Behavioral Grooves Podcast

Alex Blau is a vice president at ideas42 with projects in consumer finance, design and decision-making, and international development. In our discussion, we focused on a new project he’s working on in the area of supervision of people after they're released from incarceration, or what we commonly refer to as parole. The cost of incarceration and supervision is more than just social – it comes with a big price tag. Nearly $7 billion is spent annually to supervise individuals coming out of the prison system and another $9 billion is spent on incarceration. More than 4.5 million people in the United States are under supervision and government data indicate that roughly two-thirds of those released from prison will be arrested within 3 years. Roughly 50% of the arrests are for rule violations (the other 50% for committing new crimes). Alex and his colleagues at ideas42 are researching ways to change the context of the world the parolees return to with the hope of reducing recidivism. We talked about the novel interventions they’re testing. We also discussed a brief history of Jamaican music with an emphasis on the rich catalog of the island nation’s artists, emerging near the middle of the 20th century. In our grooving session, Kurt and Tim cover the implementation-intention framework and how reminders via association can be more powerful than specific triggers, especially when triggers are difficult to identify. We hope you enjoy our discussion with Alex Blau.    Links Alex Blau: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-blau-2271788/ ideas42: https://www.ideas42.org/ Annie Duke: https://www.annieduke.com/ Todd Rogers & Katy Milkman “Reminders through Association” https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/todd_rogers/files/rogers_milkman_rta.pdf Sendhil Mullainathan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendhil_Mullainathan Laurie Santos, GI Joe Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GimHHAID_P0 Reggae: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggae Ska: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ska Rocksteady: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocksteady Mento: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mento Fugue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue David Hussman episode #17: https://behavioralgrooves.com/episode/the-accidental-behavioral-scientist-with-david-hussman/   Kurt Nelson: @motivationguru  Tim Houlihan: @THoulihan Check out the Behavioral Grooves website: https://behavioralgrooves.com/   Artists Bob Marley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhJ0q7X3DLM Desmond Decker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxtfdH3-TQ4 Toots and the Maytals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nqqp5XoyLE Koffee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8HoEvDh70Y

Steven Sisler may not be a household name, but he should be. Steve is a Master Level Behavioral Profiler and the lead Behavioral Analyst at The Behavioral Resource Group. He consults on personality, career strategy, leadership strategy, culture, spiritual growth, relationship management, and temperament strategy. We were introduced to Steve by one of our listeners and we were happy to invite him on the show. His wit and wisdom were both entertaining and rewarding in ways that only a guy who has held jobs as diverse as roofing a house to authoring seven books and speaking at conferences can be. Steve’s behavioral focus emerges from his work with personality assessments, and this brought a fresh perspective us as we rarely dive into the tools of the trade. We discussed the value of understanding who we are as individuals to help us better understand how others are. As Steve said, “We don’t see people as they are, we see people as we are.”  We hope you enjoy our conversation with Steve and we’ve shared links to many of the references – and there were many – for those unfamiliar with this field of study.   Links   Steven Sisler: https://behavioralresourcegroup.com/about-us/about-steve-sisler/ King Solomon (Ecclesiastes 9:11): https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/04/race-swift/ Descriptive Self: https://positivepsychology.com/self-concept/ Normative Self: https://philarchive.org/archive/SILAAN-4 The Prince of Egypt (Disney): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_of_Egypt Robert S. Hartman, PhD: http://www.athenaq.com/about-us/robert-s-hartman-phd/ Axiology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiology Bad Players Make Great Coaches: https://www.thesportster.com/entertainment/top-15-horrible-athletes-who-made-great-coaches/ Turning into a Skid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONXHtODehHk Dave Ramsey (radio host): https://www.daveramsey.com/ John G. Geier & Dorthey E. Downey, Aristos: http://www.geierlearning.com/aristos.html DISC Assessment: https://www.123test.com/disc-personality-test/ Hyper Empathy: https://exploringyourmind.com/hyper-empathy-syndrome-much-good-thing/ Emotional Intelligence: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/emotional-intelligence GI Joe Fallacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GimHHAID_P0 Mirroring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirroring_(psychology) Pinky & The Brain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinky_and_the_Brain “Quiet” by Susan Cain: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8520610-quiet “9 Lies About Work” by Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall: https://hbrascend.org/topics/9-lies-about-work/ Meyers Briggs Personality Assessment: https://www.businessinsider.com/myers-briggs-personality-test-is-misleading-2014-6 Kimberlé Crenshaw – Intersectionality: https://blackwomenintheblackfreedomstruggle.voices.wooster.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/210/2019/02/Crenshaw_mapping-the-margins1991.pdf   Music “A Star is Born” soundtrack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Star_Is_Born_(2018_soundtrack) Lady Gaga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPJjwHAIny4 Foreigner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSOtCMYJqOw Electric Light Orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQUlA8Hcv4s Queen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbvyNnw8Qjg Dredg “The Pariah, the Parrot, the Illusion”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73Wt-jhBdtA “Down to the Cellar”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDIVA2sDnek “The Times They Are A Changing” by Bob Dylan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ “Purple Rain” by Prince: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9X2R_YF4Qc “Love Will Never Do Without You” by Janet Jackson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KCvVsNstjE “Candy Apple Gray” by Hüsker Dü: https://nl.qwerty.wiki/wiki/Candy_Apple_Grey The Replacements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Replacements_(band) The Suburbs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Suburbs_(band)  

