The art of SNAP decisions and the science of well-being

as they apply to health

Paul DolanImperial College Business School

The beginning and the end

• What affects well-being and what effects does it have?

Well-BeingBehaviour Change

• What affects behaviour and what effects does it have?

And we need to join them up

Priming money

• Being primed with cash (e.g. as screensaver or scrambled sentence task) makes people

• Less helpful

• Donate less

• Sit further apart

• Does it make them more likely to favour financial incentives?

Prof. Daniel Kahneman, Oct 2008

“One of the things that we have been exercising over for decades is the relative impact of internal factors as against environmental factors in the control of behaviour ...

... It turns out that the environmental effects on behaviour are a lot stronger than most people expect.”

The essence of behaviour change

The art of SNAP decision making

Salience

Norms

Affect

Priming

We attend to novelty and simplicity

We take cues from what others do

We behave according to our feelings

We respond subconsciously to stimuli

The essence of well-being

• Wanting – preference satisfaction • Needing – objective lists• Liking – mental states

• Subjective well-being (SWB)

Problems with preferences

• Salience – attention and focussing illusion

• Norms – what is the ‘right’ answer?

• Affect – feelings drive responses

• Priming – responses affected by arbitrary cues

= Miswanting

Rethinking valuation

• Rather than ask people what matters to them, elicit SWB and allow regression analysis to do it for us

• Most of what we know about SWB comes from global assessments of life satisfaction

• And mostly from the BHPS

Valuing health states

SF-6D dimension SG LS

Pain .167 [1] .034 [5]

Mental health .128 [2] .159 [1]

Physical functioning .111 [3] .071 [3]

Vitality .091 [4] .089 [2]

Social functioning .087 [5] .002 [6]

Role limitations .050 [6] .039 [4]

Problems with life satisfaction

• Salience – may not focus on what really matters• and we don’t go around thinking about life satisfaction

• Norms – responses relative to others or self over time

• Affect – not clear how much this should play a part

• Priming – affected by not-so-relevant cues

= Misevaluating

Other more direct measures of SWB

• Moment-to-moment ‘pleasure’

• Plus moment, episode or local ‘reward’

• Plus spontaneous thoughts and mind-wandering

• Can we measure the frequency and intensity of these pop-ups and what effect do they have?

Thoughts about health

• 1200 on-line and phone in the US (Rand)

• Overall mood yesterday• Frequency and intensity of thoughts about health,

work, finances and family yesterday• EQ-5D and TTO

• Second variant with EQ-5D and TTO first

»Plus ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ TTO

Dependent variable: TTO (I) (II) (III) (IV) (V)eqm2 0.008 0.013 0.002 0.002 0.010eqm3 -0.018 -0.002 0.011 -0.008 -0.018eqs2 -0.001 -0.015 -0.020 -0.013 -0.009eqs3 -0.119 -0.166 -0.183 -0.169 -0.157equ2 -0.061* -0.063* -0.065* -0.060* -0.047equ3 0.182 0.168 0.141 0.151* 0.169eqp2 -0.029 -0.029 -0.040* -0.032* -0.029eqp3 0.189 0.177 0.164 0.184 0.186*eqa2 -0.001 -0.001 0.007 0.038* 0.043*eqa3 0.257* 0.243* 0.258* 0.322* 0.319*eqn3 -0.440* -0.422* -0.415* -0.412* -0.393*Random TTO -0.073* -0.074* -0.074* -0.074*Age 0.011* 0.011* 0.010*Age2 0.000* 0.000* 0.000*Average ‘happiness’ yesterday 0.015 0.013Average ‘sadness’ yesterday -0.013 -0.007low frequency and positive thoughts 0.040high frequency and positive thoughts 0.035low frequency and negative thoughts -0.030high frequency and negative thoughts -0.076*Constant 0.920* 1.016* 0.724* 0.688* 0.664*R2 0.07 0.09 0.11 0.11 0.12Observations 1173 1173 1173 1173 1173

Issues

• Focussing attention in TTO on health problems means that thoughts about health are likely to show up• But thoughts about health matter before and after TTO

• Could do TTO to remove any problems at all if so inclined

• Need to understand how thoughts and feelings affect the flow of well-being without/before focussing on activities

• A QALY approach requires duration-weighting• Is this still possible?

The beginning and the end

• What affects well-being and what effects does it have?

Well-BeingBehaviour Change

• What affects behaviour and what effects does it have?

And we need to join them up

Thank you