34. Maya Shankar Is Changing People’s Behavior — and Her Own

21:01Maya Shankar:I was drafting all these policy proposals of things that we would love to see happen. And the campaign was so excited about this. And so to see those dreams crushed was really sad. I was actually more just reacting on a personal level, which is I just felt absolutely heartbroken while also dealing with the fact that I was now going to quit my job and I needed to figure out what my next path would be.

21:30I'm surprised the Biden administration hasn't already reinstated a behavioral sciences team. Would you go back to D.C. if they offered you the job?

21:38Maya Shankar:I don't think I would go back. One, because I'm very happy with the work I'm doing right now. And I also think the team would benefit from fresh ideas and fresh blood and a new vision for what behavioral science could look like in the context of the Biden administration. Certainly, all the documents are in place. But one thing I learned when I was in the government is executive orders don't always self-execute. Two years into my tenure, we're briefing President Obama in the Oval, and he ends up signing this executive order. And I remember very naively thinking, oh my gosh, this is it. Life is going to be so much easier after this change.

22:13Maya Shankar:But actually, no. Certainly, it was easier to now point to a document that had Barack Obama's name on it versus Maya Shunker's name on it. But did we still have to work just as hard to try and convince our agency partners to take on these pilots amidst so many competing demands and constraints and risk assessments? Absolutely. So I think reinstating this team will require finding and making an active effort to recruit people whose sole job is to translate insights from behavioral science to policy. Otherwise, I just don't know if enough activity will happen. It's interesting to me how differently the U.K.

22:53and the U.S. governments approach behavioral economics. In the U.K., it was a central part of what Prime Minister David Cameron was trying to do politically. It was high profile, lots of staff and support. And in the U.S., you had to send an email, a cold email to the White House to get hired. Are you surprised by that difference?

23:12Maya Shankar:I kept pointing to the successes of the U.K. Nudge Unit. But of course, every country is like, oh, but we're different. The Behavioral Insights Team invited me to 10 Downing and to visit their group early on in my tenure at the White House. And I remember thinking, oh, man, this is so lovely. Everyone seems like they're on board with this. And then I came back to my home environment and I just felt like every barrier was sitting in front of me. There were so many times, Steve, where we would have worked on a project for eight months, 12 months, two years, and something would happen, either politically or due to the budget or someone left and the whole project would be canned.

23:50Maya Shankar:The failure rate was so high all the time. In order to build trust and transparency with the American people, we made sure that in every policy report, we shared all the pilots that worked, that were successful and had positive results. But we also shared all the pilots we ran that had null results or negative results because we wanted to make sure that people were aware of all the activity. I wish we'd also shared how many failed attempts we had to change things. Forget about the ones that don't work, but the 90 % of the time and effort that goes into things that never even launch, that's invisible to everyone.

24:26Maybe it would be counterproductive. My thought is, well, it would be useful to show people how many failures there are. But I actually think maybe the discouragement effect would be so great that all the people like you who are doing this inspirational work, if they knew how hard it would be in the beginning, I bet a lot of them wouldn't even begin launching off in that direction. So maybe keep those failures secret. I think you're right.

24:47Maya Shankar:I think this can just be your and my little secret. Behavioral economics has this element of manipulation to it. It's trying to take advantage of people's mistakes and inattention to get them to do what you, the behavioral scientist, wants. Do you have any uneasiness about doing that? I think there's a few safeguards in place that prevent this work from having a deleterious impact. Number one is the one we already talked about, which is there are just limits on how effective any given nudge can be. The second is just a reminder that there's no default list state in the world. So every program and policy has a default design that will influence people one way or the other.

25:29Maya Shankar:So in the same way that if you go to a restaurant, menu options are listed in a particular order. And we know from research that people are more likely to pick the first option they see from a set of options. Now, in the context of government, if you're a veteran and you're asked to fill out a burdensome application form that requires referencing 16 different tax documents, that's a default too. And chances are that those requirements are nudging them away from accessing the benefits. So it's really important to remember what the status quo is and whether that's also serving as an implicit nudge, but it's actually counterproductive.

26:05Maya Shankar:It's not achieving the program's goals. And then I think the third thing is transparency. All the best nudges work just as effectively when they're transparent. One of my favorite projects in the wild was around helping to curb the opioid epidemic. And when a doctor's prescribing opioids for the first time, they go into this online system where they can subscribe a fixed number of pills for that first prescription. And researchers experimented with changing the default number in the system. So rather than it being, for example, 30 days, they change it down to 14 days. Now, doctors can see that there's this difference, but it makes them a little bit more thoughtful about what that original prescription is.

26:44Maya Shankar:And that led to a significant decrease in prescriptions across that particular health care company. When you are transparent with folks, it doesn't backfire. In fact, I think it's a very healthy part of the social contract we're all in.

