Dan Ariely Special Lecture: Harnessing the Power of Behavioral Economics (September 30, 2020)

hello my name is tamar friedman director of peer programs at jfn and on behalf of jewish funders network i'm happy to welcome you to today's special lecture and harnessing the power of behavioral economics with dan ariely i'm so pleased and excited to welcome back dan the israeli-american wrestling author uh and dan will speak to lessons from behavioral psychology that can inform how we can address major social challenges during coven 19 and beyond will also share case studies from his work and research that have far-reaching implications that can help our own work and funding dan is open to answering your questions that may come up during the lecture so if you have questions please write them in the q and a box at the bottom of your screen and we will try to get to as many as we can towards the end of our time together i will now introduce andre spocconi president and ceo of jeff and to further frame today's session and introduce dan ariely thank you andres thank you tamar and welcome everybody folks are still joining uh so welcome um it's a big big pleasure for me to introduce than a really um who is aston martin a best-selling author a researcher um on on on behavioral economics and somebody whose books have changed my way of thinking and my way of making decisions and analyzing my own behavior i now can't go to a restaurant without thinking of the opening of his first book how the menus are built to manipulate your decision making around our own dishes and bottles of wine but besides them giving us very good cocktail lines in terms of how you know companies manipulate our decision making he's also doing a lot of good in the world by trying to harness the learnings of behavioral economics uh to uh produce social change and create social good and i think that is um it's a great thing for israel and for the world that somebody like dan is is bringing his his knowledge and his research to solve uh acute social issues and produce lasting social change we talked with dan um a few months back where he actually shared with us a few a few tips on how to use the tools of behavioral economics in in in managing covid in going out of kovid and i personally found them found that very useful and now we're going to talk about the issue in a much broader sense the use of these tools to really change society improves people's lives and and and correct social problems so without further ado uh dan the floor is yours very good so uh nice to talk to all of you again last time we ran out of time for q a this time if you have questions throughout just please type them in i'll try to address them as we go through the lecture and if we are the discussion and if i we don't have time i'll try to respond to some later so basically today i want to tell you about this group that i'm a part of called kaima and kaima is an organization working in israel exclusively with the with the israeli government and what we're trying to do is to take the big challenges that we get to from the government and try to think about how do we do some high quality research first understand what some solutions might be and then try to make some some changes and i'll give you a couple of examples of of how we work and by the way we're always looking for partners to join us either in general or for specific projects so if if anything is interesting for you let me know and we can follow up later okay so the first example i want to give you of the research that we have done and has to do with the question of how do you get more kids and particularly how do you get more girls to study computer science this is a problem that every government in the world has including the israeli government and when they first approached us about this question they had a very simple suggestion they said to us look what we're doing is we have these very very good classes that we give to kids between middle school and high school it's a six weeks class on what we call computer science light and after these six weeks of classes the kids are enlisting more in studying in high school things that could get them to be computer scientists down the road they start computer science with a high emphasis math physics and so on and they said would you help us digitize those classes i said sure sounds like a good idea because taking a physical class and make it into digital digital and keeping it interesting and effective is not not that simple i said i'd be happy to study it try and figure out how to do it and then hopefully do it successfully but i said do we know that this class even works um and you know it was one of those things that people said that they believed it worked but when you look deeply there was no data so i told him i'm happy to digitize it but before i digitize it i want to first of all test whether it works uh so i studied that we took three middle schools kids did the test three other middle schools the kids did not do the test and guess what um this class seems to have not been effective at all and it was actually slightly worse it was zero effectiveness for boys from the beginning of the class to the end of the class they showed no more interest in becoming computer scientists it actually had a negative effect on the girls negative effect and this is the class that the government has been doing for a long time in lots of schools facebook is doing it google is doing it other companies are sponsoring it as well but it seems to be nobody seemed to have ever tested it and when you test it it seems to be not only not positive but it seems to be negative for for young girls and that of course was very baffling why why is it negative so um i said let me study it again just to be sure and this time not just look at what's happening but also asking other questions to understand why might it be ineffective and this time we also made the experiment better so there was the group that studied computer science group that studied nothing and another group that studied neuroscience just to have another topic as a control condition and what did we find the same result no effect for boys negative for girls