Freakonomics Radio - 200. When Willpower Isn’t Enough

Episode Date: March 12, 2015

Sure, we all want to make good personal decisions, but it doesn't always work out. That's where "temptation bundling" comes in.

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Did I mention I got hold of some killer life extension drugs the other day? So please give us a hand by going to Freakonomics.com and click donate. Your grandchildren will thank you I know I should go. And at the end of a long day, I also struggle with the desire to watch my favorite TV shows instead of getting work done. And so I actually realized that those two temptations, those two struggles I face could be combined to solve both problems. That's Katie Milkman. And I'm an assistant professor at the Wharton School, where I study behavioral economics and how people make choices.

Okay, which might lead one to think that you are an economist by training, which would make one wrong, correct? That's right. My background is actually that I have a PhD in computer science and business, a joint PhD in those two fields. But I spent a lot of time hanging around economists and got really interested in this new field. This new field that Milkman mentioned, behavioral economics,

is something we talk about a lot on this program. It is essentially a marriage of psychology and economics. It is inhabited by people who wish to blend the economist's view of incentives with the psychologist's view that most people don't respond to incentives as rationally as economic theory would predict. It was behavioral economics that years ago got me interested in economics in the first place. Behavioral economics may not seem as consequential as macroeconomics or labor economics, but I would argue it can offer tremendous leverage when properly applied. One well-placed nudge can go a very long way. It is also a field that appreciates simple,

clever solutions, like something that Katie Milkman's been working on. She calls it temptation bundling. I invented that phrase, although I'm sure many other people had invented the same solution that I came up with and used that phrase to describe. Here's how it works in Milkman's own case. What I realized is that if I only allowed myself to watch my favorite TV shows while exercising at the gym, then I'd stop wasting time at home on useless television, and I'd start craving trips to the gym at the end of a long day because I'd want to find out what happens next in my show.

And not only that, I'd actually enjoy my workout and my show more combined. I wouldn't feel guilty watching TV, and time would fly while I was at the gym. So when I talk about temptation bundling, I mean combining a temptation, something like a TV show, a guilty pleasure, something that will pull you into engaging in a behavior with something you know you should do but might struggle to do. It's a nice idea, isn't it? As is often the case, ideas that seem new in academia have in fact been running wild in the real world for quite some time, as we learned when we solicited your examples of temptation bundling. My temptation bundle is to listen to Freakonomics podcasts while I'm running.

Doing it right now. What I like to do is skip an afternoon of work and go to the movies after my annual pap smear. I really wish my temptation bundle was acceptable, but it would be drinking at work. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, which we're going to talk about today. And so here's the way I would describe it maybe is that there are a lot of activities that most of us consider should activities. And then there are a lot of ways that we avoid those should activities. And then there are a lot of ways that we avoid those should activities. And you try to identify the gap and look for ways to close the gap that are not too intrusive or

costly or painful. That was my lame attempt to present your worldview. Let me hear it from you. I love your attempt to present my worldview. I think it's much more cohesive. Actually, one of the things that I think is always funny is whenever someone, I'm at a cocktail party and I'm with my husband and someone asks me what I do, I say, well, actually he'll describe it better than I will because I get so focused on the little details

that it's hard to actually step back and see the big picture. But I think your description's beautiful. So I think in short, I struggle a lot with willpower. And I find it difficult at the end of a long day to get to the gym. I find it difficult to stick to my diet. I find it difficult to stick to my goals more generally. And what I have found curious in the world, one of the things I found curious is why and what I can do to solve those problems for myself and for others. And that's where a lot of my research focuses. Okay, so let's start with temptation bundling.

