Katherine L. Milkman

Behavioral scientist (Wharton, University of Pennsylvania) and prominent behavior-change researcher, co-author across the vault's entire Fresh Start Effect spine: the foundational temporal-landmark papers (Dai, Milkman & Riis 2014/2015) that established the individual-level dissociation mechanism, and their workplace extension (Beshears, Dai, Milkman & Benartzi 2021) that ran the effect through employers while keeping the unit of analysis on the individual employee. She and Hengchen Dai are the two names recurring across both the individual-level founding and the organizational-context extension of the effect — the reason the vault can say the mechanism was carried into organizations without being lifted to them.

References

• claim-fresh-start-effect-requires-subjective-new-beginning-framing — foundational mechanism (Dai, Milkman & Riis 2014/2015)
• claim-beshears-2021-fresh-start-savings-intervention-stays-individual-level — workplace-savings extension, unit stays individual
• observation-fresh-start-effect-extensions-stay-individual-not-collective — the synthesis her work anchors