Conducting Megastudies to Increase the Impact of Applied Behavioral Science
Speaker: Katherine L. Milkman (The Wharton School)
Time: Thursday, 21 July at 12.30pm (US Eastern) / 5.30pm (London). This webinar is scheduled for 60 minutes (including Q&A).
Registration: Please register here to receive a personalized Zoom link and a reminder prior to the event.


Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time intervals. The lack of comparability of such individual investigations limits their potential to inform policy. To address this and accelerate the pace of discovery, I’ll introduce the megastudy-a massive field experiment in which the effects of many different interventions are compared in the same population on the same objectively measured outcome for the same duration. And I will describe the results of (1) a megastudy testing over 50 ways to promote exercise among more than 60,000 gym members as well as (2) two megastudies testing dozens of different nudges to increase vaccinations in over 700,000 Americans. 

Recommended reading:

• Milkman, K.L., Gromet, D., Ho, H. et al. (2021) Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science. Nature 600, 478–483
• Milkman, K. L., et al (2021) A megastudy of text-based nudges encouraging patients to get vaccinated at an upcoming doctor’s appointment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (20)
• Milkman, K. L., et al (2022) A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119 (6)

About the speaker:

Katy Milkman is the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, host of Charles Schwab’s popular behavioral economics podcast Choiceology, and the former president of the international Society for Judgment and Decision Making. She is also the co-founder and co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative, a research center with the mission of advancing the science of lasting behavior change. Over the course of her career, Katy has worked with or advised dozens of organizations on how to spur positive change, including Google, the U.S. Department of Defense, the American Red Cross, 24 Hour Fitness, Walmart and the White House. An award-winning scholar and teacher, Katy writes frequently about behavioral science for major media outlets such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Economist. Her bestselling book How to Change: The Science of Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be was named one of the eight best books for healthy living in 2021 by the New York Times, and Katy was also named one the world’s top 50 Management thinkers by Thinkers50 in 2021. Katy earned her undergraduate degree from Princeton University (summa cum laude), where she studied Operations Research and American Studies, and her PhD from Harvard University where she studied Computer Science and Business.


This webinar is organized by Responsible Research in Business and Management (www.rrbm.network).

For queries, please contact Ibrat Djabbarov: i.djabbarov@cranfield.ac.uk