
Simple Requests Help Desk-Based Workers Stand Up More: A Meta-Analytic Summary
In a series of eight studies, spanning laboratory and field experiments, we…
What drives us to make healthy decisions? And how can we design environments to produce better health outcomes?
Many people know what they should do to stay healthy: eat well, exercise, take their medication as prescribed, and make well-informed medical decisions. However, despite this knowledge and having the best of intentions, many of us behave in ways that are suboptimal in the short term and harmful in the long run. The Center for Advanced Hindsight’s work in the area of health explores why we make mistakes when it comes to our health and how we can overcome this. Our research identifies important psychological mechanisms that lead to optimal behaviors, and we design interventions that result in better health outcomes.
The role of technology in delivering healthcare and improving health behaviours is growing rapidly. Technology offers enormous potential to impact hard-to-reach populations and supplement less frequent in-person care. In particular, we’re interested in the potential of artificial intelligence and conversational interfaces to supplement coaching programs, increase disclosure of information about sensitive health behaviours, and create feelings of accountability through more overt monitoring. We design mobile technologies to deliver interventions and conduct research to understand the characteristics of human-computer interaction that result in the greatest degree of positive behaviour change.
How do beliefs and pain impact behaviours like exercise and medication adherence? What is the role of disgust in choices for surgery, vaccination, and diet adherence?
What are the “naive models” that individuals create to explain causal relationships between their behaviour and their bodies, especially during a time in which individuals have access to an unprecedented amount of information about themselves?
The rise inchronic diseases presents a newset of behavioral challenges around medication adherence and reducing disease symptoms through diet and exercise. Our researchfocuses on how to promote habit formation around behaviors that have a long-term payoff (improved health) with short-term costs (side-effects). We’re interested in how to prompt regular behaviors that aren’t habits but instead are in response to symptoms or biometrics (like blood glucose)and the role of providing biometric feedback to patients on thesebehaviors. Finally, we’re interested in the attributions individuals make around the origins of diseases, depending on whether the disease is viewed as resulting from lifestyle and/or genetic causes.
Healthcare expenses are very difficult to predict, so people have a hard time setting aside money for future events that remain uncertain in nature and size until they occur (at which point it is too late to start accumulating savings). Our research focuses on how people in the emerging world can be encouraged to save for the inevitable but unpredictable healthcare expenses that they may accrue later in life.
Nearly everyone will face a medical decision in their lifetime, and most people will face many medical decisions. As medicine is growing increasingly personalized and complex, patients are faced with more choice than ever before. Due to uneven access, unaligned incentives across the healthcare system, and fundamental behavioral biases, certain areas of healthcare are overutilized (like antibiotics or some forms of surgery) while other areas of healthcare are underutilized (like vaccines). Our research focuses on factors that impact medical decisions in the domains of over-and underutilization, in an effort to better understand the psychologicalmechanisms contributing to utilization decisions andto improve the context in which decisions are made -for bothproviders and patients.
Maintaining weight over time is hard, losing weight is even harder, and keeping weight off after weight loss is nearly impossible. We’re interested in the ‘naive models’ that individuals create around eating and weight, andhow these naive models contribute to poor food choices, diet lapses, and under-compensationafter overconsumption. Our research explores these models and tests alternative methods of providing information back to people to help them update their naive models or take a desired actionin spite of their naive models.
Our research on exercise is simple: How can we help people enjoy exercise more? We explore the factors related to exercise that impact pain and pleasure during and after physical activity, as well as the impact of different affective experiences on future exercise behaviors. We test interventions that restructure exercise activities to optimize for pleasure and help people learn to focus on pleasure rather than other salient features of an exercise activity.
In a series of eight studies, spanning laboratory and field experiments, we…
We set out to research the causal impact of Real Age feedback,…
Many organizations have traditionally supported their employees’ physical and mental health through…
Conversational agents (CAs) are effective tools for health behavior change, yet little…
High levels of occupational sitting is an emerging health concern. As working…
Surgeons present patients with complex information at the perioperative appointment. Emotions likely…
The mechanisms that lead to overeating and the consumption of tempting, unhealthy…
In the early days of the Internet, both conventional wisdom and scholarship…
Interventions to change health behaviors have had limited success to date at…
Individuals differ in the extent to which they believe online communication can…
Zenko, Z., O’Brien, J., Berman, C. J., & Ariely, D. (2017). Comparison…
‘Choice architects’ are responsible for designing environments that guide decision-making, and thus…
Theories currently used to understand, predict, and promote physical activity and exercise…
There is a paucity of methods for improving the affective experience of…
Open defecation (OD) remains a critical global health challenge, affecting almost 1…
Recent data analyses reveal the disturbing decline in well-being of contemporary US…
Using an incentive-compatible framed field experiment, we investigate whether consumers' food consumption…
We introduce a simple solution to help consumers manage choices between healthy…
RESEARCHER IN RESIDENCE
RESEARCHER IN RESIDENCE
Alev is originally from Turkey, and she spent most of her life as a medical doctor in Istanbul. While working,...
PRINCIPAL, CENTER FOR ADVANCED HINDSIGHT
PRINCIPAL, CENTER FOR ADVANCED HINDSIGHT
Aline spent most of her time frolicking in the quaint city of Los Angeles until attending Reed College in Portland where...
SENIOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
SENIOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
I received my Masters in Psychology from UNCW in 2007, my PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Kentucky...
SENIOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
SENIOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
Catherine Berman's research at the Center spans preventive health behavior, purpose and meaning in life, mental health, and chronic disease management. Catherine graduated from...
PRINCIPAL, CENTER FOR ADVANCED HINDSIGHT
PRINCIPAL, CENTER FOR ADVANCED HINDSIGHT
James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at the Fuqua School of Business, Dan studies how people actually...
EXECUTIVE IN RESIDENCE
EXECUTIVE IN RESIDENCE
David is the Managing Partner and Founder of Catalyst Behavioral Sciences – a research and consulting firm that specializes in...
SENIOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
SENIOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
Jamie Foehl is a researcher at Duke University in Dan Ariely’s lab – The Center for Advanced Hindsight (CAH). Her...
PRINCIPAL, GLOBAL HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT
PRINCIPAL, GLOBAL HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT
Jan Willem received his Ph.D. in Philosophy and M.A. in Law from the KU Leuven, in Belgium. Previously, he was...
SENIOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
SENIOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
Jenna Clark has a Ph.D in social psychology with a research background in relationships, persuasion, and technologically-mediated communication. She loves...
BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
Jonathan Cloughesy joined the Better Living and Health team after graduating from UC Santa Barbara, where he studied Biopsychology and...
SENIOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
SENIOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
Judson Bonick is a senior behavioral researcher on the Health team at the Center. He has a background in public...
SENIOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
SENIOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
Nina is a senior behavioral researcher at the Center, focusing on applied behavioral economics research in the field of health...
VISITING FACULTY
VISITING FACULTY
Originally from Greece, Panos spends his time between the USA & Denmark. He is an associate professor of Behavioral Economics...
AFFILIATE, FUQUA / COACH K CENTER ON LEADERSHIP AND ETHICS
AFFILIATE, FUQUA / COACH K CENTER ON LEADERSHIP AND ETHICS
Sanyin is the Executive Director of the Coach K Leadership & Ethics Center (COLE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of...
BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHER
Shanta Ricks received her Master of Arts in Psychology from North Carolina Central University in December 2018 and now works...