Do rewards help people to be healthier?

You may have seen on this mornings news that the health watchdog, NICE may be considering a scheme to offer financial rewards in return for people giving up smoking or losing weight. A lot of people would claim that this is unfair on people who are already leading a healthy lifestyle and not getting rewarded. I would even argue that this type of scheme would make people less healthy.

It is widely believed that if you reward people for good behaviour and punish them for bad behaviour then this will motivate people to act in the desired way. This form of extrinsic motivation relies on an external input. Numerous studies have shown that this form of motivation does not work long term. A study in America provided a reward scheme where a group of school children were given vouchers in return for reading books during the school holidays. The study found that whilst the group of children who were offered the reward read more books than the control group who just read for enjoyment, as soon as the reward scheme ended the group who had been given the rewards not only read less books than the other group, but read less books than they had done before the scheme started. Other studies have shown that with an external rewards scheme the level of reward has to be increased over time just to maintain the level of motivation.

Helping people to have there own reasons for following a healthy behaviour pattern is much more effective than trying to reward people with cash incentives. If someone wants to be able to play in the park with their grandkids, go skiing in their sixties or just feel fantastic when they wake up in the morning then surely this is a better way to motivate people. I watched 'Are you fitter than a pensioner' last night, and one of the people on the program recognised that they didn't want their child to be as unhealthy as they were and that was their main motivator for getting more active and kicking the junk food.

So, find your own reason for wanting to make lifestyle changes, think what assistance you need to be able to make this a long term change and think what you can do right now to make that change happen.