What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Vow files. I am your host Nick and we have the team with us.

Ellie, Amanda and Chrissy, how's everyone doing? Is it working? Oh, well great job guys. We have a fantastic episode for you guys. One of my favorites, Dr. Maya Shunker is with us today. She's a behavioral scientist.

If you listen to this podcast, you know we talk a lot about our choices, our behaviors, what influences us, how we break down our own situations, our ability to lie to ourselves, not lie to ourselves, things like that.

And have just a really fascinating conversation with Maya and a lot of insights to, you know, how we make our decisions in life. So you're going to love this episode. I know I did, especially if you listen to this podcast.

So I can't thank Maya enough for taking the time. We also have our 300th episode coming out next week, 300. Wow. Thanks for sticking with us guys. Missy pile will be joining us. She is a wonderful hysterical comedian actress.

And her and I are going to be discussing and breaking down the popular show sex life on Netflix because well, obviously it's about sex and relationships and it is an outrageous show that has gotten people's reactions both positive and negative and and missy is going to help us break it down and talk about how relatable or unrelated will it might be.

Also missy has some interesting perspectives on the show is apparently the pro static person of the show she's currently working on is the prosthetic person who worked on sex life. So I think that raises a lot of questions on what is real and what is not anyway.

Be sure to check that out other than that rate subscribe sending your questions at ask Nick at cast me.com cast for the K for ask Nick episodes. And if there's nothing else, let's get to Maya.

Thanks for coming. I'm so excited to have you here for those of you who don't know you are a behavioral scientist, which I'm really fascinated to have you on, you know, we often talk about a lot of things on this relationship and relationship.

We often talk about a lot of things on this podcast, one of which is you know, relationship dynamics and things like that with the conversations we have in our ass Nick episode quite honestly I always feel like what we are really talking about are people's behaviors, their reactions to situations and and how they, you know, feel about something.

And so it's really nice to talk to an expert and a doctor who who studies that what does it mean to be a behavioral scientist let's let's start there and make sure I understand and then I have so many questions.

First of all, it's great to be unique. So yeah, I study behavioral science and it's the science behind how it is that we make decisions and how we develop our attitudes and beliefs about the world.

And I think one thing that's so interesting for my field is that it reveals that there are a lot of surprising factors that influence our judgments and our attitudes and beliefs that we might not even be consciously aware of.

And so we can identify what those are, then we can design policies and programs and products and ways that actually align with our best understanding of human behavior.

So a good example of this is we like to think when we go into a voting booth, we will vote for the candidate that we most like to see elected into office right that's that's common sense.

But research shows that the order in which the candidates names appear on the ballot has a huge impact on voter behavior. In fact, they had this study they ran in Texas where if a candidate's name was listed first on the ballot that candidate garnered a 10% percentage point boost in vote share relative to being in the last place.

And so that shouldn't matter, but it's having a big unconscious effect on our patterns of behavior. And so having worked in public policy in the past is one of those things where you can design solutions right you can make it so that the names of candidates for example are randomized across all ballots so that there's more fairness across the system.

So like if there's multiple ballots, they not each ballot could be different. Some of them are listed first, some of them are last and everything in between.

Exactly. So that's one example. There's other examples, you know, the opioid epidemic is a big problem right now. It's obviously got lots of root causes, but they ran this really fascinating study where, you know, when patients go to see a doctor, let's say right after they've had a bad accident.

Right or a bad injury. Typically doctors when they're prescribing that first set of opioid pills will go into an electronic system, some sort of software and will be a preset number of pills in the system.

That is the default number and they found that when they changed that default number from 30 pills to 12 pills. So it's just inspiring doctors just a thing for a moment, right.

If the patient truly needs 30, they can change that number. They have full agency to do so. But it's just getting them to a more conservative number when they when they reduce it to 12, it led to a 15% reduction in opioid prescriptions across the entire hospital system.

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