So what if you only let yourself get a pedicure while catching up on overdue emails for work? Or what if you only let yourself listen to your favorite CDs while catching up on household chores? Or only let yourself go to your very favorite restaurant whose hamburgers you crave while spending time with a difficult relative who you should see more of. Those would all be examples of temptation bundling. Gotcha. Okay. So the key is that the activity that you want to do is constrained. You can only do it when you're doing the other activities. So that sounds to some degree like a commitment device, which we've talked about in the show before. And our examples were, so I'll give you a couple of

our strange examples of commitment devices. One was this guy who wanted to get healthy. He wanted to lose weight, but he wanted to get healthy. He had a new kid. So he drew up a list of prohibitions, everything from alcohol to junk food to pornography, on and on and on. And if he violated them, then he would force himself to write a check to Oprah Winfrey, who he hated more than anything in the world for whatever reason. Steve Leavitt had a diet idea also, which is for people who are trying to lose weight. One thing I know would work is just take a little can, like say a baby food jar, and fill it with vomit. Okay? And wear it around your neck. And every time you decide that you're hungry,

just open the jar and take a little sniff. I guarantee you, you will lose weight. Guaranteed. So those are commitment devices of some sorts. I'm curious to know whether you see temptation bundling as a commitment device or it's more of a first cousin somehow. I see temptation bundling as a new type of commitment device with some distinct features from standard commitment devices. So a standard commitment device typically provides some consequence if you fail to engage in the intended behavior. And so this is a little different. What we're doing here is basically combining two commitments with each other and they sort of fit like puzzle pieces. So you're using something that's instantly gratifying to create a pull to provide the motivation you need

to do something that's unpleasurable at the moment of engagement. And then the other component that's different is that you can actually have complementarities, which is an econ-speak term for peanut butter and jelly, two things that go better together and are more enjoyable together than they would be separately. And so one of the neat things about, for instance, only allowing yourself to watch your favorite TV show while you're at the gym is the fact that you might actually enjoy your workout more and you might enjoy the TV show more when you do them together, whereas a traditional commitment device just penalizes some behavior.

Great. Okay, so in theory, I'm sure everybody hearing this says, oh man, Katie, that's brilliant. That is such a good way to approach problem solving. So that's the theory at least, but now you need to find out if in practice it works. So talk about what you did to find out if temptation bundling could actually improve outcomes. Absolutely. So we ran an experiment actually at the gym at the University of Pennsylvania with a bunch of participants who told us that they wanted to exercise more. And we randomly assigned them. How did you find these subjects in the first place?

We posted flyers all over the campus. We sent out email blasts to every listserv we could find. And the people who came told us they desperately wanted to exercise more and they also had to have an iPod to be in our study and they had to belong to the University of Pennsylvania gym so that they could enter and exit as they pleased. Okay, good. So we took these participants who wanted to exercise more and we randomly assigned them through a coin toss to one of several different groups. The first experimental group

was a treatment group and these participants came in and they had their iPod with them. And we told them that we were actually going to give them a new iPod in addition to the one they already had that would be preloaded with four tempting audio novels of their choice. So we had a list of 82 books that had been pre-rated as extremely tempting and difficult to put down once you get engaged. So these are books like The Da Vinci Code and The Hunger Games. The rules of The Hunger Games are simple.

In punishment for the uprising, each of the 12 districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. Participants choose the four that appeal most to them, load them on this loaned audio novel device, an iPod, and then they take them to the gym and they do a 30-minute workout while listening to the first audio novel. I have to say that it's so flattering as a writer that you are treating hearing a book as the treat that people get for having to work out. That's so awesome. It is awesome. I love that it worked,

too. I do suspect that TV would have been even more tempting and enticing, but I think there are some novels that really grab you. And in fact, actually, almost half of the participants in our study at the time when we ran it chose The Hunger Games. It was really popular right then. It was a fabulous book for this study, I think, because it's so addictive. Once you get into it, it's just impossible to put the book down because you desperately want to know what happens. Happy Hunger Games, and may the odds be ever in your favor. You only have access to the audio version of the book when you're at the gym, correct? That's right. So the participants in our study, they listen to the first 30 minutes,

and then they're told, and this is while exercising, they're told if they want to hear what happens next, they'll have to come back to the gym where we're going to hold this iPod we've loaned them in a locked, monitored locker that they can only check out when exercising. So that's the first experimental group. Second experimental group has a very similar experience. They also get tempting audio novels. They also listen to the first 30 minutes, but this time those tempting audio novels are loaded onto their personal iPods, and they also do the workout for 30 minutes while listening to the novel. But they are told, why don't you try to only listen while exercising? But we won't enforce it.

