In this episode of the Behavioral Design Podcast, we deliver into the world of AI recommender systems with special guest Carey Morewedge, a leading expert in behavioral science and AI. The discussion covers the fundamental mechanics behind recommender systems, including content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, and hybrid models. Carey explains how platforms like Netflix, Twitter, and TikTok use implicit data to make predictions about user preferences, and how these systems often prioritize short-term engagement over long-term satisfaction.
October 23, 2024. Behavioral Design Podcast
Over the years, Choiceology has offered a lot of advice for making better decisions. In this special episode of Choiceology with Katy Milkman, we bring you the story of a video game that is surprisingly effective at reducing decision errors, and you'll hear about a practical checklist for improving choices in many different contexts. Solving fictitious mysteries might sound like fun and games, but the video game MISSING: The Pursuit of Terry Hughes was designed with a serious purpose in mind: to help intelligence analysts avoid decision-making traps. In 2015, James Korris and Carey Morewedge worked together to design a video game for the intelligence agency IARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, and measured the biases exhibited before and after playing the series of 90-minute games. The results were remarkable and extremely durable.
May 20, 2024. Choiceology with Katy Milkman
Algorithms are a staple of modern life. People rely on algorithmic recommendations to wade through deep catalogs and find the best movies, routes, information, products, people and investments. Because people train algorithms on their decisions, algorithms learn and codify human biases.
Algorithmic bias can also be used to reduce human bias. Algorithms can reveal hidden structural biases in organizations. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, my colleagues and I found that algorithmic bias can help people better recognize and correct biases in themselves.
May 10, 2024. Fast Company
Just as the lead-up to something big can feel delicious—the vacation looming on your calendar, or countdown to your wedding—dwelling after the fact can make us happy, too. Carey Morewedge, a marketing professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, calls this after-the-fact savoring, “remembered utility.”
“That’s a way to squeeze more out of those experiences,” he says.
He recommends keeping your comparisons to your own life, as opposed to looking at others.Were you better offon this trip than, say, the one you took when your kids were toddlers?
Consider, too, the opportunity cost. Maybe you paid more for concert tickets than the peoplearound you. Would spending that $500 on something else have been as life-changing asbelting out your favorite song in the stadium? If not, you made the right choice.
May 6, 2024. The Wall Street Journal
Consumers have biased views of their driving abilities relative to those of other drivers and automated vehicles. These findings have implications for the adoption of partly or fully automated vehicles, which one day could reduce traffic-related deaths. This article discusses the findings and offers five ways for auto manufacturers and government policymakers can counteract consumers’ biases
April 3, 2024. Harvard Business Review
Judgment is getting as close as possible to the best answer. Everyone can have true and false beliefs about the world or calibrated and uncalibrated expectations. Part of our job as parents and teachers is to help kids figure out the difference.
January 24, 2024. EducationWeek
Despite all the attention in recent years on reducing cognitive bias, most evidence suggests that there’s little we can do to improve our professional and personal decision making. But a recent experiment suggests that it may be possible for training to improve decision making in the field.
January 24, 2024. The Conversation
The online systems that make recommendations to us often rely on their digital footprint — our clicks, views, purchases, and other digital footprints — to infer our preferences. But this means that human biases are baked into the algorithms. To build algorithms that more effectively predict users’ true preferences and better enhance consumer well-being and social welfare, organizations need to employ ways to measure user preferences that take into account these biases. This article explains how to do so.
January 9, 2024. Harvard Business Review
In 2022, U.S. consumers returned 16.5% of purchases, costing retailers an estimated $816 billion in lost revenue. Research suggests that cross-selling products during the return process is an effective strategy to reduce this revenue loss. Across a number of experiments, researchers found that consumers treat refunds as money already lost, so it’s less painful to spend these funds on another purchase, so long as cross-selling occurs before the money is reissued to the customers’ original payment method and consumers initially expected to keep the goods they were planning to buy. Creating return policies and practices informed by the refund effect can reduce revenue loss from product returns in a way that benefits both consumers and retailers.
June 15, 2023. Harvard Business Review
This is the digital age, and the advice to executives is clear. Managers need to have a digital mindset; the organizations they run must embrace digital transformation. If you don’t know what ChatGPT is, think of Dan Brown when you hear the word “code” or dislike the idea of working with a cobot, enjoy your retirement. So what present should you be getting the executive in your life this festive season? Answer: anything made of paper. Even if the recipient of your gift never uses it, it can still serve as a useful reminder of where the digital world’s limitations lie.
December 15, 2023. The Economist
When we ask a question, test a hypothesis or question a belief, we often exhibit confirmation bias. We are more likely to search for evidence that confirms than disconfirms the question, hypothesis or belief we are testing. We also interpret evidence in ways that confirm rather than disconfirm that question, hypothesis or belief, and we are more likely to perceive confirming evidence to be more important than disconfirming evidence. Confirmation bias influences the questions we explore in both our professional and personal lives, whether our investigation is on behalf of an audience of millions or an audience of one
June 6, 2022. The Journalist’s Resource
Every morning, I eat the same breakfast. Weird, no? But I’m not alone. Many of you do this, too.