but now we had some advantage because we also learned a little bit about the why and what did we find and it wasn't that the girls did not feel that they could do it what's called self-efficacy their beliefs that they could actually handle it quite well no in fact their self-efficacy was quite high they believe they can do it and do it well what happened was that they thought it's a very very boring kind of a job they thought it's a meaningless job and why because the first week of computer science you're learning how to move a turtle on the screen and the things you're doing are intrinsic for computer science they don't show you any meaning what what you're going to do with this and because of that the girls basically said this is not the kind of job i want the boys by the way are quite happy they said hey that's great you get to move a turtle on the screen and you can get a job doing that that sounds fantastic the girls were looking for something else so what did we do we moved through a very different approach we said the barrier is not belief in your own skill the bearer is not feeling that you're incompetent the barrier is that you don't think it's a meaningful job it's a meaningful career so instead of this six weeks class we changed the way that the kids were choosing what they're going to study in high school and we went around and we filmed young people but particularly young women as they were doing their daily work but they were doing work in computer science and education computer science and health computer science and design computer science end in the end the meaning did not come from computer science computer science was the tool to do something else that was very meaningful and we got the group of middle schoolers who were choosing what they were going to study in high school to go through this system they were forced in this system to watch the videos and the number of girls that sign up to study in high school things that had to do with computer science it went up by 25 percent the number of boys went up by much less but still went up and that was a big a big success now uh why am i telling this first of all i think it's a really interesting experiment by itself but the second thing is that it means that when we are trying to get people to change their behavior we need to understand why they are misbehaving right why what is the barrier and only once we understand the barrier at the high level now we can figure out what we next uh need to do because if we're thinking that the girls it's all about not understanding what computer science is uh we might not get the right answer if we think it's about feeling that they can't do it we might get a different answer um by the way we we did study another version of a computer science class one that took a whole year not just six weeks and there we found that the class is effective why because if you have a whole year a whole school year by that time it's not just the beginning it's not just something very simple and the kids are starting to understand the meaning that this class this class has another thing we studied was the role of the parents and the parents do have a very big role to play and more so in israel for girls and for boys but still a very large role in all of those and therefore we found that connecting the parents to the class was also a very effective so again if you understand what are the forces at play you're better able to make to make changes that's an example of a study that you're trying to figure out what to do okay so that's example number one then the second example uh i want i want to give an example of us trying um to help people lose their lose some weight as you know obesity is a huge problem everywhere in the world childhood obesity is terrible of course um and we were trying to figure out a way to get people to lose some weight now imagine you're a social scientist and you think to yourself how are you going to do it what is the best way what are some of the ways to help people lose weight and you can say maybe it's about telling them about the long-term effects or maybe it's about restricting calories or proposing a specific diet or getting people to exercise lots of lots of ways how would a social scientist look look at this problem so we started by stating a few very obvious points and the first one is that they struggle to keep weight or lose some weight it's a daily struggle and you can't be good five days of the week and lose all control two days of the week it doesn't work right in two days of the week you can mess up the other five you have to be good every day you have to do it every day and you also have to start first thing in the morning you can't start after lunch that's by the way what's so tough about weight management and weight reduction is you have to do it every day and you have to start before breakfast okay so that was the first principles every day all day long start early the second group of principle was the idea that we need a reminder you know if you're hoping that people would think about something for themselves like wake up in the morning and say hey today i want to lose weight that's not going to happen or today i want to recycle today i want to keep reducing energy consumption that's just not going to not going to work so we said we need to have something that reminds people we sometimes call it a trojan horse and and we want something physical you know the digital world is really amazing but one of the challenges with the digital world is there's nothing there to remind us not notification we don't pay attention to them anymore if you take a physical frame and put the frame with picture of your kids and you put it on your desk you'll think about your kids or if you send them a frame and you give them a picture with you they'll think about you if you wait for people to look through their digital photo album it will almost never happen there's a lot of value in physical reminders by the way judaism of course is a lot about physical reminders right think about the yamaka i think about the mezuzah think about a lot of things there's a lot of things that are we're supposed to see and they're supposed