Katy Milkman

Changing for Good

PublishedMarch 8, 2022
CategoryPsychology
Reading time7 min read
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Intro

Katy Milkman is best known for her award-winning research on to identify and overcome barriers that prevent positive behavioral change. Her insights have been applied to topics such as savings, exercise, vaccination uptake, and discrimination. 

Milkman is currently the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to her teaching and research, she is a best-selling author, host of Charles Schwab’s popular behavioral economics podcast ‘Choiceology’, and the former president of the International Society for Judgment and Decision Making. Milkman is also the co-founder and co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the Wharton School, a research center with the mission of advancing the science of lasting behavior change.

“

I was trained as an engineer, and I’ve found that thinking about change like an engineer comes in handy. You have to figure out what forces are working against you, and then science has lots of insights to offer about what exactly you can do to overcome those particular obstacles.


 - Katy Milkman

About the Authors

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Dan Pilat

Managing Director

Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.

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Dr. Sekoul Krastev

Managing Director & Co-Founder

Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.

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I was blown away with their application and translation of behavioral science into practice. They took a very complex ecosystem and created a series of interventions using an innovative mix of the latest research and creative client co-creation. I was so impressed at the final product they created, which was hugely comprehensive despite the large scope of the client being of the world's most far-reaching and best known consumer brands. I'm excited to see what we can create together in the future.

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