Field testing the transferability of behavioural science knowledge on promoting vaccinations.

As behavioural science is increasingly adopted by organizations, there is a growing need to assess the robustness and transferability of empirical findings. Here, we investigate the transferability of insights from various sources of behavioural science knowledge to field settings. Across three pre-registered randomized controlled trials (RCTs, N = 314,824) involving a critical policy domain-COVID-19 booster uptake-we field tested text-based interventions that either increased vaccinations in prior field work (RCT1, NCT05586204), elevated vaccination intentions in an online study (RCT2, NCT05586178) or were favoured by scientists and non-experts (RCT3, NCT05586165).

A Randomized Trial of Behavioral Nudges Delivered Through Text Messages to Increase Influenza Vaccination Among Patients With an Upcoming Primary Care Visit.

Purpose: To evaluate if nudges delivered by text message prior to an upcoming primary care visit can increase influenza vaccination rates.

Design: Randomized, controlled trial.

Setting: Two health systems in the Northeastern US between September 2020 and March 2021.

Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science.

Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens' decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time intervals. The lack of comparability of such individual investigations limits their potential to inform policy.

Lifestyle and mental health 1 year into COVID-19.

In previous work, Giuntella et al. (Proc Natl Acad Sci 118:e2016632118, 2021), we documented large disruptions to physical activity, sleep, time use and mental health among young adults at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020. This study explores the trends 1 year into COVID-19, as vaccines began to roll out, COVID-19 deaths declined, and social distancing measures eased in the United States.

Behavioural nudges increase COVID-19 vaccinations.

Enhancing vaccine uptake is a critical public health challenge. Overcoming vaccine hesitancy and failure to follow through on vaccination intentions requires effective communication strategies. Here we present two sequential randomized controlled trials to test the effect of behavioural interventions on the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines.

A megastudy of text-based nudges encouraging patients to get vaccinated at an upcoming doctor's appointment.

Many Americans fail to get life-saving vaccines each year, and the availability of a vaccine for COVID-19 makes the challenge of encouraging vaccination more urgent than ever. We present a large field experiment ( = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via text message and designed to boost adoption of the influenza vaccine. Our findings suggest that text messages sent prior to a primary care visit can boost vaccination rates by an average of 5%.

Lifestyle and mental health disruptions during COVID-19.

Using a longitudinal dataset linking biometric and survey data from several cohorts of young adults before and during the COVID-19 pandemic ([Formula: see text]), we document large disruptions to physical activity, sleep, time use, and mental health. At the onset of the pandemic, average steps decline from 10,000 to 4,600 steps per day, sleep increases by 25 to 30 min per night, time spent socializing declines by over half to less than 30 min, and screen time more than doubles to over 5 h per day. Over the course of the pandemic from March to July 2020 the proportion of participants at risk for clinical depression ranges from 46% to 61%, up to a 90% increase in depression rates compared to the same population just prior to the pandemic.