So we want to see if actually people can self-impose this rule successfully, which would be great, because if we can just educate people about this strategy, and that's all we need to do, and that can have a benefit, that means it's a really easy job to roll out temptation bundling to the world. Great. Okay. Finally, we have our third group, which is actually a control group. And the control group, instead of receiving a tempting audio novel, they received an equally valued gift certificate to Barnes & Noble. And they also completed a 30 minute workout at the beginning of the study, but not while listening to a novel. They could do whatever they wanted. They had their iPod, so maybe they listened to music, maybe they listened to a novel, they could do whatever they wanted, but we didn't control that. And we simply encouraged them to

exercise more. Okay, so you've got the three groups, the ones who can only listen to the novel that you get them addicted to while at the gym. Yes. The second group who you give them the addictive material, but they don't have to come to the gym to listen to it. And the third group who don't even get the addictive material unless they go out and buy it themselves with the money that you gave them, right? Those are the three groups? Those are the three groups. I'd add to the middle group that gets the addictive material and doesn't have to listen to it at the gym that we strongly encourage them to only allow themselves to listen when they're at the gym. So it's framed as try to only use this to lure yourself to the gym as opposed to here's just some material. So they're given the tool in a sense,

they're just not given the restriction. They have to self-impose it. Okay. So three groups, the data you collected for, people went for a minimum of nine weeks, I believe you said, yes? That's right. That's our follow-on period. So basically what we're doing is we have this period. At the end of that, they're paid for being in the study, dismissed. They fill out some survey measures and we thank them. So our critical period is whether or not they exercise more during those nine weeks while we're imposing these different rules on them and giving them access to temptation bundling. And so what we see is that for the first seven weeks of our study, the full treatment group exercises significantly more than the control.

And the group that's given access to the audio novels and asked to just self-impose the rules right in between the two. So that's good news in a sense. They're actually, they look a bit better than control initially. And so that seems like maybe people can actually do this for themselves, although they're not doing as well as the people who have the full binding commitment that we've provided. And then we see a little bit of wear off. And then over seven weeks, this is working. Participants then on the seventh week go home. It's Thanksgiving break. The gym is closed.

When they come back, we look at the data and we see that the effect is completely eliminated. So when they come back, they seem to have forgotten about their novels, perhaps, and they're no longer motivated by temptation bundling. So on the one hand, this is actually kind of neat because it suggests that wanting to know what happens next in your novel may really be what's driving our effects, as we'd hope, because forced separation is the one thing we know reduces cravings. But it also means we have more work to do to figure out how to reengage people with temptation bundling after time away from the gym. For the people in the first group, the treatment group, who can only hear the material at the gym, do they actually have to be working out at the gym to hear it? Or can they just come and get the iPod out of the locker and listen to the novel while sitting and drinking a milkshake or something? That's a great question. When we did the study, we had no way of forcing them to

work out while they were listening to the novel. We did actually have their security folks who sit right by the locker where these things are being held. And we asked them whether or not they saw people coming and sitting, hanging out. They said the people who were coming to the locker were coming to work out and they were in their workout clothes. But that's anecdotal rather than empirical. What would be really cool is if we had Fitbits, for instance, on everyone and could actually track how much exercise they're doing. And I'm doing new research right now, now that Fitbits are much more widely distributed than they were when I ran the study, where we are trying to do things like that, where we actually track physical activity,