to remind us of doing something and then we're supposed to do it in um in reaction i mean if we if we moved the mezuzah and the yamakai and the hanukiah and all of those things to be digital it could be very very different you see the candles on friday night it creates some sense of reminders that you wouldn't have if you just took a picture of candle your candle holders and put them in your digital folder and look at it from time to time almost never so so we said we need a physical reminder and what's a good physical reminder first thing in the morning it's either the electrical toothbrush or the bathroom scale for all kinds of reasons we decide on the bathroom scale okay so we say first thing in the morning every day bathroom scale is the physical reminder we want people to go into the bathroom look at the bathroom scale be reminded about their health and then do something so we started studying uh the bathroom scale and you might say what is there to study about the bathroom scale but turns out it's a really interesting process and there are things to learn so so we found three things about the bathroom scale the first thing it turns out it's a really good idea to stand on the bathroom scale every morning not so good to stand on it every night but morning is very good now why is it good to stand out in the morning and not go to standard at night not because we weigh less we do weigh less but that's not the reason the reason is if you stand on your bathroom scale in the morning you remind yourself that you want to lose weight and you eat a little bit less for breakfast you step up on the scale at night you go to bed by the morning you forgot the whole thing so there's something about this ritual of standing on the scale that is actually incredibly important by the way if you could let's say measure people's weight automatically you put a little sensor under the bathroom mat or something like that that's not the same you actually want people to step on the scale think of it for two seconds that creates a reminder and then people actually eat a little bit less for breakfast and and one more thing i want to say weight is a game of reducing small amounts of calories for a long time if you if all of us reduce our consumption by 200 calories a day doesn't seem like a lot 200 calories all the time right every two weeks you would lose about a pound right that's just how it counts but you need to do it um every day so you you step on the scale in the morning people eat a little bit less for breakfast you have some some benefit the second thing is that weight fluctuates a lot where it goes up and down up and down up and down in a random function why random function because it depends on how much salt you had yesterday and how much water you have and whether you went to the bathroom or not and that is completely unrelated to your real underlying weight but it just goes up and down up and down for people with standard bmi this up and down up and down might be two or three pounds a day for people who are morbidly obese it could be up to eight pounds a day now this up and down up and down has two things that make it difficult the first thing it's really confusing right but the second thing is that the up is much more depressing than the down makes you happy so it's terrible slightly happy terrible slightly happy terrible slightly happy on average not good news because the bad side of the news is more alarming than the good side of the news is making us happy so even somebody doesn't lose their weight on average just change it stay the same the unhappiness is higher than the happiness on average it feels like um bad news and that's why people don't step on the scale and think to yourself how many of you are looking forward to stepping on your scale tomorrow morning i'm guessing uh not many uh in and not just because of coffee then people have gained weight on average but in general it's not it's not good news okay so that's the second thing right stepping on the scale is good the variance is demotivating and the third thing we found out is that people expect their bodies to change very quickly people say to themselves i have been on a diet since yesterday morning i ate nothing but salad and i went for a walk like where are the results the body takes between eight days or two weeks to process such changes it doesn't happen quickly but we expect it to happen very quickly so what happens somebody goes on a diet for four days and then they skip step on the scale and their weight went up by half a pound and they get very demotivated and then they take a break and maybe they have a cheesecake and then the weight goes down a little bit very very confusing and demotivating by the way this idea that we expect our bodies to react very quickly is true for other um illnesses that we've looked at it looks for cholesterol-reducing medication for blood pressure medication uh depression it all kind of things that we expect our body to act very quickly and when it doesn't we get we get discouraged okay so we said good to step on the scale every morning the ups and downs are demotivating and the fact that the changes happen in the long term not in the short term is also demotivating and confusing so what would you do with those with those three facts we said let's present people with data in lower granularity instead of telling people how much they weigh let's give them the trend of the last three weeks and the good thing about the trend it swallows the variance right the trend over the last weeks doesn't show you the variance it just shows you what the trend is so the first experiment we did was whether we should show a five-point scale or a four-point scale what do i mean by that imagine i said the trend is you're increasing a lot increasing a little decreasing a little decreasing a lot that's a four point scale up a lot up a little down a little down or a five point scale up a lot up a little nothing happened slightly worse much worse the question was do you need a middle point do you want the middle point or not what do you think yes and no the answer is absolutely yes now why do you want the middle point imagine a year imagine 52 weeks in a year