26:59Maya Shankar:you're listening to people i mostly admire with steve levitt and his conversation with behavioral economist maya shunker after this short break they'll return to talk about learning chinese and maya's new podcast a slight change of plans

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29:23Today's listener question comes from Elkin Cruz, and Elkin writes, Hi Steve, aren't you afraid of survivorship bias? You keep asking successful people for advice when maybe they're not even capable of comprehending what made them get where they are. What about all of those who did the same as them, but still never succeeded? So Elkin, that is a great question. Let me start by making sure everyone knows what we mean by survivorship bias. Survivorship bias occurs when you base conclusions off of a subset of the population who meet a particular set of criteria, assuming that the results will generalize more broadly.

30:01For example, let's say you study successful startups, and you find that 80 % of them were founded by men under the age of 30. You might be tempted to conclude that young men are the most successful entrepreneurs. But what if you expand your sample to include not just successful startups, but also all the failed ones? And you find that 90 % of failed startups were founded by men under 30. Then you'll draw a very different conclusion that young men are less successful on average with startups. They just take a lot more shots at it. So back to Elkin's point. I often ask my guests for advice. Is their advice any good?

30:39My guests are extraordinary people, and while their approach worked for them, maybe if more regular people like you and me followed their exact same path, we would have failed miserably. That would be a classic example of survivorship bias. But their advice might be awful for other reasons also. Maybe successful people don't even understand why they've been successful. Or maybe their strategies were useful for the particular challenges they faced, but aren't broadly generalizable. Nonetheless, I really enjoy hearing their advice. I always try to imagine what advice each guest will give, and I'm almost always surprised by what they say.

31:13Like when Yul Kwan, the winner of Survivor, suggested that he and others should go live on an island for a while to reconnect with their gratitude for life. Or when Ken Jennings said to make sure not to neglect the things that make you weird. So more broadly, Elkin's question got me thinking. Maybe advice from people who haven't achieved their full potential in life might be particularly valuable and interesting. We get advice from successful people all the time, but no one ever asks not-so-successful people for advice. So I'd like to try something. If you were listening to this and you feel like you are someone for whom things didn't turn out nearly as well as they should have, your talent was squandered or unappreciated, then write me with your answer to the question, what advice would you give to a young person trying to find their place in the world?

32:03I will do my best to pull together the answers I receive and report back what I hear. So send me your advice. The address is pima at freakonomics.com. That's P-I-M-A at freakonomics.com. And now back to my conversation with Maya Shankar.

32:28The answer that surprised me the most so far in talking with Maya is when she said she wouldn't go back to Washington if invited by the Biden administration. It sounded like at the time, she loved her government work more than anything. She only stopped because Trump won. She lost her position. But when forced into a change, now she doesn't want to go back. Interestingly, the only other big change I know of that Maya has experienced in her life was when she was forced to abandon a promising career as a concert violinist due to a hand injury. Despite her doctors advising her to quit, she kept playing for almost another year with just one good hand before finally giving up at the age of 17.

33:05I wonder if she's someone who's the opposite of me, someone who never quits by choice. I'll start the second half probing her about that. And also, she's got a new podcast called A Slight Change of Plans. It's generating a huge buzz. I want to find out what that's all about. So you were a violin prodigy as a child, a student at Juilliard, practicing five hours at a time, private lessons with the legendary Isaac Perlman, but for an injury that you suffered that likely would have been your life's focus. Do you remember what motivated you as a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old to work so hard on something like that?

33:46Was it being on stage or joy and perfection or enormous amounts of positive feedback from adults?

33:54Maya Shankar:Oh, I think I got a lot of negative feedback from adults. If you're studying at Juilliard, your teachers are going to be very critical and have about 10 hours of classes over the course of the day. And every teacher has the ability to tell you, ooh, this thing and this thing and this thing, and ah, you should have practiced this more, whatever. But I think that was actually really useful because it means that I'm very open to being wrong in a lot of situations and updating my beliefs because you're not going to get through that kind of intense environment if you can't take a lot of criticism. Fundamentally, one of the things that I love engaging in are pursuits where your inputs feel like they really matter because they're expressed in outputs.

34:31Maya Shankar:The more you practice, the better you become as a violinist. And that's not true in every discipline. You can try your absolute hardest on this latest startup, but then all these market factors and exogenous factors play a role and you just don't have control over the system. But it felt like I could see the translation of my hard work and see it manifested in better playing. And when you choose a pursuit like that, it can be endlessly satisfying because you're not always concerned with the absolute quality of playing. You're concerned with the delta, how much progress you're seeing over time.

