NCT01875913

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

The Power of Curiosity

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 10,095 (actual)
• Sponsor: Harvard University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

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.

Detailed 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.

Conditions

• Intention
• Exploratory Behavior

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Curiosity Message	Participants will receive email messages that contain one of 8 curiosity-inducing questions. The message will tell participants that they will receive a message with the answer after they complete their VHR (health review that can be completed online).
BEHAVIORAL	Standard Message	Participants will receive email messages that contain "standard" language encouraging them to complete their VHRs (health review that can be completed online).

Timeline

• Start date: 2013-06-01
• Primary completion: 2013-11-01
• Completion: 2013-11-01
• First posted: 2013-06-12
• Last updated: 2016-08-31

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States