Katherine Milkman
Behavioural scientist at the Wharton School, known for research on habits and on how to make good behaviour easier to start and keep. She appears on this site as co-author of the study that separated how emotions feel from how much they activate people, and as the originator of temptation bundling.
Who they are
Milkman works on the gap between what people intend and what they do. Her best-known idea, temptation bundling, pairs something you enjoy with something you put off, and restricts the enjoyable part so it is only available alongside the useful one.
Her co-authorship with Jonah Berger on the New York Times sharing study is a different strand of the same interest: what actually moves people to act, as opposed to what they say moves them.
Key papers
Berger, J., & Milkman, K. L. (2012). "What makes online content viral?" Journal of Marketing Research, 49(2), 192-205. Second author.
Milkman, K. L., Minson, J. A., & Volpp, K. G. M. (2014). "Holding the Hunger Games hostage at the gym: an evaluation of temptation bundling." Management Science, 60(2), 283-299. The original temptation-bundling experiment.
Kirgios, E. L., Mandel, G. H., Park, Y., Milkman, K. L., Gromet, D. M., Kay, J. S., & Duckworth, A. L. (2020). "Teaching temptation bundling to boost exercise: a field experiment." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 161, 20-35. The larger and longer follow-up, and the one this site prefers to cite.
Key ideas
Arousal, not just pleasantness, predicts what people share. See Emotional Arousal.
Restricting a pleasure to the moment of an unwelcome task makes the task more likely to happen. See Temptation Bundling.
On temptation bundling, the 2020 field experiment is the better evidence: far more participants, smaller gains, and gains that lasted.
Sources
- Berger & Milkman (2012), Journal of Marketing Research, 49(2), 192-205, verified at the published record 6 October 2026. Milkman, Minson & Volpp (2014) and Kirgios and colleagues (2020), verified 1 September 2026.