This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Solvable. I'm Ronald Young Jr.

What do you get when you put a behavioral scientist in the room with policymakers?

Every program and policy has a default design that will influence people one way or the other.

If that behavioral scientist is Maya Shankar, you may get an analysis of how our complicated human minds impact our participation in government programs.

We are influenced by some very surprising factors that ought to not influence our decisions,

but absolutely do.

Effective government policies are tricky things to get right.

To begin with, there's lobbying and then rigorous debate around whether a policy or program

should exist at all.

That's followed by, as we've seen recently, a lot of argument about how much money to spend.

But once the budget has been settled and the money allocated to federal programs,

there's the important step of designing programs that truly serve the people and reach them.

And that's where studying human behavior can

help. Small changes can be the difference between successful engagement or a low participation

rate. So the government ended up leveraging an insight known as the power of defaults. And basically,

it changed the school lunch program from an opt-in program

to an opt-out program. The National School Lunch Program reaches nearly 30 million children

each year. Thanks to smart, sometimes seemingly subtle changes like these, millions more Americans

may be making the most of government programs, from farmers

to veterans to college age students. Behavioral science is the study of how and why we make

decisions, as well as how we develop our attitudes and beliefs about the world. Maya Shankar is the host

...