About

Katherine L. Milkman is the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, with secondary appointments in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and School of Arts and Sciences. Her research explores how insights from economics and psychology can be harnessed to change consequential behaviors for good, including savings, exercise, student achievement, vaccination, and discrimination. She co-founded and co-directs the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. Milkman has been recognized as one of the world’s top management thinkers by Thinkers50 in 2021 and 2023, and was named the world’s top strategy thinker in 2021. Her bestselling book, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, was named one of the eight best books for healthy living by The New York Times in 2021. She is a former president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, a TEDx speaker, an APS Fellow, and hosts the behavioral economics podcast, Choiceology. Milkman has published extensively in leading academic journals and her work is regularly covered by major media outlets. She has advised numerous organizations, including The White House, Google, Walmart, Humana, the U.S. Department of Defense, 24 Hour Fitness, and the American Red Cross. She earned her undergraduate degree from Princeton University, where she studied Operations Research and American Studies, and her PhD from Harvard University, where she studied Computer Science and Business.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Nursing
• Virology
• Family medicine
• Political Science
• Anthropology
• Management
• Applied psychology
• Medical emergency
• Environmental health
• Public relations
• Psychiatry
• Business
• Advertising
• Law
• Gerontology
• Internet privacy
• Biology
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Setting higher referral targets increases the number of women recommended: Evidence from the field and lab.

  Journal of Applied Psychology · 2026-04-23

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Women continue to be underrepresented in numerous occupations and in the highest echelons of many organizations.This may be due, in part, to disadvantages they face in referral-based hiring and promotion processes, as women are less inclined to ask for referrals and less likely to be referred than men for maledominated jobs.We integrate insights from the goal-setting and creativity literatures to propose an intervention to boost referrals of women: requesting a greater target number of referrals (e.g., at least four instead of at least two referrals).This strategy sets a motivating goal to provide more referrals, which should mechanically increase the number of women referred.In addition, requesting more referrals in maledominated contexts may lead to prototype divergence, which should increase the rate at which women are referred as people generate additional recommendations.Across two primary studies (a field experiment and an online experiment) and four supplemental studies (another field experiment and three online experiments; all preregistered, total N = 12,615), requesting double the number of referrals increased the number of women referred by 17%-88%.We found evidence that setting more ambitious referral goals mediated the effect of asking for more referrals on the number of women referred, supporting a goals-based account.However, we found inconsistent support for prototype divergence as a mechanism across our studies.Our work establishes a theoretically motivated intervention organizations can use to bolster women's representation in recruitment pipelines in male-dominated settings, and our full-cycle approach establishes its generalizability across contexts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Targeting behavioral interventions based on past behavior: Evidence from vaccine uptake

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2026-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  • The effectiveness of behavioral interventions depends on past behavior. • Interventions targeting follow-through are effective for people with prior adoption. • Interventions targeting intentions are not effective for people with prior adoption. • More research needed to effectively change behavior of those without prior adoption. • Assess transferability across online, field, and nationally scaled settings. Behavior change interventions are widely used, but for whom are they most effective? We examine whether past behavior shapes the effectiveness of interventions designed to either (1) provide information to shift intentions or (2) help people follow through on existing intentions. We focus on encouraging flu vaccinations. In online experiments (Study 1; N = 2,602), a video correcting misconceptions about flu vaccines increased vaccination intentions more effectively among people who had not been vaccinated in the prior flu season than those who had. In a field experiment with health systems (Study 2; N = 14,760), the same information intervention increased vaccination intentions and uptake for people who had not been vaccinated in the prior season but it did not have a significant impact on those previously vaccinated, though the difference between these subgroups was not statistically significant. In contrast, in the same field experiment, a follow-through intervention designed to make vaccination salient and convenient increased vaccine uptake only among those previously vaccinated. In a large-scale field experiment where streamlined adaptations of these interventions were delivered by a pharmacy (Study 3; N = 2,980,249), the follow-through intervention was again more effective for prior adopters than for previously unvaccinated individuals, while the information intervention had no impact for either subgroup. Collectively, these findings suggest that people’s past behavior may indicate whether insufficient intentions or follow-through challenges are the more relevant impediments to behavior change. Organizations can use this insight to decide whether and how to invest resources in behavior change interventions.

  PublisherDOI

• Corrigendum to “The motivating power of streaks: Increasing persistence is as easy as 1, 2, 3” [Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 187 (2025) 104391]

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2026-03-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Targeting Behavioral Interventions Based on Past Behavior: Evidence from Vaccine Uptake

  2026-01-06

  articleOpen access

  Behavior change interventions are widely used, but for whom are they most effective? We examine whether past behavior shapes the effectiveness of interventions designed to either (1) provide information to shift intentions or (2) help people follow through on existing intentions. We focus on encouraging flu vaccinations. In online experiments (Study 1; N=2,602), a video correcting misconceptions about flu vaccines increased vaccination intentions more effectively among people who had not been vaccinated in the prior flu season than those who had. In a field experiment with health systems (Study 2; N=14,760), the same information intervention increased vaccination intentions and uptake for people who had not been vaccinated in the prior season but it did not have a significant impact on those previously vaccinated, though the difference between these subgroups was not statistically significant. In contrast, in the same field experiment, a follow-through intervention designed to make vaccination salient and convenient increased vaccine uptake only among those previously vaccinated. In a large-scale field experiment where streamlined adaptations of these interventions were delivered by a pharmacy (Study 3; N=2,980,249), the follow-through intervention was again more effective for prior adopters than for previously unvaccinated individuals, while the information intervention had no impact for either subgroup. Collectively, these findings suggest that people’s past behavior may indicate whether insufficient intentions or follow-through challenges are the more relevant impediments to behavior change. Organizations can use this insight to decide whether and how to invest resources in behavior change interventions.

  PublisherDOI

• Does Q&A Boost Engagement? Health Messaging Experiments in the U.S. and Ghana

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Does Q&A Boost Engagement? Health Messaging Experiments in the United States and Ghana

  Management Science · 2025-08-28

  articleOpen access

  Effective information sharing is critical for the success of organizations and governments. Because information that is easy to access is more likely to be adopted, leaders often minimize friction in information delivery. However, one type of friction may increase engagement: piquing curiosity by posing relevant questions prior to sharing information. To test this, we shared identical information about COVID-19 in either question-and-answer format or via direct statements across two preregistered field experiments in Ghana and Michigan (total n = 49,395). Q&A-style communication increased information seeking about directly related topics (e.g., how to wear a mask properly) by 1.0 percentage point (216%) in Ghana and by 1.1 percentage points (19%) in Michigan (p’s < 0.001) and increased self-reported behavior change by 1.3 percentage points (4%) in Michigan (p = 0.002). However, sharing information in Q&A format did not increase interest in general COVID-19 information in either setting, suggesting that the impact of Q&A-style messaging on information seeking may be issue specific. In Michigan, both Q&A-style and direct statement messaging produced less information seeking than sending no informational messages, likely because of differential attrition: the more texts participants received, the more likely they were to opt out of receiving messages, which made it impossible for them to seek more information via text. In a follow-up implementation experiment with social media ads (a messaging strategy without attrition challenges), Q&A-style ads generated 9%–11% more unique clicks to the CDC website per dollar spent than ads that directly stated information about vaccines (p < 0.001). We speculate that Q&A-style information delivery may stimulate curiosity, driving its benefits. This paper was accepted by Marie Claire Villeval, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: The authors thank the National Science Foundation [RAPID Grant 2033321], the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Northwestern University’s Global Poverty Research Lab, Stanford University’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab, Harvard Business School, the University of Pennsylvania, the AKO Foundation, John Alexander, Mark J. Leder, and Warren G. Lichtenstein for funding support. This work was also supported by Grand Challenges in Global Health. Supplemental Material: The supplementary materials and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.04405 .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Which group should I join? Competition drives group selection away from like-minded others

  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · 2025-10-28

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Does Q&A Boost Engagement? Health Messaging Experiments in the U.S. and Ghana

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Does Q&A Boost Engagement? Health Messaging Experiments in the U.S. and Ghana

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• A national megastudy shows that email nudges to elementary school teachers boost student math achievement, particularly when personalized

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-03-24 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  In response to the alarming recent decline in US math achievement, we conducted a national megastudy in which 140,461 elementary school teachers who collectively taught 2,992,027 students were randomly assigned to receive a variety of behaviorally informed email nudges aimed at improving students' progress in math. Specifically, we partnered with the nonprofit educational platform Zearn Math to compare the impact of 15 different interventions with a reminder-only megastudy control condition. All 16 conditions entailed weekly emails delivered to teachers over 4-wk in the fall of 2021. The best-performing intervention, which encouraged teachers to log into Zearn Math for an updated report on how their students were doing that week, produced a 5.06% increase in students' math progress (3.30% after accounting for the winner's curse). In exploratory analyses, teachers who received any behaviorally informed email nudge (vs. a reminder-only megastudy control) saw their students' math progress boosted by an average of 1.89% during the 4-wk intervention period; emails referencing personalized data (i.e., classroom-specific statistics) outperformed emails that did not by 2.26%. While small in size, these intervention effects were consistent across school socioeconomic status and school type (public, private, etc.) and, further, persisted in the 8-wk post-intervention period. Collectively, these findings underscore both how difficult it is to change behavior and the need for large-scale, rigorous, empirical research of the sort undertaken in this megastudy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Hengchen Dai

  Anderson University - South Carolina

  65 shared

• John Beshears

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  51 shared

• Todd Rogers

  51 shared

• Angela Duckworth

  45 shared

• Dena M. Gromet

  University of Pennsylvania

  40 shared

• Kevin G. Volpp

  University of Pennsylvania

  35 shared

• Max H. Bazerman

  34 shared

• Silvia Saccardo

  Carnegie Mellon University

  33 shared

Labs

• Katherine L. MilkmanPI

Awards & honors

• APS Fellow