Do you want to make smokers stop smoking? Give them money!

Giving cash, vouchers or a deposit could help smokers quit. This is shown by a study carried out by the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

The results of this study relayed by the BBC even revealed that smoking cessation among participants continued well after the incentives ended. So, if you have the possibility, why not make a small transfer to your smoking loved ones? Maybe after receiving a little money, they will decide to put cigarettes aside.

At the end of the experiment, the researchers also concluded that this saving money/stopping smoking calculation worked in pregnant women. Caitlin Notley, professor of addiction sciences at Norwich Medical School, shares her feelings about these results: “We are now very confident that offering rewards to smokers encourages them to quit smoking. (…) The data also demonstrates that the effectiveness of incentives persists even after the rewards end.”

Good omen for pregnant women

To carry out this study, the researchers used a sample of 21,900 people to test the consequences of the reward system on smokers.

They thus came to the conclusion that for 100 people who received financial compensation, 10 were likely to stop smoking in the following six months, compared to only 7 among those who did not receive any monetary reward. As for pregnant women, 13 were likely to quit smoking after receiving rewards, compared to 6 when they had received no rewards.

For Professor Linda Bauld, director of the Spectrum Research Consortium, this is proof that we must continue in this direction to help pregnant women quit smoking: “The study supports the idea that there is a need to invest in the existing national financial incentive system for pregnant women in England.”

“There is ample evidence to suggest that these interventions act on the brain and its psychological reward system, which are strongly implicated in nicotine addiction,” assures Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, assistant professor of health policy at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst (United States). In short, we should not waste money stupidly if you decide to play this little game with your loved ones.