Peter Ubel

I love interacting with a wide range of audiences. High schoolers? I think they ask awesome questions. Retirees? I inevitably learn from the experiences they share with me. Academic medical audiences or business school faculty or other pointy headed professors? Those are my people. I love giving talks to academic audiences.

Below I list examples of the kind of talks I give. For each talk listed, I can craft a version to fit any type of audience. I promise to make you think and to tell you stories you’ll want to tell your friends.

Speaking topics related to my book, Free Market Madness:

Free to be obese

We are in the middle of an obesity epidemic in most industrialized nations. Some leading economists a have concluded that this is a fine state of affairs — that people are simply rationally choosing how much to eat, exercise, watch TV, drive their cars and all the other behaviors that have led them to become the largest generation in history.

I show why this view is wrong, highlighting what behavioral science has taught us about the irrational forces that are making us fat. I then discuss the policy implications of these findings — that we can’t expect the free market, alone, to solve the obesity epidemic. We need to think carefully about appropriate government interventions to improve the health of our population.

Does medicine need a dose of free market discipline?

In 1999, if you wanted to rid yourself of eyeglasses, you would be forced to fork over $2,100 to your ophthalmologist, so she could zap your eyes into shape. By 2005, that same laser procedure would cost you less than $1,700, and if you wanted a newer, improved laser procedure, you’d still be able to get it for that same 1999 price of $2,100.
Wall Street Journal editorialists point to such laser surgery as an example of what would happen if people were more accountable for their healthcare expenses, if medical care relied more on how the free market.

I show why this view is wrong, showing why health care is particularly poorly suited to operate like a free market. Even in less demanding consumer demand, people’s purchasing decisions are often distorted by powerful psychological biases. In healthcare, these distortions are even more severe, contributing to rapidly escalating health care costs and price-insensitive decision making.

Risky feelings

All else equal, it seems pretty obvious that the riskier someone thinks a behavior is, the less likely they will be to pursue such a behavior (with the exception, perhaps, of adventure sports). A person who thinks smoking creates a 40% chance of lung cancer should be less likely to smoke than someone who thinks the chances are only 10%. Indeed, some economists have talked about smoking as a rational choice, and have even concluded that people should be smoking more than they are.

I show why this view is wrong, demonstrating ways in which people’s use of risk information depends as much on how they feel about those risks as about how they rationally perceive their risks. I show that the same 13% lifetime risk of, say, breast cancer can be made to feel like a high risk to some women and a low risk to others. I show that if you want to understand how people make decisions, you need to move beyond their understanding of the decisions, to an appreciation of the way they feel about the decision.

Topics not related directly to the new book:

The price of life and the costs of new cancer drugs

In the last decade, exciting new treatments have emerged that offer new hope for many people with previously incurable cancers. But many of these treatments can cost more than $100,000 per patient. This leaves oncologists in a dilemma: which of the patients should they offer these therapies to, and how should they go about discussing the cost of these therapies to patients who may not even be able to afford the copayments? I explore this topic, in light of a national survey of oncologists that I have conducted with several colleagues, exploring oncologists’ views on these challenging matters.

Illness, disability and emotional resilience: lessons about life from the science of happiness

People often believe that happiness is a matter of circumstance. That they would be miserable if they became seriously ill or disabled. In this talk, based on my book You’re Stronger Than You Think, I discuss people who have faced serious adversity and managed to thrive. I weave their stories together with explanation of the science of emotional resilience, with the hope that I can give people useful insights to help them understand what people do when faced with adversity.

Of Two Minds: Emotion and Reason in Health Care Decision Making

Some medical decisions have been labeled as being “patient sensitive”: the right decision, in such cases depends on patient preferences. One patient will prefer X and another Y, because the two patients have different attitudes toward the goodness and badness of the outcomes associated with X and Y. Ideally, when making such decisions, patients will be informed about their alternatives and (will the help of a medical professional) integrate that information with their preferences to make the “right” choice.

I show why people are often not up to this task. They mispredict how health outcomes will affect their lives. They misintegrate probability information, feeling very different about a specific risk based on unconscious biases. What can we do to help patients make better decisions? And how should these decisional biases inform our ideas about what it truly means for patients to make free and informed decisions?

Here is a video of my “Of Two Minds” talk that I gave at a Marketing Seminar for the Yale School of Business: