Texts don’t nudge: An adaptive trial to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in India

We conduct an adaptive randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of a SMS-based information campaign on the adoption of social distancing and handwashing in rural Bihar, India, six months into the COVID-19 pandemic. We test 10 arms that vary in delivery timing and message framing, changing content to highlight gains or losses for either one’s own family or community. We identify the optimal treatment separately for each targeted behavior by adaptively allocating shares across arms over 10 experimental rounds using exploration sampling. Based on phone surveys with nearly 4,000 households and using several elicitation methods, we do not find evidence of impact on knowledge or adoption of preventive health behavior, and our confidence intervals cannot rule out positive effects as large as 5.5 percentage points, or 16%. Our results suggest that SMS-based information campaigns may have limited efficacy after the initial phase of a pandemic. •We conducted an adaptive trial of SMS on the adoption of key health behaviors.•We tested 10 arms – 5 message frames and 2 delivery timings – over 10 rounds.•We conducted phone surveys with nearly 4,000 households in rural Bihar, India.•There is no impact on knowledge or adoption of distancing or handwashing.•There is no heterogeneity by recall period, study period or literacy.