NSF
Project Title: Collaborative Research: The Impact of COVID-19 on Norms, Risk-taking, Information and Trust
Directorate: Social, Economic Sci. (SES)
Program: Decision, Risk and Magmt. Sci
Award Number: 2027513
Award Amount: $199,793
Duration: 2020-2023
Role: Co-PI
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has hit countries around the world very hard. Governments and health organizations provide extensive information and recommend behavior to avoid contracting the disease and spreading it to others. In this project we exploit previous samples of subjects recruited under two prior NSF-supported projects to test the impact of the information and recommendations on behavior, social norms, trust in each other and institutions, and risk-tolerance. The intellectual merit is to study the impact of a national health catastrophe on information processing, social norms, trust and reciprocity and risk-taking. The broader impacts are to expand understanding of how COVID affects individual perceptions and behavior, as well as social norms, will provide crucial information relevant for policy design in the current setting and for the inevitable future outbreaks.
Project Title: Impacts of Heterogeneous Organizational Backgrounds and Social Norms on Employees’ Behaviors in Temporary Organizations: Focusing on Safety Behavior in Construction Projects
Directorate: Social, Behavioral and Economic Sci. (SBE) / Social and Economic Sci. (SES)
Program: Science of Organizations
Award Number: 1759199
Award Amount: $345,181
Duration: 2018-2022
Role: Co-PI
The intellectual merit is to extend theories on temporary organizations and organizational identification by identifying the mechanisms through which desirable social norms are translated into organization members’ behaviors with the help of organizational identification. Identifying effective managerial actions/strategies to increase workers’ project identification contributes to the development of organizational actions/strategies that can overcome heterogeneous organizational backgrounds and short tenure issue in a temporary organization, which eventually will improve employee behaviors like safety. Broader Impacts: The proposed research will contribute to developing cost-efficient and durable safety management strategies driven by positive social influence and the enhanced project identification of workers. This benefits the construction industry’s competitiveness and a wide variety of temporary organizations (e.g., R&D projects, task force, emergency response teams, international joint venture, and large scale events organizing committee), where multiple organizational backgrounds coexist and conflict with each other, and norms are fragmented. Effective education of students and professionals for climate and social influence-based management approaches increases the competitiveness of the U.S industries.
Project Title: Collaborative Research: SaTC Eager: Design, Perception, and Action – Engineering Information Give-Away
Directorate: Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Program: Secure and Trustworthy Computing (SaTC)
Award Number: 1537483
Award Amount: $224,675
Duration: 2015-2017
Role: PI
The intellectual merit lies in using experiments to identifying the impact of design on the perception of social norms and subsequent information divulging behavior. We test econometrically an extension of the privacy calculus model that includes a preference for norm compliance, estimating an individual’s willingness to trade-off between privacy preserving behavior and compliance with sharing norms. We demonstrate how tools from different disciplines can be used to enhance understanding of design in cybersecurity and HCI. Finally, the instruments we will design and test may be directly used to safeguard users from responding to malevolent norm-shaping interfaces. The broader impact stems from affecting discourse and development of tools for the study of user interfaces as embodiments of social norms and other aspects of the culture and organization that the interface represents.
Project Title: REU Site: Incentive Centered Design
Directorate: Social, Behavioral and Economic Sci. (SBE)
Award Number: 1156469
Award Amount: $350,000
Duration: 2012-2016
Role: PI
Intellectual merit: This grant provides a diverse group of promising students with a short-term research experience to foster their intellectual growth as scientists, and to provide an important building block for a rewarding long-term career in the fields of social sciences and information technology unified by the incentive-centered design approach. The broader impacts are to supplement traditional undergraduate study with access to research experiences as well as a broad range of educational and social activities that forge the participating students into a community of scholars. Second, this program specifically targets those students who come from undergraduate institutions that may not have large research programs as well as students from under-represented populations in STEM fields.
