Behavioral Transmission: Evidence from a Public Health Campaign in Bangladesh

Format:Print
| Language:English
| Pages:50

Abstract

We examine how behavior change transmits across contexts in the setting of hand hygiene in rural Bangladesh. We randomize an edutainment intervention across classrooms to trace schoolto-home transmission in handwashing behavior and randomize the proportion of students who receive handwashing resources at home to track home-to-school transmission. We document that, while edutainment generates greater washing at school, it leads to substantially less washing at home, such that total washing is net negative. Likewise, children induced to wash more at home exhibit substantially less washing at school. Our results illustrate that successfully promoting behavior in one environment may crowd out like behavior in another critical context. They highlight an unintended consequence of behavior change interventions, like those often implemented in early childhood education, that assume complementarities in behavior across contexts.