Angela Duckworth and Katherine Milkman gave the inaugural lecture in CEHD’s Biology and Behavior Forum, held at the University of Chicago on Wednesday April 18. Their lecture, “Behavior Change for Good: A preview of a new platformand approach,” reviews their new technology platform aimed at helping people make permanent behavior change.

Abstract: The Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania is deploying a massive new technology platform to reach people at scale who are interested in changing their behaviors for good.  We’ll be summarizing two early projects.  One is an 14,000+ person randomized controlled trial with high school students seeking to improve their grades. Another is in partnership with 24 Hour Fitness – a 4 million member US gym chain – designed to help hundreds of thousands of gym members increase their physical activity.  The gym project involves a total of 20 randomized controlled trials with 57 different treatment arms and is currently underway.  The education project involves 5 randomized controlled trials with 12 different treatment arms and is also in progress. We’ll describe the empirical approach we’re taking to randomization and data analysis and the way our platform allows researchers to test their ideas. We hope to get feedback on how we can do this work more effectively and to recruit additional researchers to partner with us on future large RCT deployments using the systems we’ve built.

Registration is required. Register here.