Project title: Eager: The Covenants We Live By: Normative Social Influence on Behavior
Directorate: Social, Behavioral and Economic Sci. (SBE)
Award Number: 1423043
Award Amount: $55,000
Role: PI
Intellectual Merit: This grant advances the study of the impact of social norms on choice by characterizing empirical regularities related to the emergence and transmission of norms and supporting the on-going development and validation of a Norm Elicitation Protocol. One paper is currently in revise and resubmit status and three further projects are in development. Broader Impacts: This work can be applied to those who seek to understand and shape behavior in arenas such as consumer, civic, or corporate behavior.
Other Granting Agencies
ERINN (Economic Research on Identity, Norms and Narratives), The University of Oxford
Project Title: Social Identity: A flexible conception of identity and shared narratives or a fixed trait?
Award Amount: $62,000
Role: PI
Duration: 2019-2023
One view of how social identity impacts choice is that it is driven by a fixed individual propensity to be attached to an identity. However, a different conceptualization of social identity attachment is that strength-of-attachment waxes and wanes with situational features. The intellectual merit of this research program is to identify parsimonious tests that distinguish between these two different concepts of how identity modulates behavior. Testing the “strength-of-attachment” conceptualization has considerable and important broader implications for how we model and craft policy-interventions that leverage social identity motivated behavior. If such phenomena as in-group favoritism are derived from attachment to group identity (and less from an individual tendency to be attached), then, and only then, does it makes sense to attempt to alter identity-motivated choice through framing our choices or creating policy interventions that alter the stories or narratives we tell. Further, the “strength of attachment” view has implications for the development of theory and the design of new methodologies for testing theories.
Medical Research Council, UK
Project Title: Using Game Theory to assess the effects of social norms and social networks on adolescent smoking in schools: a proof of concept study
Award Amount: £729,225
Duration: 2018-2023
Role: Co-PI
Intellectual merit: Contrast two school-based smoking prevention interventions among adolescents in the UK and Colombia to test norms-based mechanisms of action, characterize the mechanisms of action of smoking prevention interventions in schools, learning lessons for future intervention research. The broader impacts range from improved understanding of underlying mechanisms of population level behavior change interventions, through improving the approaches to their evaluation and informing future policy agendas.
The Donaghue Foundation
Project Title: Provider, Patient, and Health System Effects of Provider Commitments to Choose Wisely
Award Amount: $600,000
Duration: 2016-2018
Role: Co-PI
Intellectual Merit: Clinicians’ decisions to order potentially unnecessary services — such as those targeted in the Choosing Wisely® campaign — are often affected by their high-pressure practice environments, which can make it hard to consistently avoid ordering low-value care. The field of behavioral economics offers a promising and highly scalable approach to decreasing use of low-value services: asking clinicians to commit to avoid ordering such services and providing them and their patients with resources to support adherence to this commitment. We evaluate the effects of such an intervention, which we call Committing to Choose Wisely (CCW), across 2 large health systems through a mixed-methods, stepped wedge cluster randomized trial. In each of the study clinics, clinicians will be invited to commit to following a set of targeted Choosing Wisely recommendations. Clinicians, who make such a commitment, and their patients, will receive access to key resources to support adherence to this commitment. To measure the effects of the intervention, we use clinical automated data and focused medical record review data to examine rates of orders for targeted services before and after the intervention. Broader Impacts: We disseminate our findings widely by partnering with the Michigan State Medical Society, a Statewide Health Learning Collaborative, and a National Steering Committee comprised of key stakeholders, including leaders from Choosing Wisely, the American College of Physicians and Consumers Reports.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Project Title: Decreasing Overuse of Low-Value Health Care Services Through Physician Precommittment
Award Amount: $199,417
Duration: 2013-2015
Role: Co-PI
Intellectual merit: Physicians often make decisions about ordering low-value services during clinical encounters when their thinking can be rushed and susceptible to patient demands. Shifting physicians’ decisions about ordering low-value services to the pre-encounter period when their thinking is slower and more deliberative — and then inviting precommitment to avoid ordering a low-value service during the upcoming clinical encounter — offers a highly scalable solution that would readily generalize to a range of care settings. We conduct a mixed-methods stepped wedge cluster randomized trial in primary care clinics. At the start of the control period, physicians will be shown the 3 applicable Choosing Wisely recommendations. In the intervention period, physicians who will be seeing a patient for 1 of the 3 target conditions will be shown the applicable Choosing Wisely recommendation and invited to precommit to avoid ordering a low-value service for that patient. Physicians will remain free to order services at any time without penalty. After the intervention period, we will conduct surveys and semistructured interviews with physicians to gain a deep understanding of their responses to the intervention so as to optimize its design. Broader Impacts: through dissemination to practicing communities we have the opportunity to change how care is delivered.
