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Welcome to our newsletter, where each edition is curated around a broad theme. Today, we are talking about preventative health: the measures we can take to avoid disease and protect our health. This is a uniquely behavioral problem, highlighting the gap between our intentions (to be in good health) and our actions (forgetting to take medication, for example). As with each edition, you will find the our content organized into four categories.
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Interesting stats or figures from the past week to put global issues in perspective
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Human milk bank
The amount in Kenya Shillings the UK Government has committed to fund the first human milk bank in East Africa, at the Pumwani Maternity Hospital. It will help save the lives of vulnerable babies such as those who are premature, orphaned or abandoned through the nutritional benefit of human milk.
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Patient cured of HIV
After receiving a stem-cell transplant that replaced their white blood cells with HIV-resistant versions, a previously HIV-positive patient now appears to be clear of the virus. The patient is only the second person ever reported to have been cleared of the virus using this method, as explained in a report by the 'Nature Journal'.
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Trends to watch in our primary markets of focus — East and West Africa.
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Married women embrace family planning in Kenya
The increasing uptake of contraceptives among married women, from 53% in 2014 to 61% last year is a significant behavioral shift, for a complex and often stigmatized decision.
What do we think drove this success?
From a behavioral perspective, maintaining a complex, recurrent behavior can be made easier by either increasing the perceived benefits of the action, or reducing the frequency of the choice. The Ministry of Health report cited increases in awareness, understanding, and demand for family planning services, hinting at the former, but the massive increase in long-acting methods such as injections, intra-uterine devices and implants (from 23% in 2014 to 40% in 2018), would indicate the latter. Congrats to Kenyan policy-makers for leading this change and taking a behaviorally-informed approach to family planning!
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Recently published journals, papers, blog posts or just interesting articles we enjoyed reading
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When social recognition backfires
We know that social recognition of individuals' behavior can meaningfully influence our choices - for example, a message from your gym nudging you to attend via social praise is likely to generate results. What this new research sought to measure was whether the boost in attendance caused disutility for those not attending (in the form of shame - and even lower attendance) that could even override or balance out the benefits of the treatment.
Investing in the SDGs
This new impact investing platform, Swell, allows users to invest in companies which fulfill one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals - indeed “today’s biggest challenges will likely result in tomorrow’s leading industries”. This great initiative will at the very least appease investors’ consciences (with PayPal and Square in their portfolio for “No Poverty”, they may be a bit fast and loose with their definition of SDG fulfillment!).
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A quick output from the lab including pilot results, learnings from failures or fully-fledged studies ready for publication
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Increasing immunization attendance
This week, we were curious to explore which micro-incentives are most effective in increasing the attendance of information sessions about vaccines. While this may sound specific, vaccination is one of the most cost-effective ways of avoiding disease — it currently prevents 2–3 million deaths a year, and a further 1.5 million could be avoided if global coverage of vaccinations improved. In addition, it is a truly behavioral problem: many diseases are preventable and curable, yet still affect millions of people worldwide. What can be done to raise awareness and uptake of vaccinations, specifically targeting residents of informal urban settlements?
To gather more data on this, we invited 400 women from Kibera, Nairobi, to an information session about vaccines. Beyond the standard invitation, we provided a small incentive to attend, which was randomly varied both in terms of magnitude ($0.20 vs. $1.00 vs $2.00) and modality (cash vs. 2kg of flour vs. 1 bar of soap). We then measured attendance rates at the information sessions to evaluate the impact of the different micro-incentives on demand for vaccinations.
What we found was surprising: the non-cash incentives strictly dominated the cash equivalent.
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This may suggest that the cash incentive crowds out the intrinsic motivation of the individuals to attend the session: they want to do so for a benefit other than pure financial gain. This aligns with other research suggesting that payment for blood donation can reduce participation rates.
To learn more about this study and access further findings from this research, read our blog post here.
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Finally, as part of our commitment to Open Science, we have made all our findings freely available here.
Our goal is to make research accessible in order to start, continue or inform conversations that help us better understand human behavior.
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Please note: We will be increasing the frequency of our newsletter to twice monthly, in order to share more timely content and updates about Behavioral Science!
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