I think that's a little complicated I'm reminded of my um uh graduate advisor Gary Becker who was a freshman at Princeton in Tennessee tough graduate. He wanted to be a math major and after his uh as a Princeton undergrad too and thought maybe math yeah but it turns out his roommate did a lot better than he did on an exam they took together. It backfired when Scott Corel tried to engineer better outcomes for students at West Point by actually assigning roommates strategically so he had this result that random assignment to a roommate who'd done better on their verbal SATs seem to improve your performance.
Behavioral scientist Katy Milkman of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania talks about her book How to Change with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. What can we learn from research in psychology and behavioral economics about breaking the habits we want to change? Is that research reliable? And should Russ Roberts accept being overweight or keep working at finding the thinner man trying to get out?