Project Title: Impacts of Public Announcements of Goals and Outcomes on Goal Completion
Award Amount: $100,000
Duration: 2012-2013
Role: Co-PI
Intellectual Merit: We test the effect of public announcements of physical activity goals and of pre-committing to announcing the outcome through a controlled trial. All participants wear an uploading pedometer and access an online walking program (web interface was designed in-house). Daily step-count targets are exogenously set in an individually tailored way and automatically adjust on a weekly basis. In a between-subject design, subjects are in one of three conditions: goal setting and outcomes of goal attainment both only privately known, public goal setting (announcements are emailed to subjects’ friends) and outcomes of goal attainment kept private, public goal setting and outcomes of goal attainment are public (both announcement and outcome are emailed to friends).
University of Michigan (internal)
University of Michigan National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID)
Project Title: Out-group minority bias and the persistence of stereotypes in sexual consent
Award Amount: $4,980
Duration: 2020-2023
Role: PI
Using Identity Theory and behavioral economics, I identify the impact of implicit gender, race and sexual orientation bias on obtaining consent in the context of college students’ sexual interactions. The central problem I tackle is this: bias stemming from identities rooted in gender, race, and sexual identification affect consent-seeking behavior among college students and require policy and support for seeking consent to be informed by knowledge of these biases. My results identify interventions at the intersection of behavior (consent seeking actions) and policy (setting guidelines and shaping norms) that prominently address inherent biases associated with race, gender and sexual orientation.
University of Michigan Elizabeth Crosby Grant, Award Amount: $15,609, Duration: 2015-2016, Role: PI
Distinguished Award for Interdisciplinary Sustainability (DOW), Award Amount: $5,000; Duration: 2014-2015, Role: PI
Office of Research (UMOR), Award Amount: $25,945, Duration 2013-2015, role: PI
Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) grant, Amount: $12,971, Duration: 2013-2015, Role: PI
Elizabeth Crosby, Award Amount: $12,233, Duration: 2012-2013, Role: PI
Rackham Summer Research support grant, Amount: $3,000, Duration: 2011, Role: PI
Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR), Amount: $4,000, Duration: 2011; Role: PI
Other
DFG/NSF Travel Grant for Conference on Contextualizing Economic Behavior, 2008
Center for Behavioral Decision Research Small Grants Program, March 2006
Graduate Student Association, Graduate Conference Funding, March 2006
Ford Motor Company Graduate Student Research Grant, February 2006
Ford Motor Company Graduate Student Research Grant, September 2002
GuSH, Graduate Small Project Help, September 2002
AWARDS and Honors
2024-2025
Big Ten Academic Alliance Academic Leadership Program (ALP), nominated and selected
The Economic Science Association Prize for Exceptional Achievement
2025 SGIM Best Published Research Paper of the Year Award for the paper: Kullgren, J., Kim, H., Slowey, M., Colbert, J., Soyster, B., Winston, S., Ryan, K., Forman, J., Riba, M., Krupka, E. and Kerr, E., (2024). Using Behavioral Economics to Reduce Low-Value Care Among Older Adults: A Cluster Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Internal Medicine, 184(3), 281-290.
2022-2023
Advising Council at the University of Michigan (ACUM) Outstanding Advisor Award, nominated
2018-2019
Honored Instructor Award from University of Michigan Housing, nominated and selected
2013-2014
Golden Apple Award – student nominated and recognizes outstanding teaching, nominated
2010-2011
University of Michigan School of Information Outstanding Teacher Award, nominated and selected