35:03Maya Shankar:And that's certainly relevant in my life today. My husband is Chinese. His whole family in China doesn't speak English. And so one of the activities I took up a few years ago was to try to learn Mandarin. Good luck with that. I tried that, too. It's very hard. I am elementary at best. but it is so gratifying to see improvement over time. I understood a sentence my Chinese teacher told me today, and I know that I wouldn't have been able to do that two months ago. So my drive came from just the joy of getting to see myself be better at something. So I adopted two daughters from China, and so I tried to learn Mandarin.

35:39I tried really hard. I would say I spent a half an hour a day for a year or more trying to learn Chinese. One of my graduate students was tutoring me, and my ear is so bad. I actually went to one of those online sites where they'd say two tones in Chinese view, and then you'd have to say which of the tones you had just heard. And I was so bad at it that I decided to start collecting data. And it turned out that I literally could have guessed I was no better than chance.

36:08Maya Shankar:I love that. And I found that very discouraging. That really hurt my progress. Have you tried with your Chinese relatives? Because after all that practice, I went to China and I neither understood a single word that anyone said to me or had a single word I said understood. Yeah. So I think in general, I suck at learning foreign languages. I just don't pick things up effortlessly. But Chinese does actually play to my comparative advantage, which is I have a finely tuned ear from my violin days. I would say that my ability to speak is far outpacing my ability to comprehend. So I did go with my husband to China.

36:43Maya Shankar:It was our post-wedding trip. And all these relatives were meeting me for the first time. And I was able to produce language and they were able to understand it. But one thing I was struck by were all the regional differences in accents when speaking the language. So I felt completely demoralized after the trip. After I adopted my first daughter from China, I literally did not practice Chinese for one minute for the next three or four years until I adopted my second daughter. And on the plane to China, I just memorized and practiced really hard four sentences. I'm American. This is my daughter.

37:25I adopted her from the orphanage. And then I had my father with me. And then this is her grandfather. And I really worked to pronounce him well. So every conversation I had in China, I started with my first sentence. And no matter what anybody said to me, I would say my second sentence, and then I would say my third, and then my fourth, and it was phenomenal. It worked unbelievably well. Every conversation was a huge success. People were like calling their friends over. And the funny thing was the other Americans who were with me watched this happen and watched every conversation be so vibrant.

38:01They're like, I cannot believe how much Chinese you know. And I never told them that I literally said the same four things in every conversation.

38:09Maya Shankar:I do find actually I mislead people often because my pronunciation is relatively good because of the musical training. I'll say a few things and then they assume that I must have some degree of proficiency or fluency. And I'm like, no, there's a cap on how much I know here. But I live in the Bay Area. So there's a lot of Chinese speaking folks here. There's been a few times where I've been walking on the street and a person who might not speak English is lost. They're looking for directions. And they see me and obviously are thinking this person can be of no help to me. So they're trying to sign to me, how do I get from here to there?

38:42Maya Shankar:And I suddenly start speaking in Chinese. And this beautiful human connection forms almost instantly. And you feel like you're bonding with people, literally having a conversation that you could not have had in the counterfactual world had you not tried to pick up the language. And those interactions have definitely touched me on a deep level.

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40:49So in the White House and at Google, your job was to change other people's behavior. And in your new podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, it's all about how people respond to life changes. Dani Kahneman always told me that people study things that they themselves personally are really bad at. So is Dani right? Are you bad at change?

41:11Maya Shankar:I think I am bad at change. That was probably my big motivation for launching A Slight Change of Plans. In 2020, I was feeling quite overwhelmed by the rapid pace of change around me. I think many people were feeling that and that you just don't have control. I thought, OK, maybe the specifics of what 2020 is throwing our way are unprecedented, but the human ability to navigate change is not. And it's possible that we recruit a very similar type of psychology when we confront various types of change. And so if we can mine people's stories, we can potentially learn some very valuable things that we can use in our own life.

41:51So what kinds of things do you think we can learn from change?

41:55Maya Shankar:I think in my own life, obviously I had a very privileged form of change, which was simply that I was this budding concert violinist and I couldn't play the violin anymore. But it did lead me as a 15-year-old to realize, because you don't really think about these concepts when you're a kid necessarily. At least in my case, I just let my life unfold. And I think it taught me this control thing is a bit of an illusion. I am the personality type that loves having control, but it takes a while to fully appreciate that. You have to have a few more experiences with change and unexpected change and unwanted change, I think, for it to really drill in.

42:30Maya Shankar:There's this concept in psychology called identity foreclosure. It basically refers to the idea that we can settle into a self-identity early on and close ourselves off to other alternatives. To your point earlier, I think this is one of the reasons why we as people have a really hard time quitting things and knowing when it's time to move on to the next chapter. I think the fact that I lost the violin at an early age forced me as a child to think of my identity as more malleable. That served me well as I've gotten older because it means that I attach my identity less to the thing that I'm doing at that particular moment of time and instead attach it to a broader cluster of personality traits and the friends that I have and the activities that I enjoy in life and what my mindset is or my beliefs about things I don't know if you've had this experience too, where you figure out what does it really mean for me to have a certain identity as a person?