I have data to prove it. In a forthcoming paper in the journal Appetite, Romain Cadario of Erasmus University and I examine the food diaries of 2,624 people living in France and 1,275 people living in the United States, measuring how often people eat the same meal every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you had oatmeal and fruit and coffee for breakfast on Monday, for instance, how many other times this week did you eat that precise combination of foods for breakfast? In our French and American panels, overall, 68% ate the same breakfast at least twice in one week (the French a little more so than the Americans; 73% versus 52%, respectively). Only 9% repeated a dinner (the Americans a little more so than the French; 16% versus 6%, respectively).
Why do so many of us eat the same thing for breakfast day after day, when we do not repeat a lunch or dinner? Why do we avoid variety in the morning, yet later in the same day, seek variety in our choice of food?
December 13, 2021. TIME Magazine
New patterns of consumption will change brands’ customer relationships. While trends show psychological ownership on a downward trajectory, it may also be transformed and preserved if people develop stronger relationships with the platforms, brands, communities, and devices that provide access to goods.
November 8, 2021. MIT Sloan Management Review
AI holds great promise to increase the quality and reduce the cost of health care in developed and developing countries. But one obstacle to using it is patients don’t trust it. One key reason is they perceive medical AI to be a black box and they think they know more about physicians’ decision-making process than they actually do, the authors research found. A remedy: Provide patients with an explanation of how both types of care providers make decisions.
September 3, 2021. Harvard Business Review
Why does decision making matter?
You make decisions every day, big and small. But choosing wisely isn’t easy. You don’t have time to linger over every choice, yet your first intuitions aren’t always right. There are blind spots that can systematically bias how you decide. And many options involve risks that are not resolved until after you’ve made your choice. Everyone uses mental shortcuts that can sometimes lead us to make decisions that are less than optimal—so what’s important is knowing how and when to correct for their influence.
April 2, 2021. Character Lab
Technology hasn’t just changed the way consumers use goods and services, it’s also changed the way they own them. Music collections, for example, have evolved from hundreds of alphabetically-organized records on a shelf, to carefully edited digital libraries, to the 2021 version — a list of songs stored on Spotify or some other streaming platform. What consumers used to think of as “mine” is now “ours” in the sharing economy, where everything from car rides to books has become less of a coveted item and more of an experience.
March 2, 2021. Knowledge at Wharton
If any year ever feels like the worst, it’s mostly because our brains have a tendency to judge the present more harshly. Unfettered media consumption skews our perception, and it becomes easy to slide into unhealthy patterns of belief.
September 4, 2020. National Geographic
Our research indicates that patients are reluctant to use health care provided by medical artificial intelligence even when it outperforms human doctors. Why? Because patients believe that their medical needs are unique and cannot be adequately addressed by algorithms. To realize the many advantages and cost savings that medical AI promises, care providers must find ways to overcome these misgivings.
October 30, 2019. Harvard Business Review
On Jan. 27, 1986, engineers at Morton Thiokol contacted NASA to advise calling off the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger the next morning. The forecast called for freezing temperatures between 26 and 29°F. Concerned the O-rings on the booster rockets would not seal and cause an explosion, the engineers scrambled to explain their first no-launch recommendation in 12 years. They faxed NASA 13 charts, identifying launches where the O-rings showed signs of failure.
NASA carefully inspected the charts, and saw no relation between temperature and failure. NASA told the engineers to reconsider their recommendation. We all know the deadly consequence of the ultimate decision to launch the next morning. What led such accomplished professionals to such different conclusions from the same data?
October 29, 2019. The Hill
Our latest field study, published by Psychological Science in September 2019, suggests that one-shot de-biasing training can significantly reduce the deleterious influence of cognitive bias on decision making. We conducted our experiment in a field setting that involved 290 graduate business students at one of Europe’s top business schools, HEC Paris. In our experiment, a single training intervention reduced biased decision making by almost a third.
October 8, 2019. Forbes.
I’m staring at a photograph of myself that shows me 20 years older than I am now. I have not stepped into the twilight zone. Rather, I am trying to rid myself of some measure of my present bias, which is the tendency people have, when considering a trade-off between two future moments, to more heavily weight the one closer to the present. A great many academic studies have shown this bias—also known as hyperbolic discounting—to be robust and persistent.
September, 2018. The Atlantic
Last year had its good moments, but so many were bad that 2017 was dubbed “The Year of the Dumpster Fire.”
It was the second hottest year in recorded history. Hurricanes decimated the Caribbean and flooded major cities on the Gulf. Northern and Southern California resembled hellscapes of fire, ash, and mud. A tiff between world leaders threatened thermonuclear war. Beloved cultural icons were revealed to have committed heinous sexual misconduct. Regulations protecting the air, water, and land were repealed en masse. Investigators found Russian influence in the 2016 United States presidential election to be significant, and the potential of collusion in the Trump campaign threatens the impeachment of our President. Happiness regressed to levels not seen before 2014.
