Pay College Students To Go To Bed – One Way To Help Students Get Enough Sleep
Small financial incentives can get college students to go to bed earlier and sleep significantly longer. That’s what my colleagues and I found through an experiment that involved 508 students at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Oxford.
When the students were offered US$7.50 per night Monday through Thursday – a total of $30 per week – to sleep longer, they were 13% more likely than those who were not offered the incentive to sleep seven to nine hours. They were also 16% less likely to sleep fewer than six hours.
We collected data from wearable activity trackers, surveys and time-use diaries. The people to whom the incentives were offered were chosen randomly from the group of people who agreed to be part of the study.
The incentives were offered for three weeks, but th...