| obacco use is a leading cause of death worldwide, yet smoking cessation services are not widely available in many low-resource settings. Popular approaches also fail to help smokers to maintain self-control and motivation. The degree to which peer pressure promotes self-control in team-based health interventions remains largely untested. Moreover, peer pressure and cash incentives have rarely been mobilized in tandem. To this end, we conducted a randomized controlled trial in 42 villages in Thailand to test a novel intervention that combines commitment contracts for smoking cessation with team incentives that activate peer pressure. We randomly assigned 201 participants, 11% of all smokers in the study area, to a control group that received smoking cessation counseling or a treatment group that received counseling plus a commitment contract, team incentives, and text message reminders for smoking cessation. We find that, relative to the control group, the intervention increased biochemically verified smoking abstinence by 25% points at six months (three months post-intervention). Moreover, the intervention cost about... |