and imagine somebody who loses weight for 12 weeks and nothing bad happens for 40 weeks is this a successful year or an unsuccessful year from a health perspective it's an amazing year uh you know it uh i'm 53 at my age a year that nothing but happened is an amazing year right it doesn't have to be good but if somebody loses weight 12 weeks of the year and 40 weeks of the year nothing but happened that's an amazing year but unless people code then nothing bad happened is good news it would feel like most of the year was a failure right so it turns out that you want we want to celebrate nothing bad happens we want to celebrate nothing but happen it's incredibly important not just to portray it but to celebrate that by the way it's even worse in things like diabetes if you think about measuring a1c for most people their a1c is just going to get worse throughout life now we hope it will get worse in a slower rate than expected that's victory victory in fighting diabetes for most people is you just going to deteriorate slower than expected how motivating do you think this is to just deteriorate slightly slower than expected not very motivating but if we change what we the expectation we call the this zero and we say hey you're you're you're better than zero that's a that's a motivating issue um okay so we tested our system we we got about a thousand people in the first study low income generally obese some people get a regular scale that tells them their weight in decimals you know you're 220 pounds 0.2 and those people for six months the study lasted six months just gained a little bit of weight gain gain gain gain gain a little bit of weight zero point three percent of their body weight every month every month gain gain gain gain the people who got our scale with no numbers no numbers just the trends in the five-point scale lost 0.6 percent of their body weight every month for six months lost loss loss loss loss right and that's great news now here's kind of the the exciting thing for me as a social scientist you know when we some of you probably remember we used to have a mechanical scale and we had a mechanical scale that's not wasn't that bad because we didn't know what our weight was exactly it's just in general here's what it was like a thick needle and you didn't know exactly what it was but then we moved to digital age and what we decided to do was to put the display exactly where it used to be and add a couple of decimals to it not necessarily a good idea in fact it's a bad idea the digital revolution is giving us a lot of opportunities but we need to think about this and in the case of a scale we need to say maybe we want to report something else just before because we measure weight in pounds and decimals doesn't mean that that's what we need to report and if you think about measurement in general they have three functions accuracy give people data help people understand the relationship between cause and effect and motivate people you can't always have those three sometimes they stand in contradiction for example with weight because it fluctuates it's very hard for people to understand the relationship between cause and effect in our system when we ask people later on what is the effect of you eating less cookies or going home for a walk or all kinds of things like that people understand the relationship but with the regular skill is very hard to figure it out because you stop eating cookies and you just see the variance and you don't see the trend changing in any way so so the question is if you can't have all of these three accuracy relations between cause and effect and motivation which one do you want and personally for me as somebody who's interested in having behavioral change i mostly invest in motivation because i want to help people change their behavior the second thing i care about is understanding the relationship between cause and effect for people to make better decisions should i walk more or should i cut more cookies by the way probably the answer is to cut cookies and then the accuracy is the least thing that i care about and if it hurts the other two then i certainly don't don't want that so um so this is kind of a general framework of saying how do we think about about data in general and what do we want to represent now right now we're just starting a new a new project based on those principles that have to do with how do you grade kids in school now when we give grades let's say in israel it's on 100 point scale we give people great you got 78 on this exam 82 whatever it is and here's the question imagine imagine that we have a kid who is a c student and this kid who is a c student would always get not always but most likely will get grades between 70 and 80. there are c um what how should we give these kids grades should we always tell them you got 71 you got 72 you got 78 you had 79 and how motivating is that how motivating is it to get great within the your range of ability but always know that you're a c student so far from our analysis and we didn't do the the full set of experiments as much more to study this is just not very motivating these kids no matter what grade they get if it's 71 or 79 they always feel very much behind they always feel that they get bad news right you're a c student you're a c student yes slightly better c student or maybe a b minus but but you're not really at the top of the class what would happen if we gave them grades that are relative to themselves um would would they find more interest would they become more motivated would they understand better what they need to do would they care more about this so i don't have the answer yet but but you can see how we're starting with some information about something like wait and then we're taking this to other other places and saying what is the theory of information as it comes to motivation and should we change uh should we change what we're doing to include other sources to motivate kids to a higher level and i think the answer eventually will be will be yes but but we need we need to do to do more of that okay so that was project number two the third project i want to tell you about is about a trust and as you