Matt Wallaert is the (first!) chief behavioral officer at Clover Health. Wallaert classifies as a behavioral scientist, studying human behavior as it intersects with technology as a whole. He’s been involved in plenty of startups and non-profits, including a website called GetRaised.com, to benefit underpaid women and to raise their salaries. He is a panelist in the Changing Minds: Behavioral Science for Designers panel, and will be sharing his thoughts on behavioral science and past studies he has done.
Tell me a bit about yourself. (Your background, what got you into this career, etc.)
I sort of fell into psychology. On a whim, I took a psychology class called, ‘Psychology of Self Control.’ [The professor] did what I think is the most important thing you can do for somebody. That was to say, ‘Here in science we have an organized way of replying to people you don’t agree with by doing your own research. You don’t have to debate about beliefs or perspectives. You can just do your own research and that data will show you whether what you think is right or wrong.’
That concept was just amazingly attractive to me..that science was an organized way of having the conversation about what was true in the world. I got sucked in by the ability to study things and reply to each other in an organized fashion. I think I came in at a magical time. Social psychology was really coming into its own.
You are the first Chief Behavioral Officer in your industry. How did that position come about?
It was something I worked very hard to create and evangelize. Evangelizing and bringing about the introduction of scientifically trained people into and across industries to improve the outcome of behavior change is really valuable, important, and worthwhile. So I [wrote] a sort of manifesto about how we integrate behavioral science into business and what having a chief behavioral officer means, how it gets laid out, et cetera. One of the founders of Clover, Kris Gale, said we should talk and it was just the right place at the right time. They are an experimental data-driven culture, but they didn’t necessarily have a bunch of people with an experimental background that I have. It was just a really nice fit.
How is Clover Health going to play a role in the panel that you’re speaking in?
We’re talking about behavior change more generally, but I’ll certainly be using some Clover examples. We’re doing all sorts of really interesting things. Clover, on the business side, is an insurance company. What we really are is a health outcomes company. It’s one of those rare businesses where the direct business outcome and what’s good for people are perfectly aligned. If I can keep you healthy, you are happier and better off in the world, and I am better off from a balance sheet perspective. So we’re experimenting with a lot of really neat things and it’s a lot of fun.
With regards to behavior change, what do you hope the attending audience gets out of attending this panel?
One thing is just reorienting people towards behavior change, and helping them see what they’re doing. If you start with, ‘what does the world look like when I change the behavior in the appropriate way’, you will then actually learn the strategies you need in order to go do that. It requires an entire organization to start realigning their thinking. It’s a talk where I’m hoping that everybody and every function and organization can start to see how [their] role will be transformed, and how [they] can use it to up level in a new and interesting way. The goal of the talk is whatever you’re passionate about, to find a way to find how you can think about that from a behavioral science perspective.
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve discovered about the relationship between human behavior and technology?
It is not special. People tend to treat technology and human behavior as if somehow technology is the special case, but it’s really not. If we take the broader version of technology, there’s always been dynamism between what we figure out how to do and the behaviors that have made changes. Behavior change is the point of everything. It’s just part of this natural dynamic between us and our environment. Much of technology is labor saving; it allows us to not spend time on things we don’t care about. But what everyone cares about is different. For example, the internet is not eating your life. It’s letting you spend time on whatever you want to spend time on, and it’s freeing up time from other places to spend on that.
You get all of your clothes off of eBay, but a script does it. Did you have any inspiration behind it or do you just hate shopping? What was the reason?
One of the things I talk a lot about in science is that people don’t care halfway about things. You either care, or you don’t, and I just don’t give a shit about clothing. The people that think that’s crazy are the some that feel exactly different from me. The notion of choosing the individual options doesn’t matter. I bought a bunch of used shirts off eBay, tried them on until I found one that was a pretty good fit, and when I found one I bought it. So I literally just wear the same thing every day. The nice thing is that it’s not actually the exact same thing…no one will notice I’m wearing basically the same thing every day.
When and Where:
Monday, March 12
5:00pm-6:00pm
JW Marriott – Salon E/110 e 2nd St
Find out more: Changing Minds: Behavioral Science for Designers
Featured Image Provided by Matt Wallaert