Clinical trial NCT01875913: The Power of Curiosity: Leveraging Curiosity to Motivate People to Complete Health Risk Assessments
Official title: The Power of Curiosity
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Intention
Exploratory Behavior
Keywords: Curiosity
Intention
Follow Through
Lead sponsor: Harvard University
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2013-06-12
Enrollment: 10095
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Brief 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.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Employees at Vitality's partner's worksites that are in Vitality database
* Must have email address on file

Exclusion Criteria:

* Employees that have already completed their VHR by June 11, 2013

Primary outcomes:
measure: Completion of VHR
timeFrame: Measured one month after first message (July 12, 2013)
Secondary outcomes:
Other outcomes:
measure: Previous VHR Completion during 2012-2013
timeFrame: On or before July 12, 2013
measure: Social Atmosphere at Worksite
timeFrame: On or before August 12, 2013
measure: Curiosity Type
timeFrame: On or before July 12, 2013
Locations:
city: Cambridge
country: United States
facility: Harvard Kennedy School
state: Massachusetts
Study officials:
affiliation: Harvard University
name: Todd Rogers, PhD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
affiliation: Harvard University
name: Erin Frey
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References: