Ashley Whillans is an assistant professor in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit, teaching the Negotiations course to MBA students. Broadly, she studies how people navigate trade-offs between time and money. Her ongoing research investigates whether and how intangible incentives, such as experiential and time-saving rewards, affect employee motivation and well-being. In both 2015 and 2018, she was named a Rising Star of Behavioral Science by the International Behavioral Exchange and the Behavioral Science and Policy Association. In 2016, she co-founded the Department of Behavioral Science in the Policy, Innovation, and Engagement Division of the British Columbia Public Service. Her research has been published in numerous academic journals and popular media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
Professor Whillans earned her BA, MA, and PhD in Social Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Prior to joining HBS, she was a visiting scholar and guest lecturer at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Professor Whillans has also enjoyed an acting career, attending London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and appearing most notably in the 2007 comedy film Juno.
The basis of Professor Whillans’ research is the idea that time and money are two of our most valuable resources, and she poses the question, “With both of these resources being limited, how should we spend our time and money to maximize happiness?” To answer this question, and to understand the psychological barriers that may prevent people from spending their free time and discretionary income in ways that promote well-being, she starts in the lab, then takes her ideas to the real world, to examine the applicability and replicability of her research.
Health & Giving
Past research suggests that spending money on others (prosocial spending) can promote happiness. With this as a springboard, Professor Whillans’ work examines the health benefits of helping others. After recruiting older adults who were previously diagnosed with high blood pressure, she gave each participant a modest amount of money to spend over the course of three weeks. Measuring their blood pressure before, during, and after they spent their study payments, Professor Whillans found that participants who were randomly assigned to spend money on others showed significant reductions in blood pressure, a benefit comparable in magnitude to starting a new aerobic exercise program. Her work provides some of the strongest evidence to date that prosocial behavior can lead to clinically relevant benefits for physical health.
Wealth & Giving
While investigating the benefits of prosocial behavior, Professor Whillans came across a puzzling finding: the more money that people make, the less they donate to charity, proportionately speaking. Given that prosocial behavior can provide a key lever for improving health and happiness, she sought to uncover psychological factors that can encourage charitable giving, particularly among those with the greatest capacity to give. Professor Whillans has conducted studies that show when appeals emphasize agency (the pursuit of personal goals) as compared to communion (the pursuit of shared goals), wealthier individuals donate more money to charity. Thus, tailored messages can encourage the wealthiest people in society to spend their money in more generous, and potentially more emotionally satisfying, ways. Building on her past research, Professor Whillans is currently examining other theoretically grounded methods of promoting and sustaining financial generosity. She is also conducting several large scale trials examining the benefit of sport and education programming on youth development and charitable giving intentions and behavior in collaboration with CHIMP (Charitable Impact Foundation).
Buying Time
Taking more time for oneself—such as by working less—often comes at the expense of having less money, and working to earn more money often cuts into free time. When attempting to maximize happiness, what should people do: give up money to have more time, or give up time to have more money? Professor Whillans’ ongoing research suggests that prioritizing time over money is associated with greater happiness and life satisfaction. In addition, her work suggests that people who spend money to have more free time by delegating their disliked tasks to others—such as shopping, cooking, and cleaning—report greater well-being. Yet she also finds evidence that many people are reluctant to buy time even if doing so can promote their welfare. She is exploring the idea of “future time-slack,” which is the notion that most people believe that they will have more time in the future than they do in the present.
Current Work
Professor Whillans is currently working with Maritz and the Incentives Research Foundation to conduct a naturalistic field experiment examining whether employees who receive time-saving versus cash rewards report greater reward satisfaction and job satisfaction, and whether such rewards have more optimal outcomes on objective engagement measures, such as the number of sick days taken.
