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.

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.