Behaviour Change & Technology

Persuaded by the Fitness-Club

My fitness-club has understood that to earn money they have to gain new members, but also keep the members they already have active! Members that are not using their membership will sooner or later leave the club, so to keep the members happy and active is of great importance. Most members have joined the club to change their exercise habits in some way. To support the members in planning of their training, the club has a web-site where one can book group-training classes like aerobics and spinning. The most popular classes are often full, so by booking in advance the members are secured a ticket to the classes they prefer. This is the obvious reason why booking is nice to offer. But from a psychological view, or you might say a persuasive view, there is more to this booking- system than you might think. We shall now take a look at how this online booking- system actually utilizes basic persuasive principles; familiarity, commitment and consistency, social proof and scarcity (Cialdini, 1993). In addition the booking functions as a self- regulatory tool by helping you plan and self-monitor your exercises.

First of all, the booking takes place on the clubs homepages, so the member is guided to the booking system trough the regular home-site where all news from the club are presented. In this way the club persuades the members to at least take a glance at their homepage where special offers and news from the club are presented. Hence, the booking makes the members more familiar with their homepages. Familiarity underlies almost all advertising. An idea, person or product becomes more familiar and comfortable, and thus more attractive, to us through sheer repetition.

Second, the booking makes you commit to participate in particular classes. The persuasive principle of commitment and consistency is described as our yearning to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already performed or stated. Once we make a decision, we will feel pressured from within and from the people with whom we interact to behave consistently with that commitment. Thus, by booking the class on internet the member has psychologically committed himself to exercise. You also know that by booking in advance for the class you have occupied one out of the 30 available places for that particular class. So if you don’t show up, it would actually prevent someone else from training. This knowledge will probably enhance your feeling of commitment to show up and join the class.

Third, you are persuaded by social proof and scarcity. Social proof is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior. Making the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, they will deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed. The scarcity principle on the other hand says that we want what we are afraid we can’t have. The words “Closing Down” and “Last Few To Go” are very powerful, because we value what is rare and exclusive. In the fitness-club booking system you get a notice if a class is full booked, and you can choose to be placed on a waiting-list. Thus you both see that this is a popular class that other people are joining (social proof) and you are also reminded that the tickets to the wanted class is a limited resource (scarcity).

When we are changing a habit like starting exercising, it requires effective self-regulation (see e.g. Baumeister, Heatherton & Tice, 1994). Self-regulation can be divided into three sub-processes: (1) self-observation; (2) self-evaluation; and (3) self-reaction. So to have a visualisation of your exercises makes it very clear to you if you have dropped out of training for a week. The bookings are presented to you in a calendar, which allows you to follow your exercise over time in your own training- calendar. Thus, the calendar workss as a self-monitoring tool facilitating the self regulation of your exercise behaviour. In addition the fitness-club helps you with the monitoring and regulation of your exercise behaviour. They also have access to your planning- calendar and actually pick up the phone and give you a call to check if you need help to get back on track if you have dropped out for more than a month. In this way you have no chance to “forget” about your training.

As you can see, the online booking system which by first glance looks like it is made just to help the fitness-club with administration work, actually turns out to be a system which utilizes both persuasive principles as well as helping you self- regulate to make you exercise more often. This is an excellent example of how a pretty simple online tool can persuade and help people that want to change their exercise habits succeed.

References:

Baumeister, R. F., Heatherton, T. F., & Tice, D. M. (1994). Losing control: How and why people fail at self-regulation. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Cialdini, R. B. (1993). Influence: The psychology of persuasion. New York:Quill.

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Most people adhere to their goals when they are both motivated and able. This is quite impressive in terms of the complex human social life people engage in and the multiple choices people face every day. But how is it that people who are highly motivated and proven to be capable of for instance studying or dieting suddenly may fail to do so? In this article, we discuss how making choices can impair subsequent self-regulation.

