Page 56 - Hard Goals

Heartfelt 47

A different study, reported in The New England Journal
of Medicine, that was a bit more astute on the use of fi nancial
12
motivators, found that incentives do work. Half the people
in the study were offered information about smoking cessation
programs. The other half were offered the information plus a
fi nancial incentive. The fi nancial incentives were $100 for com-
pleting a smoking cessation program, another $250 for quit-
ting smoking within 6 months after enrolling in the study, and
another $400 for staying provably smoke free 6 months later.
(Smoking abstinence was measured with a simple biochemical
test for cotinine.)
So, was $750 better than $10? Well, let’s see. The people who
got the fi nancial incentives had a 294 percent higher smoking
cessation rate than the information-only group 9 or 12 months
after enrolling in the study. The incentive group also had a 261
percent higher smoking cessation rate than the information-only
group 15 or 18 months after enrolling in the study. And, of
course, they had almost triple the rates of enrollment in smok-
ing cessation programs, over quadruple the completion rates,
and almost double the smoking cessation rates within the fi rst 6
months. So I’m going to say yes, the extrinsic rewards worked.
Extrinsic connections do work. Again, in an ideal world,
you want an intrinsic and/or a personal connection. But when
you’ve exhausted those, or you still need a little something extra,
extrinsic connections are available. What seems to be the real
issue here is what kinds of extrinsic incentives work. An emerg-
ing school of thought, led by Columbia University professor E.
13
Tory Higgins, is the notion of regulatory fi t. This basically
means that the incentive has to be consistent with (or “fi t”) the
way people think about their goal.