Our guest in this episode is a prolific writer and observer of the human condition, Chris Matyszczyk (pronounced ma-TIS-chick). We talked with Chris about a variety of topics including advertising, the psychology of who we are, including an unplanned psychoanalysis of Tim’s desire to be heard as a musician. We also talked about politics and referenced Brexit, life at Google and Facebook, and, hold the phone: how World War will be won by the best nerds. All of this got started because we saw an article Chris wrote that caught our attention. It was a topic we have discussed in the past: Music and its relationship to getting work done. Is music a stimulant to creativity or is it a buzz kill? Does it enhance the work experience or drown it out? You’ll have to listen to see what Chris has to say about this. In our grooving session, we focused on the dynamics of why we connect so easily with some people and others, not so much. And we also covered some of the challenges of a digital, high-social-media age where the lines of work and life might be more like how our ancient ancestors live: it’s just life. Or is it?  We hope you enjoy our conversation with Chris. And please share your thoughts with us and stay in touch. Links Chris Matyszczyk:https://www.zdnet.com/blog/technically-incorrect/ and https://www.inc.com/author/chris-matyszczyk and https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-matyszczyk-935b604/ Brexit: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brexit.asp John Cleese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cleese Fawlty Towers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcEws7il4EY On Privacy: “Privacy and human behavior in the age of information,“ by Alessandro Acquisti, Laura Brandimarte, and George Loewenstein https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/PrivacyHumanBeh.pdf Marvel comics: https://www.marvel.com/ Work-Life Balance was Episode 59 with Jeanie Whinghter and Afra Ahmad: https://behavioralgrooves.com/episode/jeanie-whinghter-and-afra-ahmad-balance-vs-harmony/ Charlotte Blank: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlotte-blank-52554a2/ Roger Dooley: https://www.rogerdooley.com/   Kurt Nelson: @motivationguru and https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurtwnelson/ Tim Houlihan: @THoulihan and https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-houlihan-b-e/ Check out the Behavioral Grooves website: https://behavioralgrooves.com/   Cold Play: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coldplay Pink Floyd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd Ludwig Van Beethoven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_van_Beethoven Beethoven’s Violin Concerto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cg_0jepxow

