All episodes of No Stupid Questions

No Stupid Questions · 2026-01-18 · 36 min · 6,361 words

57. Which Incentives Are Best at Boosting Vaccination, and Why?

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I may be making that up, but I'm pretty sure it's got a germ of truth to it. I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to the listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, what sort of incentives increase vaccination takeup?

If they're willing to enter me in a lottery that might pay me a million dollars, it must be really bad. Also, would you rather have the power of flight or invisibility? This is a hypothetical. question that you can never actually execute. I did order an invisibility cloak just the other day from the back of a matchbook.

So Angela, the behavior change consortium that you help lead, Behavior Change for Good, recently did a big study trying to figure out how to get more people to get vaccines. Now this was In anticipation of a COVID-19 vaccine, so the actual experiment was encouraging people to get the flu vaccine, not the COVID vaccine, which wasn't ready yet. Right. As I've read, the research found that most efforts didn't work that well, but there was one that was really successful, which was when people got a text

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