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The Megastudy Approach for Changing Behavior at Scale

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Behavioral Public Policy in a Global Context

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Abstract

The Behavior Change for Good (BCFG) Initiative was founded in 2016 to accelerate scientific discovery and identify the best behavioral science strategies to help people make meaningful and lasting changes to improve their lives. There have been many important insights from behavioral science, yet we still know very little about which insights have the best chance at cost-effectively changing behavior in any given situation. This chapter reviews BCFG’s novel, collaborative approach to combat these issues in behavioral science—the “megastudy.” A megastudy is a large field experiment in which many sub-studies are tested simultaneously on the same objective outcome, allowing for apples-to-apples (and dollars-to-dollars) comparisons across many different interventions developed from multiple disciplines. The authors review the benefits and drawback of the megastudy approach, explain how BCFG conducts megastudies, provide an in-depth look into BCFG’s 54-intervention megastudy on encouraging exercise with a large U.S. gym chain, and share the lessons learned for implementing this new approach to conduct behavioral science at scale.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    BCFG’s published results from the following megastudies: (1) a 54-arm, 61,293-person megastudy on encouraging exercise in partnership with 24 Hour Fitness (megastudy results: Milkman et al. 2021b; individual study results: Kirgios et al. 2020), (2) a 20-arm, 74,811-person megastudy on encouraging vaccination uptake among primary care patients in partnership with Penn Medicine and Geisinger (megastudy results: Milkman et al. 2021a; Patel et al. 2022; individual study results: Buttenheim et al. 2022), (3) a 23-arm, 689,693-person megastudy on encouraging vaccination uptake among pharmacy patients in partnership with Walmart (megastudy results: Milkman et al. 2022), and (4) a 13-arm megastudy on improving student GPAs in partnership with Character Lab (individual study results: Eskreis-Winkler et al. 2019).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Katy Milkman for her valuable feedback and Kasandra Brabaw for her excellent editorial assistance on this chapter.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Behavior Change for Good Initiative, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Dena M. Gromet, Sean F. Ellis & Joseph S. Kay

  2. Assistant Editor at the Behavioural Scientist and an Editorial Researcher for Authors Angela Duckworth and Dan Heath, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Heather N. Graci

Authors
  1. Dena M. Gromet
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  2. Sean F. Ellis
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  3. Joseph S. Kay
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  4. Heather N. Graci
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dena M. Gromet .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. King's College London, London, UK

    Michael Sanders

  2. Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA

    Syon Bhanot

  3. King's College London, London, UK

    Shibeal O' Flaherty

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Gromet, D.M., Ellis, S.F., Kay, J.S., Graci, H.N. (2023). The Megastudy Approach for Changing Behavior at Scale. In: Sanders, M., Bhanot, S., O' Flaherty, S. (eds) Behavioral Public Policy in a Global Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31509-1_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31509-1_22

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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