Christina Gravert on this year's Talent100 list
She was born in Germany, she did her postdoc in Sweden, and now she is part of our team at the Department of Economics at UCPH where she is assistant professor. She is also the only researcher on this year's Berlingske Business Talent100 list.
Christina Gravert is behavioral economist. She studies how people make decisions and how to influence these decisions - and she assures that her knowledge crosses the borders of academia and comes into play in business. She is co-founder of the consulting company Impactually that advises private and public companies in applying behavioral economics in their daily work.
She has taught more than 350 business executives how to nudge their employees, users, and clients to act in the most appropriate way, for example, by designing "decision-making environments" helping people overcome their biases.
- We use knowledge from the behavioral economy to create environments that make it easy to make "the right" choice. After all, the challenge is that even though we all often know what would be the proper thing to do, still for some reason we often end up doing something else. So, our key to make changes is our knowledge of people's irrational side, Christina Gravert explains.
The impact of Christina Gravert’s work is deep. She has played a key role in projects increasing people's donations to DanChurchAid; she has helped pregnant women in South Africa take their medication; she has influenced people's preference for vegetarian food above meat dishes; and she has helped increase the use of public transport in Skåne. One of her key tools in influencing people into a desired action without creating resistance is reminders.
- When we decide whether to receive reminders from an app or not, for example, we consider whether the benefit of being reminded is worth more than the cost of being distracted or annoyed by pop-up messages on our phone. In fact, reminders can also create definite discomfort – just think of an otherwise welcomed reminder from our fitness center saying that it has been a long time since we have showed up. When I receive reminder like that it makes me feel bad reminding me that I do not live up to my own fitness ambitions, Christina Gravert explains.
Top in the Danish business community
Every year, the Danish media Berlingske Business nominates 100 talents under the age of 36 who have the ability and the will to reach the top in Danish business. Previous talents from this list, called Talent 100, include, among others, star architect Bjarke Ingels running the company BIG and our Minister of Education and Research Tommy Ahlers.
The talents are selected in nine categories: public administration, business development, entrepreneurs, communication and public affairs, managers, advisors, sales and marketing, specialists as well as finance.
Christina Gravert is also one of the 24 researchers in the UCPH talent program UCPH Forward: a small selection of researchers are supported in their steep career development through a talent program aimed at young researchers showing exceptional academic excellence, creativity and motivation and who have the courage to cross different academic disciplines.