New article on long-term behavior change & financial incentives

[Sophia Winkler-Schor]

Dear colleagues, 

 

I am excited to share with you my recent publication entitled "What happens when payments end? Fostering long-term behavior change with financial incentives” (in Perspectives on Psychological Sciences). In the paper, we review research across disciplines to examine how to promote enduring behavior change when financial incentives are initially given and then removed. We synthesize research from public health, education, sustainability, and conservation to provide recommendations to strengthen financial incentive program design.  

 

I am pasting the abstract and full citation below.

 

Best wishes,
Sophia

 

Sophia Winkler-Schor (she/her)
PhD Candidate | Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Web: Sophiawinklerschor.com

 

The UW–Madison occupies ancestral Ho-Chunk land, a place their nation has called Teejop (day-JOPE) since time immemorial.

 

Complete reference: Winkler-Schor, S., & Brauer, M. (2024). What happens when payments end? Fostering long-term behavior change with financial incentives. Perspectives on Psychological Sciences. Advance online publication.

 

Abstract: Financial incentives are widely used to get people to adopt desirable behaviors. Many small landholders in developing countries, for example, receive multiyear payments to engage in conservation behaviors, and the hope is that they will continue to engage in these behaviors after the program ends. Although effective in the short term, financial incentives rarely lead to long-term behavior change because program participants tend to revert to their initial behaviors soon after the payments stop. In this article, we propose that four psychological constructs can be leveraged to increase the long-term effectiveness of financial-incentive programs: motivation, habit formation, social norms, and recursive processes. We review successful and unsuccessful behavior-change initiatives involving financial incentives in several domains: public health, education, sustainability, and conservation. We make concrete recommendations on how to implement the four above-mentioned constructs in field settings. Finally, we identify unresolved issues that future research might want to address to advance knowledge, promote theory development, and understand the psychological mechanisms that can be used to improve the effectiveness of incentive programs in the real world.