But was 2017 the worst year ever? It depends on when you’re asked.
February 12, 2018. Behavioral Scientist
Despite the many advantages of digital products, research shows that in many cases, people are willing to pay significantly more for physical products. In this piece, the authors describe a recent study which found that customers often just don’t feel as if they actually own digital goods, leading them to ascribe less value to digital products than to physical ones. The authors go on to offer several strategies for manufacturers and marketers that may help consumers to feel a greater sense of ownership over their digital products, thus increasing their perception of these products’ value. Digital products offer significant advantages over physical ones in many respects — but our preferences are not solely determined by how useful or practical we find these innovations. Understanding how people develop a sense of ownership over their goods is essential to understanding how they perceive those products’ value.
December 22, 2017. Harvard Business Review
We generally prefer to minimize our potential losses than to maximize our potential gains. And if you bet that your side will lose, that’s precisely what you’ll be doing.
But in practice, as my colleagues Richard P. Larrick and Simone Tang and I demonstrate in a paper forthcoming in the journal Management Science, voters and fans turn out to be reluctant to accept emotional hedges.
October 14, 2016. The New York Times
Negotiations involve gaps in perceived value. When we are sellers, we feel that buyers offer too little. When we are buyers, we feel that sellers demand too much. This is true whether we’re actually exchanging goods or services for money, or whether we’re simply trying to make a fair trade.
This gap in the perception of value is called the endowment effect. If we own a good, we value it more than if we did not. The endowment effect influences us all, whether we are young children deciding whether to keep or trade a toy, or adults deciding the value of intangible things like our ideas and rights. Even chimpanzees show an endowment effect for food they are given! It influences the way we value everything from concert tickets to the environment.
May 13, 2016. Harvard Business Review
Deep down, marketing is an extension of psychology. It is a study of the means used to produce comfort, connection, and pleasure. At Boston University, Carey Morewedge, a social psychologist by trade, is known for his unconventional, yet deeply memorable teaching methods. One example: He had students bid on paper cranes they made, to reflect how people place higher value their own efforts. Outside the classroom, Morewedge is a renowned scholar. His work has recently appeared in Management Science, the Journal of Marketing Research, and Trends in Cognitive Science. And earlier this year, he was honored by the Academy of Management with its Best Paper Award. Morewedge holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
April 13, 2016. Poets and Quants
My research collaborators and I wondered if an interactive training exercise might effectively debias decision-makers. So we spent the past four years developing two interactive, “serious” computer games to see if they might substantially reduce game players’ susceptibility to cognitive bias.
There was scant evidence that this kind of one-shot training intervention could be effective, and we thought our chances of success were slim. But, as we report in a paper just published in Policy Insights in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, the interactive games not only reduced game players’ susceptibility to biases immediately, those reductions persisted for several weeks. Participants who played one of our games, each of which took about 60 minutes to complete, showed a large immediate reduction in their commission of the biases (by more than 31%), and showed a large reduction (by more than 23%) at least two months later.
October 14, 2015. Harvard Business Review
Michael Mosley and the doctors delve once again into the confusing world of health claims. In this programme, they recruit over 200 volunteers to test a surprising way to cure food cravings, while Michael tries a new technique to beat the habits we find hardest to kick. Dr Chris van Tulleken looks at whether organic food is better for your health, whilst surgeon Gabriel Weston investigates a potentially groundbreaking new treatment for cancer and Dr Saleyha Ahsan shows how to spot a stroke before it happens.
August 13, 2015. BBC Two
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University say that repeatedly thinking about eating a certain food — M&Ms or cheese — led study participants to eat less of the food once it was presented to them. Researcher Carey Morewedge describes the work and its implications for dieters.
December 10, 2010. NPR Talk of the Nation
Imagine that you’re eating your favourite food, perhaps a bloody steak or an obscenely large bar of chocolate. You’re probably quite keen for an actual mouthful now. You may even have started to salivate. But wait – before you dash for the kitchen, imagine eating another one. And another one. In fact, picture yourself guzzling down thirty more. Do you still want a bite?
If you had done this with actual food, the answer would probably be no. The more we expose ourselves to a something, the more we get used to it. This process, known as ‘habituation’, applies to all sorts of things – bright lights, level of wealth and, yes, the taste of food. The first bite of chocolate is heavenly but the fifteenth usually feels less so. Now, Carey Morewedge from Carnegie Mellon University has found that people habituate to the taste of food even if they just imagine themselves eating it.
December 9, 2010. National Geographic
Suppose last night you had two dreams. In one, God appears and commands you to take a year off and travel the world. In the other, God commands you to take a year off to go work in a leper colony.
Which of those dreams, if either, would you consider meaningful?
Or suppose you had one dream in which your friend defends you against enemies, and another dream in which that same friend goes behind your back and tries to seduce your significant other? Which dream would you take seriously?
Tough questions, but social scientists now have answers and really, it’s about time.
March 9, 2009. The New York Times