not just in this case, all we could track is whether or not they enter and exit the gym. Awesome. And I'm guessing there's so many places you could go with that because you could see pace and intensity and all different kinds of things that work out depending on material and inspiration. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. There's so many neat things you can see with Fitbit data. There are also a lot of neat things that Milkman can envision doing with temptation bundling

more generally. One thing you could do is imagine building this into an app, for instance, that let you create certain geolocations like all the gyms you belong to or the only gym you belong to where you can access tempting content on your iPod and then set restrictions so you can say, I can only access this content at those tempting locations. And then there's what she calls gym flicks. Gym flicks is one of my favorite suggested products. So imagine that you took a company like Netflix and you called it gym flicks and you let people

set aside certain TV shows for gym only access. My research suggests that a product like that might be very attractive to people. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, what do you think is the most common temptation that is bundled by Freakonomics Radio listeners? I like to drink scotch while I fold laundry. I like to enjoy a cold beer while I clean the house. A drink that I love making. I call it the nectar of the gods. And we explore what Katie Milkman calls the fresh start effect.

Like when I wake up sometimes, I feel sometimes that I'm a new person. I went vegetarian like on my birthday in 1997. My birthday is coming up in two weeks and I'm just tired of being fat. bet. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. We are talking with Katie Milkman of the Wharton School at Penn. She's been doing research on temptation bundling and how it can help motivate us to do the things we ought to be doing, but left to our own devices, might not do. Milkman has also been doing research on what she calls the fresh start effect. So the work I've done on the fresh start effect was actually motivated by giving a talk out at Google a couple of years ago and telling them about some of the different tools I had done research on that can be helpful to getting people to do things like exercise

and get flu shots and follow through on various other goals that they intend to follow through on but sometimes fail to. And one of the HR folks at Google asked me this great question while I was out there. He said, you know, we see that there are all these tools available and we'd love to roll them out and try to promote them to our employees to encourage more long-term focused behaviors. But do you have a sense of when it would be best to deploy these tools? What is the best time? And we just hadn't looked at that in my research group. So that's actually what motivated the work I've done on the Fresh Start Effect. Right. And what kind of tools were they trying to roll out?

So I actually talked about the idea of temptation bundling. So that was one of the things I presented. I'd also presented some of my research showing that if you prompt people to form concrete plans about exactly when they intend to follow through on a given behavior. In this case, it was getting a flu shot or getting a colonoscopy. Even in the privacy of their own home, if they're just prompted to think through privately the date and time when they intend to do that, that actually increases follow-through quite significantly and substantially. So those are the tools that I had just presented, and they said, when do we roll these out? And I sat back and I scratched my head and I thought, you know, well, we know about the New Year's effect.

We do know about the New Year's effect, that a lot of people make resolutions that they at least try to keep. Here are a few samples from people we spoke with. My resolution for New Year's was to smile more. I make the same one every year. Yeah? Eat less, f*** more. I mean, it was New Year's last year, and I did start doing yoga, and now I do go three

times a week, and it's only to stop the inevitable decline of my person, because I'm 33, but I think it's the best thing I've done for myself in a long time, and it was New Year's. Is it a resolution if your wife decides that you can't wear tube socks anymore? That was a resolution because they were thrown away. We create these resolutions, and there's a lot of social support for that kind of thing, so it's not clear that that is anything besides a social norm or a social ritual. But I wondered if there might be something more to it. And in particular, one of the things that struck me is that at the start of a new year, we feel like we

have a clean slate. It's the fresh start effect, in essence, that I feel at the beginning of a new year is driven by the fact that last year's behind me, all of my past failures are from last year. And I can think, those are not me. That's old me. That's not new me. New me isn't going to make these mistakes. And so I thought, if that's true, if that's part of what's going on at the beginning of a new year, then there should be lots of other cycles that show that pattern as well. So we should see the same kinds of dissociation from our past failings and same motivation to do better on this cycle at the beginning of a new week, the beginning of a new month, following birthdays when we feel like we're beginning a new cycle in our own lives, following holidays, which may stand apart from other dates and create the start of a new cycle for us personally as well.

