Conducting Megastudies to Increase the Impact of Applied Behavioral Science

Speaker: Katherine L. Milkman (The Wharton School)

Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time intervals. The lack of comparability of such individual investigations limits their potential to inform policy. To address this and accelerate the pace of discovery, I’ll introduce the megastudy—a massive field experiment in which the effects of many different interventions are compared in the same population on the same objectively measured outcome for the same duration. And I will describe the results of (1) a megastudy testing over 50 ways to promote exercise among more than 60,000 gym members as well as (2) two megastudies testing dozens of different nudges to increase vaccinations in over 700,000 Americans.

Recommended reading:
• Milkman, K.L., Gromet, D., Ho, H. et al. (2021) Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science. Nature 600, 478–483
• Milkman, K. L., et al (2021) A megastudy of text-based nudges encouraging patients to get vaccinated at an upcoming doctor’s appointment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (20)
• Milkman, K. L., et al (2022) A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119 (6)