Dr. Anne Thorndike - Choice Architecture

I first stumbled over Dr. Thorndike’s work when I was reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, in his book Clear uses a study that Dr. Thorndike and her colleagues conducted which is called “Choice architecture“, an intervention where Dr. Thorndike and her colleagues succeeded in changing the habits of thousands of people without boosting their willpower or motivation at all. I reached out to Dr. Thorndike because I wanted to learn about her journey of becoming and discuss with her how we as a society can work together to design for positive behavioral change.

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Dr. Anne Thorndike

Anne Thorndike, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Physician at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, MA. She is the Director of the Metabolic Syndrome Clinic at the MGH Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Center. Her clinical and research interests are the prevention and treatment of obesity and cardiometabolic disease through lifestyle modification. Her research focuses on interventions utilizing behavioral economics strategies, such as traffic-light labels and choice architecture, to improve dietary intake and health outcomes in worksite and community-based settings. She has received research funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as well as several other foundations and government organizations. She currently serves on the Nutrition Committee of the American Heart Association, and is a member of the expert panel for the U.S. News and World Report Best Diets Rankings.