34. Maya Shankar Is Changing People’s Behavior — and Her Own

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**Steven Levitt** (1:04)
My guest today, Maya Shankar, is a great example of how with the right mix of talent, confidence and doggedness, anything is possible.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:14)
Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

**Steven Levitt** (1:20)
But only in her 20s, Maya built from scratch the Obama administration's social and behavioral sciences team. That's the US government's first systematic attempt to integrate behavioral economics into its policies. It's a US version of the highly successful British Nudge Unit, which was launched by Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010, and named after Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's hugely impactful book, Nudge. She also served as the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations, and more recently, as a global director of behavioral sciences at Google. Still only in her early thirties, Maya might be the youngest guest I've had so far on this podcast, and I'm guessing she will bring a big dose of youthful enthusiasm.
I first became aware of you when you were put in charge of the social and behavioral sciences team in the Obama administration. How old were you when that team was created with you as the leader?

**Maya Shankar** (2:17)
I think I was either 26 or 27 I had no public policy experience at all. I was an academic. I was doing a postdoc in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford at the time.

**Steven Levitt** (2:28)
Had you ever had a real job?

**Maya Shankar** (2:30)
Never had a real job.

**Steven Levitt** (2:31)
Okay. Your first job was running an agency in Washington?

**Maya Shankar** (2:34)
Yes, it was. What happened is, I pitched the White House on creating a new position for a behavioral scientist, and then I just made it my mission to create a team because I don't think I was totally qualified for the gig.

**Steven Levitt** (2:46)
So you just wrote an email to WhiteHouse.gov and said, my name is Maya and I would like to be your advisor, and they said, sounds great, or how did that work?

**Maya Shankar** (2:55)
I still remember this one moment where I was in the basement of an fMRI laboratory. It was probably my fourth or fifth hour scanning people's brains, and this guy came in, and within minutes, I'm peering into this person's brain, and I'm thinking to myself, given my personality, I feel like the order of operations is wrong here.
I don't know whether this person has children, what his job is, what his favorite ice cream flavor is. I quickly realized that maybe scanning people's brains was not exactly the right choice for me, and that I wanted to do something that was a bit more social, working on teams, and so I ended up chatting with my undergraduate advisor, Laurie Santos. I'm sure you're familiar with her. She has this great podcast called The Happiness Lab, and she was my mentor starting from the time that I was a freshman, and I said, Laurie, what do I do?
And she said, there's this amazing work that's happening in the White House right now, where they are using insights from behavioral economics to help enroll low-income students into the free lunch program. The government offers this amazing program for kids to be able to eat at school, but millions of kids were still going hungry because the forum was really burdensome, and there was a stigma associated with signing your kid up for a public benefits program. The government used the power of defaults, and they basically used existing administrative data on these kids to automatically enroll them in the school lunch program. So now, parents only had to take an active step if they wanted to unenroll their kids, not enroll them, and as a result of this policy change, over 12.5 million more kids were now eating lunch at school every day, and it was a light bulb moment for me. I thought, oh my gosh, I really want to do this kind of work. I want to be a practitioner of behavioral science, but I had no connections in the political sphere. So I sent a cold email to Cass Sunstein. He is the co-author of Nudge, and he had served as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama White House. I just said, I'm a postdoc, I've published nothing of significance, I have no public policy experience. I even wrote in the email, Steve, that I didn't think I was, quote, cool enough to work with the likes of Obama, and so if there was a state or local government opportunity, I'd be totally game for that. And thankfully, Cass ignored all of the insecurities and connected me with President Obama's science advisor. And so a week later, I was pitching my soon-to-be boss on the idea of building out a new role for a dedicated behavioral scientist in the White House.