Because we're taking a little break, we are republishing one of our favorite episodes: a conversation with Scott Jeffrey, PhD from Monmouth University in New Jersey, recorded in December 2017. Our conversation was so engaging that we wanted to make sure no one misses out on it. The original audio from this was only our third podcast we’d ever recorded, and it was a recorded with the simplest tools available. That said, we hope you enjoy the content. In this episode, we discuss the concept of justifiability with one of its earliest researchers, Scott Jeffrey, PhD. Scott was early among researchers, including Itamar Simonson at Stanford, to note that part of what makes a thing a 'reward' is its difficulty to be justifiable. In other words, the best reward is something that we would NOT justify spending our own money on.  Scott took an interesting turn with his theme song and we had also talked about how employee engagement platforms are 'dollarizing' the relationship between the employer and the employee. Scott also brought up Max Bazerman's "Arguing with Yourself and Losing" model which coaxed a spirited discussion among us. We groove on holiday eats, since we originally recorded this in December and lots of geeky stuff in this episode. We hope you enjoy.   Links Scott Jeffrey, PhD: https://www.monmouth.edu/directory/profiles/scott-a-jeffrey/ Justifiability: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8da9/c17cecfba7806e00a966009c67e11f14e13f.pdf A Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith: https://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_MoralSentiments_p.pdf Cognitive Misers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_miser Dragon’s Den: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons%27_Den Max Bazerman, PhD: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6420 Dan Ariely, PhD: http://danariely.com/ Source Attribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_(psychology) Behavioral Grooves: https://behavioralgrooves.com/ Kurt Nelson: @motivationguru and https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurtwnelson/ Tim Houlihan: @THoulihan and https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-houlihan-b-e/  

Kurt and Tim groove on where behavioral science shows up in popular music. Social norms, loss aversion…all at its best. The human condition is redolent in popular music and we hope you notice some of your own. Let us know what songs YOU think are great for demonstrating behavioral science principles.   Links Aretha Franklin, “Think”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsL9UL9qbv8 Linkin Park “Numb”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXYiU_JCYtU Cheap Trick, “Surrender”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sAm5UCJ9vA  Joan Jett, “Bad Reputation”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RAQXg0IdfI George Jones, “She Thinks I Still Care”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UquXUYfHYok Dan Hicks, “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Ever Leave Me”: https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/1136477/Original+Recordings/How+Can+I+Miss+You+When+You+Won't+Go+Away  

We met up with Kathleen Vohs, PhD at our Behavioral Grooves Meetup in Minneapolis on the evening that her op-ed article appeared in the Washington Post on July 18, 2019. She had been asked by the newspaper to write a piece explaining how supporters of President Donald Trump could continue backing him in light of his, “send them back” comment in a tweet. The tweet referred to 4 first-term congresswomen of color. All of them are US citizens and only one of them was born outside the United States: Representative Ilhan Omar from Minnesota. Representative Omar is from Kurt and Tim’s district and we were motivated by the situation to groove on the cognitive dissonance that Dr. Vohs wrote about. In this short grooving session, we talk about politics, politicians and cognitive dissonance. We also explore the age-old philosophical question about whether or not a piece of art can be viewed (and appreciated) without the context of the artist. Links Kathleen Vohs, “The psychological phenomenon that blinds Trump supporters to his racism,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-psychological-phenomenon-that-blinds-trump-supporters-to-his-racism/2019/07/18/29789344-a8ac-11e9-ac16-90dd7e5716bc_story.html?utm_term=.3cd14b5c4d4b Kathleen Vohs, PhD: https://carlsonschool.umn.edu/faculty/kathleen-vohs Leon Festinger, PhD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Festinger Cognitive Dissonance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance Picasso: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso Kurt Nelson: @motivationguru and https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurtwnelson/ Tim Houlihan: @THoulihan and https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-houlihan-b-e/ Check out the Behavioral Grooves website: https://behavioralgrooves.com/

Matt Loper, CEO and Co-Founder of Wellth, discusses using loss contracts to improve medication adherence rates. Wellth app rewards patients for taking their pills but penalizes them for missing doses, resulting in better than 90% adherence rates. The science of behavior change is complex and requires rigorous testing. The podcast also explores motivating behavior change in underserved populations, creating value through user-centric design, establishing and maintaining habits, and the complexity of human behavior and incentives.

