Paying college students $5/night if they slept more than 7 hours (n=468) led to increased sleep and increased GPA compared to control group; habits lingered some after end of payments
https://theconversation.com/we-paid-college-students-about-5-a-night-to-sleep-at-least-7-hours-and-their-grades-quickly-improved-289935
13 Comments
Research published in the [Journal of Political Economy](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/740221)
Now we need to do these for adults.
They used a fitbit to track the hours. Curious how gameable this is – can you make a fitbit think it’s tracking sleep even if not attached to a sleeping user?
Employers should probably jump at this if it wasn’t so easy to fake.
UBI was a hotter topic when Andrew Yang was promoting it, but this adds an interesting element. The original idea was set payments with no strings attached. A sleep requirement would actually be pretty interesting.
That’s also a significant amount of money per year for something like a food budget. If you got paid every 2 weeks thats 70$, you could make a nice meal prep for the week with that kind of money.
5 dollars? that’s not going to motivate people to sleep 7 hours a night.
chances are these students all ready slept 7 hours a night anyway, and they just wanted free money for doing something they all ready did.
There seems to be a bit of a fallacy between causation and correlation. I dont see sufficient controls in the study to determine the cause. There’s no before or after control of the groups and a lot of other issues… yes, sleep is generally beneficial for a lot of reasons. Also, the people that are generally more disciplined do better in school, and disciplined people also tend to do better with sleep. I dont see how they ruled this out.
This is awesome. Rounding error in $ terms and could have huge impacts on long term health (which reduces expensive chronic medical issues and should increase productivity), especially if the habits persist.
There are many ways to reward this. The student dorm i was in gave free breakfast, but only until 10. I had some of my most consistent sleep schedules while there, because i wanted to wake up in time for the food.
I would pay them to help me sleep better.
Next step is to see how this would impact year over year retention and 5-year graduation rates.
Because this sounds like it would have an impact, so much so that it’s is probably worth ~$1,125 per student per academic year (most of which would go back to the school anyway) to have that impact on retention and 5-year graduation.
Stay up until 03:00 studying. Sleep until 10:00. Miss your 08:00 class. . .