Want to trick yourself into more exercise? Yeah, good luck with that
A “nudge” is a policy intervention that “alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives,” says Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago economist.
Nudges typically are used to get people to do things that are good for them or for society, things they may be otherwise disinclined to do.
One nudge that has shown great promise is the planning prompt, which asks people to lay out the concrete steps they will take to achieve a goal. Research says these prompts are effective at getting people to do things such as vote, get their flu shots and go to the dentist.
But going to the gym? That’s what researchers behind a working paper set out to discover with a randomized field experiment among 877 members of a private gym in the Midwest. In exercise, in particular, a notoriously large gap exists “between intentions and actions,” as the researchers put it. Most Americans know they should exercise more, but fewer than a quarter of them get the federally recommended physical activity each week.
A 2015 experiment at a Fortune 500 company found that “workers’ targeted levels of exercise are 43 percent higher than their actual levels of exercise,” according to the paper’s authors.
The researchers recruited subjects from the gym’s active members and divided them into two groups. The treatment group was asked to fill out a schedule indicating the days and times they planned to work out in the gym over the next two weeks. A control group filled out no plan, instead simply listing the times they had exercised in the previous two weeks. Would those who filled out a schedule go to the gym more than the people who did not?
To keep respondents honest, the researchers used the gym’s records of member check-ins to track actual exercise frequency. What they found was slightly dismaying. “The treatment group made an average of 2.3 visits over the two-week period, compared with an average of 2.6 for the control group,” the authors write. Statistically speaking, the difference was zero.
The authors tried to suss out why. The subjects certainly believed that planning their visits could help them exercise more. Before the study period, 60 percent of all subjects agreed with the statement “I don’t go to the gym as much as I would like because I don’t set aside time for it in my schedule; then my schedule fills up and I no longer have time to go to the gym.”
The treatment subjects appeared to try to stick to their plans: “[S]ubjects are more than twice as likely to attend the gym on planned days than on unplanned days,” the study found.
But not all plans were fulfilled. A considerable gap remained between a stated intent to exercise on a given day and showing up to the gym that day. One of the biggest predictors of gym attendance during the study was not whether people planned to visit the gym but rather how often they had visited the gym before the study.
People already inclined to go to the gym continued to do so, regardless of whether they had made plans to do so. This creates a discouraging circularity for anyone hoping to change their routine. If you want to start going to the gym, it’s best already to be going there.
Why does the nudge fail in this case? The researchers suspect that planning nudges may be more useful for one-time events, such as doctor appointments. Activities that are repeated, such as going to the gym, are easier to put off. “Repeated behaviors like exercise … are very unlikely to produce a feeling of urgency, since many individuals likely have the mind-set that they can always exercise ‘later,’ “ the authors say.
Unfortunately for many of the would-be exercisers among us, that “later” never comes.
Courtesy of Albadia Golf Resort