In this episode, Kurt and Tim explore Robert Cialdini’s Fifth Principles of Influence: Liking. In it, we groove on the very powerful tool for influence and persuasion and give examples of how to apply it. In short, we like people who like us and are more willing to do things for others who we like. We can find aspects of liking and similarity on a multitude of levels, and this subconscious bias impacts much of what drives our behavior. There are three key things to keep in mind when it comes to maximizing the impact of liking: 1. Don’t give people a reason to say no, 2. Be cooperative, and 3. Be authentic in the way you present yourself. We hope you enjoy our short grooving session on liking. If you find yourself liking this episode, please be kind enough to leave us a review. Thank you. Links Robert Cialdini, PhD on Liking: https://www.influenceatwork.com/principles-of-persuasion/ Negotiation study: https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-training-daily/negotiate-relationships/ Attractive Bankers in Call Center study: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002224298404800110 Halo effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect Celebrity effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_branding Kurt Nelson: @motivationguru and https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurtwnelson/ Tim Houlihan: @THoulihan and https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-houlihan-b-e/ Check out the Behavioral Grooves website: https://behavioralgrooves.com/

In this episode, we spoke with Nurit Nobel, who is living in Stockholm, Sweden where she’s working on her PhD. Nurit is a co-founder of Impactually, along with one of our favorite guests, Christina Gravert, PhD. Impactually is a behavioral science consultancy that is firmly grounded in both academic rigor and real-world experience. Nurit, who is related by marriage to the family associated with the Nobel Prize, talked about Impactually’s BOOST model, which is a practical tool for behavior change. The majority of our conversation was focused on a client case study about de-biasing the recruitment and hiring processes. Her client’s intentions were all in the right places; however, the firm still ended up hiring new employees that were fundamentally the same as the existing employees. The research Nurit relied on to de-bias the hiring process was originally conducted by Iris Bohnet at Harvard, and it is focused on modifying the process in order to overrule our natural biases. Nurit and her team put the research to good use and our discussion dove into the nitty gritty of the issues they dealt with as well as the results they’re getting under the new process. We also talked about the Lindy Hop, a pre-World War II dance developed in Harlem, and Sweden’s fascinating revival of it. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Nurit Links  Nurit Nobel LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nnobel/ Twitter: @nuritnobel Impactually: http://impactually.se and https://impactually.teachable.com/ for the BOOST online course Iris Bohnet, PhD, Harvard University: https://scholar.harvard.edu/iris_bohnet/home Kahneman & Levav on judges after lunch: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/11/judges-lenient-break Christina Gravert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cgravert/ South by Southwest (SXSW): https://www.sxsw.com/attend/ Richard Thaler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Thaler Dan Ariely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely April Seifert, PhD: https://www.aprilseifert.com/ Laurie Santos and the GI Joe Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GimHHAID_P0 Brexit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit  Muzak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak Lindy Hop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7KO7b9qbfU Frankie Manning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankie_Manning “Sonic Boom,” by Joel Beckerman: https://thesonicboom.joelbeckerman.com/ Tim Houlihan, “Washington Square”: https://soundcloud.com/timhoulihan/washington-square Kurt Nelson: @motivationguru and https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurtwnelson/ Tim Houlihan: @THoulihan and https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-houlihan-b-e/ Check out the Behavioral Grooves website: https://behavioralgrooves.com/

We are excited to re-share our favorite episodes from time to time and this discussion with Tom was terrifically informative about the sales managers can be more effective at introducing new products to their sales team.  Thomas Steenburgh, PhD is a senior professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Tom spent a good portion of his career in the corporate world and before he departed for academia, he held senior positions at Xerox Corporation, ending his work there as head of the US Direct Incentive Strategy with a budget of $140 million budget for 4,000 salespeople Tom has partnered with Mike Ahearne, PhD from the University of Houston (featured in a June 2018 episode of Behavioral Grooves) on extensive research related to the performance and management of sales reps. Recently, the two of them developed ground-breaking research on how to help sales reps be more successful when they are asked to sell new products. Tom and Mike invested 5 years in gathering data from sales managers, salespeople, and even customers. The insights they gained were especially valuable for those working in sales leadership positions. There were three primary discoveries we discussed with Tom. The first is that the best asset for a sales rep to have when it comes to selling new products is a learning mindset. A learning mindset, as described by Tom, is what comes from a sales rep’s innate curiosity about customers, their environment and their needs. As intuitive as that sounds, it’s a lot less common than we imagine. Reps with learning mindsets spend more time discussing the market trends affecting the customers as well as the situations and the specific needs their customers have before they start into selling new products. This deep investigation into each customer’s situation contributes to increased success when they start selling. The downside is that it takes more time and reduces output while they’re doing that investigation. Sales managers who are anxious to keep the numbers up from month to month may struggle with this. Tom highlighted a few ways to work around this in the short term. The second big discovery was the disconnect between sales reps and their customers in how they perceive the strengths of the reps. In other words, customers were asked to rate reps on a variety of scales and reps were asked to the same of themselves. When considering the rep’s strengths, customers tended to rate sales reps very differently than reps rated themselves. The only dimension the reps and customers agreed on was on the sales rep’s product knowledge. Customers were more likely to give reps lower scores on reps’ learning mindsets, adaptability and openness than the reps gave themselves. This revealed big blind spots. The third big discovery was the role of the rep’s emotional wellbeing in the selling process. We recognize that selling new products can be hard on the reps, but it’s vital to the company’s long-term success. Tom’s research revealed that sales reps need to become change agents within the organization as well as masters to change their own selling methods. These changes, along with saving face with clients, can cause significant emotional challenges – a component that has been undervalued in the past. It turns out that reps were surprised by the stark contrast between how easy it was to get customers to take meetings and how difficult it was to close deals after the initial interest. Unfortunately, most sales reps failed to do the deep investigation to understand who the best target for the new product would be, so many of their meetings were wastes of time. We also talked about the importance of strategic account reps with their broader viewpoints and longer-term orientations and how they can be leaders in new product introductions. And we discussed Neil Rackham, the creator of SPIN selling and author of books on consultative selling. Of course, we also discussed Tom’s eclectic tastes in music. Apparently, he has seemingly equal interest in the works of Philip Glass, great American contemporary composer of minimalist orchestral music and John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards, who are responsible for some of the greatest covers of Ornette Coleman’s classic sax tunes. But Tom also listens to the sweet and simple Americana melodies of Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch. Not to be outdone with another left-turn, Tom paid special note to Kurt Weill, the early 20th-century composer of The Threepenny Opera which featured the song “Mack The Knife” (lyrics by Berthold Brecht). It was popularized by Bobby Darin in 1958, then Ella Fitzgerald in her 1960 performance Live in Berlin, which we’ve referenced before as one of the greatest live recordings – ever. Our own notes included references to The Who’s Tommy and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Thomas Steenburgh, PhD: https://www.darden.virginia.edu/faculty-research/directory/thomas-j-steenburgh/  In our grooving session, we expanded on Tom’s mention of learning mindset and we brought up Carol Dweck’s growth mindset. The intersection of these two concepts is very cool. Finally, Kurt and Tim help companies with sales compensation, sales incentive structures and selecting the most motivational rewards, don’t hesitate to start a conversation with us. You might be a sales leader with questions, and we can help answer them. We’d love to help your organization improve your bottom line with a behavioral lens.