow of A...

Jules Nolan, PhD is a psychologist, speaker, and author. She is the president of the Minnesota School Psychology Association and chairwoman for the Human Diversity Committee for the International School Psychology Association.  Her research, which has been conducted and published internationally, focuses on behavior, achievement, and wellbeing for school-aged children. She consults with parents an...

Our inspiration this week comes from an article written by Shayla Love for Vice titled, “You’ll probably forget what it was like to live through a pandemic.” We thought it would make a great jumping-off point for how we will remember this time as well as a discussion on memory in general.  We explore how memories get shaped during historically significant times and how vividness and emotion play i...

Greg Davies, PhD is a specialist in applied behavioral finance, decision science, impact investing, and financial wellbeing. He founded the banking world’s first behavioral finance team at Barclays in 2006, which he led for a decade. In 2017 he joined Oxford Risk to lead the development of behavioral decision support software to help people make the best possible financial decisions. Greg holds a...

Iris Tzafrir is an inspirational and influential cross-functional leader in strategy and business development, deal making, value actualization, and merger integration. She grew up in a Kibbutz in the Negev Desert of Israel, the daughter of 2 Holocaust survivors, and emigrated to the US for graduate school where she studied virology. She loves to learn and is committed to making the world a better...

Anurag Vaish is the co-founder and director of The FinalMile in Mumbai, India. In building the company's practice of Behavior Architecture, Anurag led the conceptualization and development of digital games as a platform for research. Anurag brings over 17 years of experience in strategic planning, research and marketing communication. Our conversation with him allowed him to highlight some of the...

Artem Petakov is a co-Founder of Noom, a behavioral change and weight loss product that marries both psychology and AI to help people form more healthy behaviors and lose weight. You’re probably seeing Noom everywhere these days – on television, social media, YouTube – and with high frequency. The media exposure is generating terrific growth for the company and we wanted to talk to Artem about how...

Michael Boden is the Head of U.S. Crop Protection Sales at Syngenta, a global agrochemicals and seeds firm based in Basel, Switzerland. He joined the company in 1986 and has held global sales and marketing positions throughout his career.  Michael grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, and is currently based in Syngenta’s North American headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina. Michael shared a vivid imag...

Alessandro del Ponte is a research fellow at the National University of Singapore working in the Behavioral Change program at the Global Asia Institute. He recently earned his PhD in behavioral political economy from Stony Brook University in New York. His recent research uses simple video games to understand how people feel about making tradeoffs between jobs and paying off national debt, or betw...

Stuart King designs evidence-based interventions for children and adults to change their behavior and manage their weight. He has worked with the UK’s NHS as an Obesity Lead, as a Senior Scientist in the Obesity and Healthy Weight Team, and is now the CEO and Head of Distraction at his company, BeeZee Bodies. The firm provides behavior change services across all of England. Our conversation was re...