know and covet is a a problem with biology right there's a terrible virus but but it's not just a challenge of biology it's also a challenge of human decision making it's also a challenge of human behavior and in lots of ways right we need to [Music] get ready to change our habits we need to learn to live with different kind of stress there's economical changes lots of things are happening but with all with all the things that are happening one of the real questions is is trust how we trust the people around us trusting the government and so on so uh i i want to first kind of give you a general story on on kind of a game that we play to to portray why this is so important i'll say something about building building trust so so there's a game that that we call the publix good game the public's good game and it's a really good metaphor for life for a lot of things in life in general but also for for covet 19 and trust and the game goes like this we pick 10 random people in the us and we call them in the morning and we say hey hey we're going to call you every day for the next year and every day we'll give you ten dollars and you can do one of two things with these ten dollars you can either keep the money for yourself in which case you'll be ten dollars richer or you could put the money in a central pot and all the money that all the players will put in the central pot will grow up will grow during the the day five times in the evening distributed equally by everybody okay how does this game work out when you play it for real you call 10 people you remind them the rules and on the first day everybody puts their money almost always everybody puts your money ten people each get ten dollars they all put the money in ten people ten dollars a hundred dollars the money grows five times five hundred dollars equally divided by everybody in the evening everybody gets fifty dollars and life is good it continues like this for a while people wake up they get ten dollars they put the money in in the evening they get 50 everybody is very happy and and this is a metaphor for what happens when we work together right and and the idea is that together we can do things that we can't do individually if we pull our resources together we can achieve great things we can build schools and hospitals and roads and invent vaccines and do all kinds of things if we pull our resources and everybody is happy and then at some point and it always happens one person decides not to put anything in so people put put put and one day one person decides to be selfish and not to put anything what happens on that day on that day nine people put their money in ninety dollars the money is multiplied five times four hundred fifty dollars equal divide by everybody including the bastard they didn't put money in and everybody gets 45 dollars from the common pot but the bastard they didn't put anything in has 55 dollars why because they have their 10 dollars from the morning and they get money from the public pool that's what's called freeloaders right people who don't pay taxes for example or people who don't participate in the public good they just take the resources like everybody else but they don't participate themselves so so that's what happened on that day what do you think happens on the next day and the next day basically it goes down to zero and and it's not it's not uh and the other thing about this is that you have um these two stable mechanisms these two stable solutions what's called equilibria there's an equilibria a stable solution where everybody puts money in everybody's gaining and there's an equilibrium where nobody puts money and nobody is gaining there's nothing in the middle that is stable the moment one person doesn't put their money in it deteriorates to zero it doesn't stay at five people putting money in and five not if it's either a hundred percent and then it's stable for a while one person betrayed goes to zero and the good equilibria where everybody participates is very weak it's enough for one person to be traced and the whole thing deteriorates the bad equilibria is very stable imagine it for three months nobody puts money three months nobody and then one day for some reason three people put money in what happened the next day does it go up to 100 no goes back to zero and and this is a metaphor of how important is for everybody to work together now if you think for example uh in israel we had this huge challenge that during yom kippur a lot of the orthodox communities uh did not adhere to the rules right they did not adhere to the social distancing masks stayed home rules as a consequence there's no question that the hospitals are going to be flooded by people from the orthodox community and it's going to basically burden the whole healthcare system to a degree that i hope they will be able to manage but it's unclear that they will be so you have a group who said we don't care about the public good we'll do just what's good for us and then the whole thing will deteriorate and of course there'll be long-term uh ramification for that okay but let's go back to uh let's go back to trust and if you think about the the public good problem um it's always true it's always true paying taxes right if somebody decides not to pay taxes they are hurting the public good covert 19 is extra important from a public good perspective why because if in a regular day 10 of the people don't pay their taxes we have 10 percent less taxes but if you have 10 of the people not adhering to covered 19 rules it's not just 10 they can destroy it for for everybody everybody else um okay so this is kind of the importance of adhering to the public good playing together another question is how do we how do we make it happen how do we increase trust how do we get people to uh to care about this so first of all i'll tell you my favorite study on on trust um in this study imagine i'm a waiter and i come to you and your table of four people and you're the first one i go to and i say what would you like for dinner and you say i want the fish and i say ah you know what the fish is not so good today take the chicken the chicken is cheaper and better cheaper and better and then we