The Centre for the Study of Incentives in Health. (360G-Wellcome-086031_Z_08_A)

Financial incentive schemes may be more effective than existing approaches in achieving the behaviour change needed for smoking cessation and weight loss. Yet such schemes elicit strong opposition in the media and among the general public, being variously described as unfair , a reward for bad behaviour , and coercive and manipulative . We aim to describewhich characteristics of incentive schemes make them more or less acceptable to the general population, as well as explore the motivations behind judgements of acceptability, such as concern for negative consequences, protected values, judgements of responsibility, and emotions such as disgust or anger. We further aim to disentangle factors which we hypothesize to influence the perception that incentives can sometimes be coercive or manipulative, and to establish the relationship between these judgements and those of acceptability.