43:23Maya Shankar:And maybe I am just the aggregate of all the things that I think and do. I think it's such a risky strategy to put all your identity eggs in one basket. A good example, my son was a world-class fencer as a high school student. And probably I had as much identity wrapped around that as he did. It was so much fun. We shared so much time with it. And then he hurt his knee. And even though it was fencing and he was 14 years old at the time and who cared, it was a devastating loss to me. I just imagine what it's like for the parents of a professional basketball player or a college football player to suffer such a devastating injury.

44:03And it was interesting because I hadn't really even understood that about myself, how much enjoyment and identity I really got from being not even the world-class fencer, but the father of a world-class fencer, which is like incredibly pathetic. But it was eye-opening.

44:17Maya Shankar:Thanks for sharing that example, because it does remind me of a conversation I had for my new podcast with Tommy Caldwell. He's considered one of the greatest big wall climbers in the world. He had been taken captive in Kyrgyzstan for six days and nearly died of hypothermia and starvation. He ended up pushing his captor off of a cliff, and he had to reckon with the fact that he had done this, and he surprised himself. He said he's a meek, softer type, and he doesn't believe in killing people. I was just so confident that was going to be the crux of his change story and that that would have informed his climbing identity in the future.

44:53Maya Shankar:Actually, the big change moment for him was that he said his body entered survival mode when he was in the depths of this hypothermia starvation, and that he experienced the greatest mental clarity and focus he had ever had in his life. And so since that day, the true motivator for him has been chasing this mental state. And he once even tried to starve himself on a climb to recreate those conditions. But it's propelled him to become the world's greatest big wall climber. And it has been the thing that he's been searching for and seeking over the course of his life, even outside of the climbing domain.

45:30Maya Shankar:After I had this interview, I thought to myself, Tommy Caldwell is the type of guy who seeks genuine flow states. Climbing is the secondary thing in his life. That's just a means to an end. But that's actually the thing that's very Corridor's identity and that he can achieve in a bunch of different disciplines or domains. Like you said, it can be risky to attach your identity to a soul pursuit. But if you identify features of the activity that light you up, I mentioned earlier in the interview that I love the idea of seeing progress, seeing that delta between how I sounded on the violin yesterday and how I sound today.

46:07Maya Shankar:And if you can identify those features, then you can find them in many spaces in your life. And that, I think, can lead to a sturdier identity. Have you tried playing violin again since your injury, or did you just permanently retire? I haven't played the violin for what feels like ages at this point. And then my producer said, Hey, Maya, what if you play the violin for the soundtrack of the podcast? I was thinking, Oh my gosh, I don't know if I can do this. But I called up my parents. They were going to be flying out here to see us after they got their vaccines. And I said, Hey, pops, do you mind just bringing my violin with you?

46:44Maya Shankar:And I opened it up and it was amazing to me. It is a little bit like riding a bike. I lost so much of my technique, but the fundamentals were still there. And I was able to record original music for the soundtrack. So if you hear the first episode of my show, it's a conversation with Michael Lewis in which I give a preview of what's to come in the season of A Slight Change of Plans. You'll actually hear my violin playing at the end of the episode. And it was incredibly fun to do. So I have a theory about leading a happy life. And some of Maya's answers, I think, were consistent with my theory, which is that the single best predictor of who will be most unhappy in life versus those who will be happiest is that the unhappy people need to feel control over things, whereas the happy people accept the fact that much of life is beyond their control.

47:34Now, admittedly, I don't have much evidence in support of this theory. It was initially based on casual observation of the people in my life, some of whom crave control and others who don't seem to. A second piece of evidence, again, not particularly convincing, is that over the last 20 years, I've intentionally and pretty successfully transformed myself from being someone who craves control to someone who accepts the impossibility of having control. And I'm much happier now than I was back then. Of course, a thousand other things have changed in my life over the last 20 years, so who really knows?

48:06Have others followed my path and let go of the need for control? If so, are you happier now? Has anyone gone the other direction, not needing control when you were young, but having the desire to control everything grow with age? Is there someone out there who absolutely needs to control everything, but does so with a great sense of joy? I'd be really curious to hear your personal experiences on this subject. If you feel like sharing, you know how to reach me. It's pima at Freakonomics.com. That's P-I-M-A at Freakonomics.com. And I read every email you send. Thanks for listening and take care.

48:43Maya Shankar:People I Mostly Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network and is produced by Freakonomics Radio. Morgan Levy is our producer. All of the music you heard on this show was composed by Luis Guerra. Thanks for listening.

49:05Maya Shankar:Hi, I'm Maya. and I speak a little Chinese and today I'm excited. I'm very excited because I, with Steve, get to chat.

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