Taiwan gets citizens to pick up 700,000 Cigarette Butts by Rewarding Eggs
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
Gamification with Extrinsic Rewards Taking a Quick Win
A city in Taiwan, Gukeng with population of 30,000, decided to reward its citizens a soy sauce hard-boiled egg for every 100 cigarette butt they brought in.
Even though the value of a boiled-egg was not great, it massively moved the citizens of Gukeng to collect cigarette butts everywhere they could find.
Within 3 months, 700,000 Cigarette Butts were turned in, and 70,000 eggs were given out.
The government also incentivized other good behaviors with these eggs, including asking members to collect recyclables such as bottles and wasted tires in exchange of these eggs.
The campaign was a great success, as the professional cleaners stated that it became difficult to sweep up any trash bottles or cigarette butts, and they are mostly just sweeping up leaves.
Of course, from what we understand about extrinsic motivation, some people started to cheat and pull cigarette butts out of ashtrays, but the impact of the cheaters are not significant and still led to a successful campaign.
After three months, the local government unit ran out of eggs, and decided to put a pause to the program for better design.
Pretty interesting example of Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession spearheading Core Drive 1 (Meaning), Core Drive 2 (Accomplishment), and Core Drive 3 (Empowerment).
Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
- Taiwan Gamified Tax Collection Since 1951
- What is Gamification?
- Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession
- Gamification Stats & Figures
- Books by Yu-kai Chou