The Power of Curiosity: Leveraging Curiosity to Motivate People to Complete Health Risk Assessments

President and Fellows of Harvard College

Status: Completed

Conditions: Intention; Exploratory Behavior

Treatments: Behavioral: Curiosity Message; Behavioral: Standard Message

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01875913

F24176-101

Details and patient eligibility

About

The investigators will work with one of Vitality's partner corporations to test whether curiosity can motivate employees to follow through on their virtuous intentions and complete their annual health risk assessment (VHR). Employees will receive email messages that contain either a curiosity-inducing question or a standard encouragement message. The investigators predict that presenting people with curiosity-arousing questions will make them more likely to complete a health risk assessment, as compared to standard messages.

Full description

The vast majority of adults express the desire and intention of engaging in healthy behaviors-exercising, losing weight, getting a colonoscopy-but then fail to do so. This has massive individual and societal costs. This research tests a promising intervention to increase the likelihood that an adult will follow through on their health-related intentions. Curiosity can be a powerful motivator and can cause people to engage in new behaviors (Tomkins 1962; Silvia 2006); however, curiosity has not yet been used as an intervention to help people follow-through on their intentions. In this project, the investigators target employees who have failed to complete their annual Vitality Health Review (VHR) and test whether curiosity can be used to induce the employees to complete their VHR. The VHR is a medical questionnaire that can help individuals understand medical risk factors they may be prone to. The investigators provide employees with a question and inform them that they will see the answer upon completion of their VHR. The investigators hypothesize that the curiosity-inducing messages will cause employees to follow through on their intention to complete their VHR.

Enrollment: 10,095 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Employees at Vitality's partner's worksites that are in Vitality database
• Must have email address on file

Exclusion criteria

• Employees that have already completed their VHR by June 11, 2013

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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10,095 participants in 2 patient groups

Standard Message

Experimental group

Description:

Participants will receive email messages that encourage them to complete their VHR.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Standard Message

Curiosity Message

Experimental group

Description:

Participants receive email messages containing "curiosity-inducing" questions. The messages tell the participants that they will receive the answer to the question after they complete their VHR.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Curiosity Message