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CULTURE✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
We paid college students about $5 a night to sleep at least 7 hours – and their grades quickly improved
Filed 1h ago · Via The Conversation · The Buffoon Desk
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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: Agnieszka Kwiecień, Nova · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh gave over 1,100 students Fitbits and an app, then paid 468 of them roughly $5 for every night they slept at least seven hours over four weeks. Those students slept 19 more minutes a night, hit the seven-hour mark 26% more often, and saw GPAs rise about 0.08 points that semester.
Before the study, the average student slept 6.6 hours a night, with half going to bed after 1 a.m., and most badly overestimated how much sleep they were actually getting. Reminders and feedback alone, without money, did almost nothing. Once payments stopped, the sleep gains faded but didn't vanish entirely, persisting at about eight extra minutes a night for several more weeks.
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✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
Turns out you can buy a college kid's bedtime the same way you'd bribe a toddler to eat vegetables, five dollars at a time. It says something about how colleges design deadlines and morning classes that a tiny cash nudge outperforms years of well-meaning sleep-hygiene pamphlets. The real scandal isn't that students need bribing to sleep, it's that nobody in charge of the schedule ever asked what the schedule costs them.
