Person
Katherine Milkman
Researcher whose study of healthcare workers' compliance during work shifts is cited in discussion of self-control and depletion.
Stories on Angle
Background
Selected excerpts from Wikipedia. This is general background, not Angle's reporting, and it may have changed since the stories above were published.
Katherine L. Milkman is an American economist who is the James G. Dinan endowed Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She was previously the president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.
Early life and education
Milkman originally considered working on Wall Street, and spent her college holidays interning at investment banks. She was an undergraduate student at Princeton University, where she specialised in Operations Research and American studies. She moved to Harvard University for her graduate studies and completed a doctorate in information and technology in 2009.
Research and career
Milkman moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where she was made assistant professor. She was promoted to Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions in 2018. She studies how economics and psychology can be used to change behaviour, including opinions on exercise, vaccine take-up and discrimination. Milkman makes use of big data to document this behavioural change in an effort to understand what results in failures of self-control.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Milkman investigated the transmission of coronavirus disease, claiming that it relied on social habits that can be changed. She used her understanding of vaccine hesitancy to encourage people to accept the COVID-19 vaccine. She argued that getting people to wear masks would have been easier if people had considered them as fashion items as opposed to a burden.
From the Wikipedia article Katy Milkman (revision of ). Wikipedia contributors; selected plain-text excerpts from this revision. Formatting, reference markers and non-prose material removed. Available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0. Identity from Wikidata (CC0).