The Healthy Nudge
August 2021
Welcome to The Healthy Nudge. Each month, we'll get you up to speed on the latest developments in policy-relevant health behavioral economics research at CHIBE.
5 chibe stories you may have missed
Article in The Guardian, citing Silvia Saccardo, PhD

"Researchers at UCLA and Carnegie Mellon University in the US conducting two randomized controlled trials involving 100,000 patients found simple texts successfully boosted COVID-19 vaccine appointments by as much as 84% and actual vaccinations by as much as 26%."

Read the study "Behavioral Nudges Increase COVID-19 Vaccinations" published in Nature.
CHIBE blog post with Rinad Beidas, PhD

"As an implementation scientist, having impact at scale has always been a major driver for my career. I am most excited about opportunities that allow us to realize the potential of scientific discoveries — in other words, last mile challenges — and leading the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit presents an extraordinary opportunity to have impact." Dr. Beidas told CHIBE.
Article in The Atlantic, citing Gretchen Chapman, PhD

“So much of the previous messaging was ‘Wear a mask until we have a vaccine developed’ or ‘until we have people vaccinated,’” says Gretchen Chapman, a psychologist who studies decision-making behavior around vaccines at Carnegie Mellon University. Masks were a stopgap, and shedding them was a reward for rolling up our sleeves. “Now, it seems to some people like that reward is getting taken back.”
A JAMA Network Open paper led by Anish Agarwal, MD, MPH, MS, with CHIBE author Dylan Small, PhD

"These findings suggest that gamification with social support, when combined with loss-framed financial incentives, can modestly increase physical activity among obese or overweight veterans, but future investigations should be conducted with a more representative sample of veterans and may need to be combined with other approaches to increase and sustain changes in physical activity."
CHIBE blog post with Emily Largent, JD, PhD, RN, CHIBE's newest affiliated faculty member

"I first started working on the ethics of paying people to participate in research over a decade ago and have never stopped. I’ve found that Institutional Review Boards are generally quite suspicious of payments to research participants and, as a result, adopt very conservative approaches to offers of payment. I would argue that this conservatism reflects some fundamental misconceptions about ethics and human subjects protections, and it needlessly hampers recruitment and retention efforts. I keep trying to address these misconceptions in my work," Dr. Largent told CHIBE.
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The Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE) at the University of Pennsylvania conducts behavioral economics research aimed at reducing the disease burden from major public health problems. Originally founded within the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, our mission is to inform health policy, improve health care delivery, and increase healthy behavior.