I intended to get satirical this week with outlandish ways state and local governments, along with private businesses, could entice more Americans to get the COVID vaccine.
Then I heard about “Joints for Jabs” and those plans went up in smoke.
It’s true: Washington state is offering a pre-rolled joint to any resident who gets a first or second dose of one of the vaccines. According to the New York Times, an Arizona dispensary is doing the same.
Suddenly, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s Vax-a-Million and college scholarship incentives, which drew so much bipartisan ire when first announced, sound circumspect and even quaint by comparison.
A little Googling reveals a motley crew of vaccine promotions around the country and the world. These include free beer and food, apartment rentals, days off from work and, of course, cold hard cash. All in the name of encouraging people to roll up their sleeves and stave off future COVID disruptions.
Giving away prizes for people to do what is already in their own best interest has always been steeped in controversy.
Most behavioral experts will agree that intrinsic motivation, doing something because you want to or because you recognize its importance, is superior to extrinsic motivation, doing something because you are being forced, coerced or externally rewarded.
One of the earliest lessons future teachers learn in college is to be wary of bribes. Handing out candy for completed math problems may appear to be a good way to get kids to do their homework, but what happens when next year’s teacher doesn’t carry over the practice? The well-meaning, candy-dispensing educator may be conditioning kids to work only for external rewards and not for the short- and long-term benefits of math.
Similar debates swirl around the practice of paying kids for good grades. Does $20 for an A, $15 for a B, and so on devalue the inner satisfaction that comes from learning a subject well? Or does money help keep kids focused until they develop the maturity to recognize learning as its own best reward?
Americans of a certain age may remember a major restaurant chain’s reading program. Kids who read a certain number of books earned coupons for free food. The hope was that this short-term extrinsic reward would spark a love of reading, so that youngsters would go on devouring books once the food incentive was off the table. (Sorry, these meal-oriented figures of speech keep simmering to the top.)
For kids who didn’t catch the reading bug, educators worried that once the food coupons stopped, so did the reading.
Outside of education, psychologist Edward L. Deci and others have found evidence that paying workers more can actually decrease their job satisfaction, as they go from being intrinsically interested in the work to being extrinsically motivated by the money. There are lots of caveats here: The work must be interesting in the first place, and the pay should be enough that basic needs are easily met. (No fair using this as “proof” that minimum wage should keep workers below the poverty level.)
Implications from the education and employment sectors, then, are profound. Yes, the needle poke is not intrinsically interesting, although the bigger societal win from herd immunity most certainly is.
And while nobody is too worried about how current incentives will impact our willingness to get vaxxed for the next global pandemic (COVID-20, anybody?), it's worth pondering how today’s freebies could impact regular childhood immunizations and annual flu shots. Will we now be less likely to get these for ourselves and our children without some sort of prize?
There are also those who argue that if COVID vaccines are truly safe, governments and private businesses would not have to dangle so many carrots to get needles into arms. In that sense, then, these grand-prize drawings are also disincentivizing, not only to this particular health initiative, important as it is, but to the overall impression that the general public has of vaccines.
Getting more people to agree to COVID vaccines is undoubtedly important. Hence, all these special prizes and incentives.
Whether COVID should take precedence over society’s collective comfort and confidence in public health is more arguable. In this regard, states offering big incentives for the vaccine are not just rolling joints, but also the dice.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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