measure how much the people around the table take my advice the second third and fourth person take my advice and how much the whole table take my advice for wine and people take the advice to a very high degree case number two i come to you what would you like you said you want the fish and i say ah the fish is not so good today take this take it's three times more expensive but it's amazing now how much do people now take my take my advice now the answer is not so much now what's the difference in the first waiter and the second waiter what's different is that the first waiter made it clear that they have our best interest in mind the diner's best interest in mind he said take something better and cheaper good for you and worse for me now the second way to say take something more expensive and better it's good for you and good for me now maybe this was a good advice maybe the second waiter gave you an advice that is just amazing that you would be happy with forever that you know just amazing advice but you would never know why because you don't know if they're acting for themselves or for you with the first waiter it's very easy to to tell so what is the point here the point here is that we want to create trust we have to basically make sure that we are willing to give up something from ourselves that people know that we have their best interest in mind and so for example um when our czar of corona gunzo got his job we got to talk a lot and my recommendation one of my recommendation was to ask our representatives uh basically the members of parliament and our members of the government and their ministers to basically be very clear about them adhering to the corona rules and agreeing in advance to take to to accept double define if they ever violate something right you want to say basically we care even more we're willing to take on ourselves a rule if i tell if i tell you here's a rule that i want you to adhere to but i'm not adhering to that's a very bad signal if i say i'm adhering it to a high level that i'm demanding from you that's a sense of something that is a trust creating of course i i failed um miserably in trying to convince the government to take on this kind of approach uh but but that's the thing that the kind of thing we were trying to do and to create a trust and we also asked people to start a new contract and we said today will be different we'll start something else that also was very effective for a short time until it became clear it wasn't a really um it wasn't a really a new contract okay and there's lots of other topics that we've attacked over the years kaima has been around for for about four years and we we've been trying to reduce government bureaucracy to get more orthodox men and women to to study and to stay in school we've tried to get more people who are going to engineering colleges to stay in school and we try to get people to do preventative health care to a higher degree reduce diabetes and lots of things on education of course these days how do you do distance education how do you create autonomy for the teachers for the principles for the kids now um really examining what are the rules of um roles of examinations and to what extent is our exams actually promoting education versus not and can we find other ways uh to promote that um trying to uh measure well-being trying to figure out a healthcare lots lots of things in in all kinds of uh all kinds of directions um we have a really good collaboration from the government in general of course [Music] these are these are complex times and those are the kind of things that were interested so i'll stop here and if there are any questions i'm happy to take questions about what we do at kaima about social science in general kovid great thank you so much so much to take in and i just and i know i have a lot of questions and we had some that came in so i'll start with some of those but we do have some time now i want to encourage everybody all the participants to to type in your questions in the q a box and we will try to get to as many as we can in the next little bit of time that that we have so so a question came in about how can we use behavioral tools for things like jewish engagement is there a way to use these principles for example to get people to study and i'm i think you touch upon that a little bit of in what you do at kaimab but is there more to elaborating some tools that could help with yeah so so i would say the following in in general and every time we approach a problem we start with the assumption that we don't know much about what is really going on we basically suspend the belief that we understand what is causing certain kind of behaviors and then what we do is we start by trying to understand what is holding people back and what's holding people back could be lack of knowledge lack of interest it could be time it could be all kinds of things so we're doing a deep analysis of what's holding people back and then we ask questions about and what could motivate people so in a very very different world there was a study that looked at there was a piano company organs electronic organs that they were trying to figure out how to get people at retirement to start playing and they did a factory in florida and they fell miserably so then they started having a happy hour not not with alcohol but with cookies and tea and lots of people came they came for the cookies and tea but then they also learned to play the the piano the organ and um they were very happy with that so the first thing is to figure out what's holding people back and then the second thing is to is to figure out what is motivating to people and i think in jewish studies there's lots of things that could be motivating is it about the sense of community is it about uh personal growth um is it about a pure interest in in uh education uh i i don't know what uh what it is uh but but i would say that it's it's not that i have a suggestion of what to do but i think the structure of our approach of saying find barriers first find things that could motivate later on think about how you make them into a habit those are the same steps that i would take for a lot of things