Monetary incentives to encourage people to live healthier lifestyles only work in the longer term when they are designed to stop negative behaviour, rather than promote positive choices, suggests new research from LSE

Galizzi, Matteo M.

LSE Research Online

6/14/2017 LSE Behavioural Science – Paying incentives to be healthy only works in the long term if you pay to NOT do somethinghttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/behaviouralscience/2015/09/18/paying­people­incentives­to­make­healthy­choices­only­works­in­the­long­term­if­they­are­paid­to­n… 1/2Paying incentives to be healthy only works in the long term if you payto NOT do somethingBy Matteo GalizziMonetary incentives to encourage people to live healthier lifestyles only work in the longer term when they aredesigned to stop negative behaviour, rather than promote positive choices, suggests new research from LSE.A  paper    published  in  Social  Science  and  Medicine  describes  the  results  of  a  laboratoryexperiment where participants were invited to watch a series of videos while eating as many jellybeans as they liked. Partway through, incentives were introduced to encourage some participantsto eat the sweets and for some participants to not eat the sweets for the duration of the next fiveminute  video.  For  the  purpose  of  comparison,  another  group  of  participants watched  the  videowithout  an  incentive.  The  experiment  was  then  repeated  two  days  later,  when  none  of  theparticipants received incentives.Only the incentive to not eat sweets was found to still have an effect two days later. Participantswho had been previously offered a £3  incentive  to not eat any  jelly beans ate  significantly  lesssweets than the participants who had not receive a monetary incentive.Matteo  M  Galizzi,  an  ESRC  Future  Research  Leader  Fellow  and  Assistant  Professor  ofBehavioural  Science  at  LSE,  and  one  of  the  authors  of  the  research,  said:  “Our  findings  areconsistent with  the  idea  that people  find negative messages easier  to  retain  than positive ones.6/14/2017 LSE Behavioural Science – Paying incentives to be healthy only works in the long term if you pay to NOT do somethinghttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/behaviouralscience/2015/09/18/paying­people­incentives­to­make­healthy­choices­only­works­in­the­long­term­if­they­are­paid­to­n… 2/2By Matteo Galizzi | September 18th, 2015 | ResearchEven though we only paid participants not to eat the jelly beans for five minutes, we seem to haveprimed them with the notion that not eating sweets is something good and this effect was still  inplay several days later.“In the short run we know that incentives work, for example, in helping to motivate people to giveup smoking. However  this  is  the  first  time  that  research has directly compared what happens  todifferently designed health incentives when the incentives are removed. This is an important areaof research because, in the real world, most incentives to get people to live healthier lives will notbe able to be applied indefinitely.”A total of 353 people participated in 35 experimental sessions at the LSE Behavioural Lab.The research was undertaken by Professor Paul Dolan and Dr Matteo M Galizzi from LSE and DrDaniel Navarro­Martinez from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. It was funded by the Centrefor  the Study of  Incentives  in Health  (CSIH),  from an award by  the Wellcome Trust BiomedicalEthics Programme.‘Paying People  to Eat or Not  to Eat? Carryover Effects of Monetary  Incentives on EatingBehaviour’, Social Science and Medicine, 2015, 133, 153­158Comments are closed.

Paying incentives to be healthy only works in the long term if you pay to NOT do something

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