In 2012, Forbes referred to Chris York as “a psychologist with a special job [:] to find ways to keep users engaged, and ultimately modify their behavior.” The scope of behavioral challenges he’s undertaken are broad, including voter turnout, eliminating hypertension, and maximizing contributions to savings account. Working at the intersection of psychology, technology, and design, Chris helps organizations develop successful approaches to applying behavioral science.
Chris founded Cognitive, an award-winning strategy and design consulting firm that has worked with some of the world’s top startups, leading multinationals, and most renowned universities and medical institutions. The team has helped deliver change for organizations like Illumina, Salesforce, Novartis, VMWare, Healthline, UCSF, Harvard, the Mayo Clinic, multiple US Presidential candidates, and many Y-Combinator startups. Cognitive’s work has been chronicled by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, BBC, MSNBC, and Bloomberg.
In the world of startups, Chris provided behavioral science, product, design leadership for at least 20 startups prior to their acquisitions, including Rise, 100plus, Breakthrough, WellnessFX, TalentShare, and Keas. Chris has also served as Chief Product Officer at Riva Health and Head of Product at Athena, which bootstrapped to over $50m ARR in under four years. He is also an active investor and advisor, including Spotify, Palantir, Circle, Lark, Exa, and Able Health.
Chris founded the Behavior Institute, which aims to aggregate datasets on behavioral interventions from government, academic, and commercial sources and make them easier for practitioners to discover and analyze. The Institute also trains policy-makers, business leaders, and others capable of large-scale behavioral influence to do so more successfully—including past participants from Apple, Stripe, the UN, the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government, and other leading organizations.
Chris is also an advisor to CommonCents Lab, where Dan Ariely and other world-class behavioral interventionists design and test solutions to increase the financial well-being for low- and moderate-income people living in the United States. CommonCents is funded by the MetLife Foundation, and has collaborated with CreditKarma, Gusto, Chime, AARP, CapitalOne, Digit, and other leading fin-tech organizations.
Chris studied psychology at Stanford University and worked on research in the lab of Benoit Monin, including experiments published in Psychological Science and Newsweek.