Study Identifies Several Ways to Improve Exercise
Most people make fitness resolutions for the new year. Unfortunately, these resolutions are usually only temporary. Numerous studies have discovered the magic bullet for getting people to achieve long-term gains in their fitness regimen. The majority of interventions were unsuccessful.
Researchers from a variety of universities, including five from Carnegie Mellon University, approached the problem in a novel way. They chose a major project with thousands of participants.
An exercise-focused study
The research study includes 61,293 individuals from the organization’s membership. They randomly placed the participants into different treatments. The benefit of the mega study is that it is simpler to compare results from one treatment to the next one.
Gretchen Chapman, department head and professor of social and decision sciences at CMU, stated, Science has done this work bit-by-bit in the past, and you can not compare studies since numerous details are different. We enlisted each participant similarly, so you can compare oranges to oranges to look for a behavioral shift.
Scientists placed the participants into one of 54 treatment arms for the research study. One arm in the mega study was the control, where they thanked the participants for their involvement. However, it did not get any kind of tips or receive a small lump-sum payment for participation.
Each arm got different information, such as incentives and/or reminders (varying from $0.11 to $1.79 toward an Amazon gift card) for going to the gym or executing other behaviors (e.g., replying to text messages or altering their workout schedules).
Katy Milkman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative, and lead author on the research study, stated, A crucial objective of this project was to show what could be achieved by bringing dozens of academics together from different institutions and fields to create innovative ideas for testing in a tournament. I am so glad we could draw on talent from a varied set of institutions to elaborate the interventions tested in this mega study.
The study’s results
Amongst all, one arm displayed the best success: the arm supplied participants approximately a dime if they came back to the gym for a planned workout following a missed visit they had scheduled at the start of the research study. Future research might focus on this arm of the research study to learn that the most amazing part is getting individuals to return to the gym.
Milkman claimed, Megastudies accelerate the pace of scientific research and increase comparability, making it less complicated for policymakers to understand what ideas must be deployed at scale to solve pressing real-world issues. We wish to use same approach create essential insights about other pressing problems too, like how to motivate voter turnout, decrease energy use, and more.
Exercise makes it hard to change, and this change is difficult to bear,” Chapman said. The findings of this study help us to frame the debate between physical activity and chronic health in novel and exciting perspectives.
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References: Milkman, K.L., Gromet, D., Ho, H. et al. Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioral Science. Nature 600, 478–483 (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04128-4