i would i would do the same thing for um getting people to exercise and i would do it for studying studying judaism as well interesting and so what do you think the limits are between using these tools as social scientists or behavioral behavioral scientists and psychologists and being manipulative into in different ways of getting people to do what you would like them to do yeah so i think it's it's your intention so you know manipulative is is about doing something that people really don't want you to do uh where i try to do things that people in principle want to do but not today so you know if if i came um let's say with the weight loss program that i told you about and those people basically want to improve their health it's just that on a day-to-day basis it's tough so i i think of it as basically helping uh helping them and but let's say i did something else let's say um i took i took um let's say i took workers and i got them to work two more hours a day and spend less time with their families and when you ask them in principle what they really want to achieve they said oh i really want to work less hard and spend more time with my family then i would think of it as manipulative but if i in general it doesn't have to be everybody but statistically if most people in my group are generally interested in that then i feel comfortable with what i'm doing so i have to convince myself that it's for their benefit and they're interested in this and then i'm really comfortable um i will tell you that i have used my own knowledge for things that are um sometimes are manipulative and this has been more in the area of how israel for example deals with its enemies right so when you think about people on the other side then you have a different sense of what's okay and manipulative so so uh anyway the the ethical questions the ethical questions about knowing social science and using it are are complex and you have to always ask yourself are you you using it in the ways you want to use it interesting i think that's such a that's such a lesson everywhere also with our with you know we're jewish funders network and with funders or they use what's the intention of where they're funding and to think through the tools that we might have and and how we can best utilize those tools in a way to really create great good genes i see on the chat people want to buy the scale that you were talking about so if you want to let people know where they can get that i know a lot of people especially right now would love some help with that um so we have a few more questions we'll try to we'll try to tackle so kamal uses revolutionary approaches in so many different ways and you were talking about the government um you know has used to do things in a very different way than that and how do you try in the work that you're doing all over how do you try to convince them to try the approaches that you see work so well at kaima yeah so you know what what what ngos usually do is they have us a mission and they promote their mission they donate money they they create programs and then they hope that at some point the government will take over because no philanthropist wants to stay in their business for forever they want to do a proof of concept to show things are working and then hope the government will will keep on taking it from there basically our approach is very different we start with the government we look at the things that the government already wants to do and we basically propose to them to inject some science into it and it's amazing it's amazing how many decisions at the government level are are made with with no data and sometimes they have no time there's all kinds of reasons for that but they're just not this is not their field right um so so we start with things that we know the government already wants to do and and then we said let us study this find out and propose something that is more likely to work and it's um it took us some time to build trust and but but now we have it and now we're deeply involved in in lots of things i'll give you one more example and there's a law in israel that if a employer wants to hire an employee with a disability they get from the government money back for adjustments like if you need a ram for a wheelchair or braille machine or whatever it is only what as you know the government is always afraid that people would cheat it so bureaucracy is very very high so the process can take more than a year and to to get the money back and many employers don't even start because they know it will take more than a year and it's also very time consuming so we said let us do a study in which we will make the process very very short and we made the process two weeks so in two weeks you get the money you take a video of the work environment before you hire a contractor from a list of approved contractors you take your video of afterwards you get the money that's it now do i think that people would cheat us yes but it's a cost and benefit like i don't want the process to be two years like a year and a half to get the money back and nobody's cheating but but nobody's hiring people with disabilities and so uh we're basically getting the government to do lots of experiments like this and and i think for all philanthropists it's actually a good question to think about what is your view on when the government will will take on your project and and the way we are starting is we're starting with a very high likelihood that that would happen because we're starting with something the government already wants to to take place um for example this class i told you they already wanted to happen it's really important to them so it's a very high value of time to spend money on that because it will not just happen it will happen soon great thank you thank you another question that came in is more um i guess personal in how from a psychological perspective many experts say our brains are like computers that they have been programmed since childhood to behave in a certain way how do we reprogram our subconscious and conscious brains to improve our habits when we're fighting against years of programming is it possible to make major changes