Behavior Change for Good

In 2017, Katy Milkman and Angela Duckworth created Behavior Change for Good (BCFG)—a behavioral science initiative founded with the goal of helping people achieve long-term behavior change in the areas of personal health, financial decisions (savings), and education. The initiative centered around a simple idea—by partnering with large customer-facing organizations such as gyms and banks, BCFG could design interventions aimed at changing habits of these organizations’ customers. The earliest BCFG experiments focused on increasing exercise, partnering with two major gym chains—24 Hour Fitness and Blink Fitness. The gyms were on board with the idea of nudging members to exercise more and continue their memberships. But what interventions might lead their gym members to have better exercise habits? And how will they decide if an intervention is successful?