Singapore began paying citizens to read this month — not much, and not in any straightforward sense as a wage. Fifty reading sessions of at least fifteen minutes, capped at one logged session a day, earn one Singapore dollar, about 59 pence. The Guardian asked behavioural scientists and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt whether a reward that small can do anything about a habit in steep decline. Their answers converge on a narrower claim than the headline implies: the payment works as a trigger and a visible streak, and whether the habit outlives the money is precisely the part nobody has measured.
The payment is not the mechanism
The most useful framing comes from Ivo Vlaev, a professor of behavioural psychology at the National University of Singapore. A dollar every few weeks plainly does not compensate anyone for the hours involved, and it does not have to. “One of the interesting findings from behavioural science is that incentives do not always work in proportion to their monetary value,” he says. The payment, on his account, “may be acting more as a trigger than as a wage.” Logging a session produces an immediate signal that the behaviour has been recognised, that the streak holds, that a goal is closer — and once reading is under way, the intrinsic rewards have a chance to take over.
That matters most for people who already want to read. Vlaev describes the target as someone who “already intends to read but repeatedly fails to get started,” for whom a tiny immediate reward “can help bridge the gap between intention and action.” Katy Milkman of Wharton makes the same point about lapsed readers: for those already intrinsically motivated, the scheme may be enough to tip them over the edge.
The gamification may be doing the work
Patrick Taylor, director of education at the Behavioural Insights Team, thinks the “gamified” element may be “smarter” than the money: a manageable fifteen-minute daily goal bolted onto an existing routine — a commute, bedtime — with streaks and visible progress. The design copies the structure of the thing it is meant to displace. It introduces a short-term reward for reading that mimics the immediate hit of scrolling, which is a more honest description of the intervention than “paying people to read” suggests.
The part nobody can answer yet
Persistence is the open question. Haidt expects a useful effect in setting up the habit for children, who respond to rewards to some degree, but warns that for some participants the money “will convey to them that they are reading only for the extrinsic reward” — and the reading stops when the payment does. Lory Barile of Warwick puts the same problem at the centre: the interesting question is not whether people read more while being rewarded, but whether the habit survives the reward’s removal. Taylor wants such schemes run as trials, so it becomes clear what works and why. Haidt sketches the design: randomise children to cash, to free books of their choice (“so that they see books as a reward, not money as a reward for reading”), to a points competition with no money, or to a true control that only measures how much they read.
Britain already runs the non-financial version at scale — primary-school rainbow certificates and the Reading Agency’s Summer Reading Challenge, where Barile says the value comes primarily from recognition and a sense of achievement. She suggests a UK pilot comparing cash directly against certificates, badges, gamification and goal-setting.
The normative objection, that a government should not pay for what is traditionally done for fun, gets a short answer from Milkman: “We subsidise, and even require, many other forms of education.” On that view, reading habits are less a private pleasure than a public good with a decaying default — which is why a scheme this stingy is worth watching rather than dismissing.