within a year i know that's a big question and away from some of some of the case studies we were talking about today but but i know people would be interested in your views so so leave you two very different answers the first one is like you know very very severe serious daily training like meditation does work uh a few years ago i i met with the dalai lama you know he has a lot of ideas about how training the brain works at the end of our meeting i asked him if he would give me some monks for testing he said no so so you know there's a limit to to what what we know about that but but i still think that there's um some things you can get like the training is brutal it's tough it's difficult it's time consuming but there are ways to do it and what meditation does to a large degree is to separate the experience from the emotion so you see a cookie and you see a cookie and the emotion is kind of separate and that that's one thing my approach as a social scientist is usually very different and for me it's all about designing the environment for better outcomes so so if you're used to snacking at night you know i would just say don't buy those snacks or lock your refrigerator or you know do do something else so so we in general we believe that human freedom resides in our ability to change our environment and make our environment more conducive for better health if you want to go walking don't just tell yourself that you want to go walking and set up an appointment with a friend to go walking together you will not want to disappoint your friend and you'll show and you'll show up or if you think about um dieting you know set up things that are easy to do we talked about friction like make the right behavior the easy behavior so so i i think that if you think about what we can do most of what we can do is change the environment and we can change our work environment we can change the school environment we can change the world bank accounts look like i'll give you one maybe last example you give people a budget and a credit card and they overspend credit card just goes up and people overspend you say spend two thousand dollars a month on discretionary spending and they spend way too much you give them a prepaid debit card it goes from 2000 to zero they adhere to it more you put the money on weekly 500 a week people stay more in line because they see the consequences of their action you lower the money the money on monday rather than friday people are even better because on friday you spend too much on the weekend lots of things are about tools what tools are we designing and you know if you think about the tools for the physical world right we have chairs and rugs and we have forks and knives and crutches and planes i mean we've designed lots and lots of tools to deal with the world our mental tools are very very much behind so for me it's about what kind of mental tools are we creating for people and can we create mental tools for improved performance i think the answer is yes and we've showed it in all kinds of ways but we need to create more of those okay thank you really a lot to try to think about and answer especially during this time of uh of uncertainty to try to create those tools with our own personal life and then within our professionalism our funding and our funding interests some tools that we might have had that works we have to readjust and think through some of those steps that you were saying about some of the easy things that maybe we can adjust that can be helpful we only have about a minute and a half left so i wanted to really leave it open to to you for any kind of clothing closing thoughts about the work that you're currently doing with kaima or some of the other work that you're involved in that can you know help help close this conversation and center us a bit so i would say is following with with kaima right now a lot of work is in education uh distance education is a tremendous challenge tremendous importance also some on domestic violence and that as you probably know is increasing around around the world for all kinds of terrible reasons and we do need help and it used to be that the government uh used to cover some of our costs not all of it but some that's becoming more and more challenging with the the way the israeli government is functioning right now or saw the functioning right now and so if at all you're interested in following up and maybe help us with some of our research and policy work we're always happy to to talk to more more partners and i would say you know this covered period is going to last for a while it doesn't look like it's going to go anywhere and in whatever funding initiatives you do and i think i think that and adding a little bit of research to what you do is probably going to be useful first a lot of our assumptions about what's working and not working are should be questioned uh right now money is is tighter using it in a in a better way is probably a very important so whether you want to help us with kaima okay or not yeah when you think about how you are spending your own philanthropic money it's probably a good idea to think about some evidence-based to make sure that you're spending your money in the right way and if if you want to talk about a measurement or evaluation or something like that i'm also happy to try and help great thank you that's really good advice and and thank you for being so generous for being open to connecting with people if they have more questions um people can connect with me and i can you know help make sure that people are able to get in touch so dan thank you again so much for your partnership this hour flew by again we never have enough time to dive into everything that we would want to dive into so thank you so much for being with us and and teaching us and sharing your wisdom and um thank you to all the participants who were here today and we look forward to coming back together again and learning again in the future thank you stay well everybody

Channel: Jewish Funders Network

Views: 6,912

Rating: 4.8666668 out of 5

Keywords: JFN

Id: wIToj1RXaT8

Length: 60min 56sec (3656 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020