Small incentives drive lasting seatbelt habits, cut unbuckled trips by a third

We’ve all heard “Click It, or Ticket” as a reminder to buckle up in the car, but “Click It and Win It!” appears to be an effective approach for sustaining consistent seatbelt use among drivers. When drivers were promised a share of $125 weekly prize money for maintaining perfect seatbelt use streaks, they established good, long-lasting habits. Driving without a seatbelt decreased 26 percent relative to the control during the incentive program and was 33 percent less than the control even after the program ended, according to research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, published in the American Journal of Public Health.

“Tying incentives to perfect streaks worked really well for buckling up—a simple, one-click behavior that most drivers already perform, but sometimes forget,” said M. Kit Delgado, MD, MS, faculty director of the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit and an associate professor of Emergency Medicine and Epidemiology. “For behaviors like reducing handheld phone use, which require more effort to change, we’ve found in prior studies that rewarding step-by-step improvements can be a more effective long-term strategy, especially among high-risk drivers.