So talk about the evidence you have and where the evidence comes from. What you go looking for, where you're getting the data to do that? Yeah, well, so the very first data set we explored actually was maybe very natural given the idea originated at Google. The first thing we did is we downloaded searches for the term diet on Google. And diet, by the way, is the most popular New Year's resolution. It's the thing that we most struggle with. And that applies to me as well. So we downloaded daily search volume for this term over the course of eight years, which you can get from Google. And what we did is we looked to see whether or not there were any particular moments when it bounced up and whether or not, in fact, it was consistent with our hypothesis, which was that people would search more for the term diet at the beginning of a new week, month, year, and following holidays. And we found, indeed, that that's exactly the case in that data set.

So we see bigger effects for dates that feel like fresh starts. And if we look at placebo terms, something like weather or news that people often search for, we don't see those patterns. So it's something distinct happening when we look at the term diet. So that was our very first exploration. We got all excited about what we saw. And we said, well, let's see. That's just information search, information gathering. What about real behavior? So we actually went to this data set on all of the visits to the gym by undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, which we had at our fingertips, and said, maybe we'll see it in gym visits too. And when we looked at that data, what we saw is that people visit the gym, the very

same undergraduate, in fact, we can look within student and see that the very same undergraduate is more likely to visit the gym at the start of a new week, month, year, following holidays and following birthdays, with the notable exception of 21st birthdays. And I'll let you speculate as to why that might be different. I'm guessing alcohol may be involved. I'm letting you speculate. I don't have any data on exactly why. But, you know, my speculation may or may not have gone in the same direction. Judging by the submissions you sent when we asked for your examples of temptation bundling, I'd say that yes, alcohol may be involved.

I like to drink scotch while I fold laundry. If I don't work out, I don't drink beer. That's my trade-off. My name is Filip Nilsson, and I live in Sweden. And my temptation bundle is actually cleaning my apartment before going out for drinks with my friends. So, okay, so I'm thinking of the different ways that one might look at this fresh start effect. So one would be that, you know, the beginning of a new year or maybe a new school term or some new, you know, some demarcation of time that feels like your past is behind you and your future is ahead of you. And then you embark on this thing. And theoretically, that thing that you embark on is better for you. But

then talk about the degree to which people fall off. And the implication is that it's bad to fall off. But I guess I'm thinking, well, maybe this activity they were trying to change or add to wasn't that important to them. That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of fall off with New Year's resolutions or with any goal that we're pursuing with anything that requires willpower. New Year's, I always say I need to stop smoking cigarettes and I always revert back to smoking a couple of days after. You know, I find resolutions are tough. Like, I try to meditate more in the New Year and it doesn't go well. But in New Year, yeah, you say you're going to lose weight or do something like that.

Then by February, well, I fell off. Some people say that means why even bother in the first place? Why even form New Year's resolutions if you're going to fall off? I think there's a few different responses to that. One is you can't hit a home run if you don't swing. So it's never going to work if you don't start. And I think that suggests that we want fresh start moments to motivate people. And hopefully, eventually, they'll actually hit the home run, even if they fall off a

bunch of times. So that's one answer. Another answer is that sometimes, actually, the behavior just takes a tiny bit of effort. So there are some things we can do that are just a one-time decision, and they make a huge impact on the rest of our lives. For instance, if you just sign up for a 401k plan just once, then you're going to be saving forever after. Or if you just get your flu shot, you only have to do that once a year and then it has benefits for the remainder of the year. A lot of different medical procedures have that characteristic where if you can just get people

to do it once every so often, even at low frequency, like a colonoscopy once every 10 years can be enough to save many lives. So I think we can also think about the fresh start effect as having a lot of benefits for those kinds of one-time behaviors with huge, huge downstream consequences that are positive. Okay. So considering that you've identified this and found it and found evidence for it in the data, what can you do about it? How can you use this knowledge to help people make more pro-social choices? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, I think there's a bunch of different implications. So one thing we've tried is just reminding people that a given day is a fresh start. So for instance, we have one experiment

where we reminded people that a certain day was the first day of spring. And we experimentally compared people who we reminded a certain day was the first day of spring with another group that we didn't. And the group that got that first day of spring reminder was more motivated to pursue their goals and receive a reminder about their goals specifically on the first day of spring when it was labeled as such. And so you can think about just reframing a given day, reminding someone that it is an opportunity for a fresh start as one intervention that might increase engagement in fresh start behaviors. You could also think about just asking people to do things that are good for them on fresh start dates. So you might try to roll out, for instance, a planning prompt campaign or offer people an opportunity to sign up for a commitment device or for a temptation bundling device on a fresh start date when we know their natural inclination and their motivation to

do things like exercise and diet. And by the way, we also found the fresh start effect with non-health related goals. So looking at things like financial goals and educational goals. So whatever it is that they're striving to do, if we provide them with the tools they need at a moment when they're feeling fresh, they may be more likely to take advantage of those tools and start a good new habit. All right, so Katie, let me play devil's advocate for a minute. It's more like jerk's advocate, not so much devil's advocate. But why should smart, motivated people like you have to work so hard to nudge and trick people into taking better care of themselves, for instance? Why not just let Darwinian forces do their thing and weed out the people who are too lazy to go to the gym or to get a vaccine? There are a lot of different answers. One could be that you simply want to see better

outcomes for people who maybe didn't realize what they needed to do or were too busy to figure out what they needed to do. So this is one way of helping people who maybe really would do this if they had the time and energy and education. Another answer would be that there's huge social benefits, right? So even selfishly, we all pay the costs when other people fail to exert the willpower needed to take care of themselves. And so you could even think of a selfish reason for engaging in this kind of research and providing these kinds of nudges, which is that society is going to pay the cost when bad things happen to people who didn't take care of themselves. But I like to think of it as a more altruistic motive. Can I just say for the record that I don't really agree

with the jerk's advocate argument. I just wanted to hear what you had to say. I know. I'm on your side. Maybe Katie Milkman's research has inspired you to harness the fresh start effect, but maybe you need one more nudge, a bit of further inspiration to follow. If that's the case, we will leave you with some more of your examples that we gathered along the way. I'm not a particularly religious person, but during Yom Kippur, I think about some of the things that I haven't done particularly well that year and some of the things that I want to improve upon the next year. My grandmother, she died from smoking. So I remember I used to smoke cigarettes with my friends all the time in high school.

As soon as she died, it was like over. I was just like, why? Like, that's it. I'm not smoking cigarettes ever again. But now I just smoke weed, but yeah, that's a better solution. Last August was my birthday and I turned 25, and something that was a long-term goal for me was to apply to grad school. So after I celebrated my birthday, I started with the application process for all the grad schools. Leaving a job is probably the perfect sort of fresh start moment. So generally in the

morning I make better decisions than I do at the in the evening put it that way. I think every day honestly you can start fresh. So let's say I went out to dinner the night before and I ate a lot of sweets and carbs. The next day, I wake up and instead of beating myself up about it, I try to eat a little bit better that day. Hey, podcast listeners, next week on the show, what would an economist never, ever, ever, ever put on his own online dating profile? And what might an economist lie about? In some of the questions that asked you how into deep conversations with your mate and cuddling and things like that you are, I may have made myself seem a bit more accessible in those dimensions than

an honest person would say. How to build the best ever online dating profile. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes Greg Rosalski, Caroline English, Susie Lechtenberg, Merritt Jacob, and Christopher Wirth. With help from David Herman, Anna Hyatt, Rick Kwan, Daniel Tuzula, and Paul Schneider. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.