The Decision Corner Hacking health and savings: Ting Jiang
Aug 3, 2019
Ting Jiang, an experimental economist at the Center for Advanced Hindsight who designs behavioral interventions for global health and finance. She explains a dice game that revealed cheating patterns. She describes a calendar that boosted savings, projects like Hidden Gym and Nappiness for healthier habits, and why trusting evidence and testing small experiments beats intuition.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Hidden Gym And The Nappiness Campaign
- Ting discussed Hidden Gym and 'Nappiness' initiatives to embed small, time-efficient healthy actions like stair walking and midday naps.
- These interventions target perceived time scarcity and stigma to boost everyday exercise and restorative rest.
The Real Barrier Is Trusting The Evidence
- The hardest barrier is trusting evidence over intuitive beliefs, not technical limits of tests.
- Regular forecasting games and prizes help teams confront and update false priors to create an experimentation culture.
Build Permission To Experiment
- Create leadership that rewards experimentation and tolerates failures to scale behavioral science.
- Start with small, low-cost tests to build familiarity and momentum before larger trials.