Ego depletion
Self-regulation refers to the ability to override or inhibit thoughts, feelings, impulses, and behaviours. It can be viewed as the active part of the self (i.e. agent), as opposed to the self as something known (i.e. identity) or the self as knower (i.e. knowledge). In other words, self-regulation is crucial for the ability to adhere to personal and social goals, but what happens when people’s self-regulatory capacity breaks down?

Vohs and colleagues (2008) conducted a series of experiments where a choice versus no-choice manipulation was followed by a task that required self-regulation. After for instance making active choices on a website, the researchers measured participants’ persistence on a subsequent self-regulatory task. In several of the experiments, participants were also led to believe that practicing or solving the self-regulatory task would help them on an upcoming task so that participants should have been highly motivated to perform well on the self-regulatory task.

The unanimous findings were that making choices leads to lessened tolerance to negative adverse events, lowered persistence, and more procrastination. In other words, making choices depleted the self of mental resources (i.e. ego depletion) that affected subsequent ability to self-regulate or adhere to goals.

Information architecture design
These findings are very interesting from an information architecture (IA) design perspective (see Danaher, McKay & Seeley, 2005). On the one side, we can depend on users to find the right information at the right time and give them complete freedom, including a range of choices and few restrictions (e.g. design digital interventions as matrices). Both users and designers may find it appealing to have a full set of choices and full self-determination although people often report feeling frustrated and overwhelmed with the intense cognitive demands that accompany large amounts of choices (Huffman & Kahn, 1998). And as Vohs et al. and related research shows (e.g. Baumeister, et al. 1998), providing people with many choices is not very helpful or supportive. In addition, from a therapeutic point of perspective, just providing people with choices would be equivalent to holding a laissez-faire attitude as the designer or therapist sort of lets the sequence of events take its own course and takes on a passive role and seeming lack of interest and involvement in the user (Rogers, 1951).

On the other side, we can guide users through a predetermined sequence and reduce or remove irrelevant information (e.g. tunneled IA design). A good example of these principles applied in action is e-commerce where users typically add items in a basket or shopping cart, proceed to checkout, enter shipping address, billing information, and place their order. This may be appropriate and desirable in e-commerce, but when it comes to health and well-being, such IA designs can easily end up objectifying a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, become too intellectualistic and didactic, and communicate a basic mistrust and lack of respect for the person and belief in his or her abilities to find solutions to their own problems.

Belief in the right for self-determination
The empirical evidence stand in stark contrast to the thought experiments by existentialist philosophers like Camus and early Sartre who portrait the self as an entity that is constructed by acts of free will. Most people strongly believe in the existentialist thought and would have a hard time accepting anything else because a rejection of the existentialist thought would entail that they reject the belief in their basic (human) right for self-determination. People feel it liberating and tend go to great lengths in protecting their freedom. When this freedom or opportunities for making choices is restricted, people become defensive, exhibit patterns of aggression, reactance, and imagine that they control events which they cannot possibly control (e.g. what other people think of them or the roll of dice at casinos). But let us assume that the empirical evidence and existentialist thought are equally true and neither is false, can we then find a solution which does not necessarily imply a compromise?

Is there a solution?
According to Rogers (1951), the counselor’s aim and role or, in our case, an intervention designer’s role is to perceive the phenomenological field as experienced by the person, wholeheartedly accept the person as he or she is which is already experienced critically by the person’s self as it is, and adopt an internal frame of reference. It means to see the world as the person sees it and put aside any preconceived ideas, preconceptions, and perceptions adopted from an external frame of reference (i.e. the counselor or designers perspective). It also means to move in the direction of greater self-responsibility; self-government, self-regulation, and autonomy. The paradox is not the right for self-determination, but it is the choice(s) itself which is the paradox.

Consequently, the potential solution is to help users make the right choices and be supportive of their decision even if it goes against every form of your personal and intellectual sense and understanding of users’ or clients’ problem. This can be an excruciating exercise for the counselor or designer because as human beings we tend to evaluate, compare, diagnose, guide, persuade, argue, teach, etc. quite automatically. Instead, help users decide the overall and important intervention components that strongly underscores that these decisions are fully self-determined rather than providing an excess of alternatives and options concerning nitty-gritty details which users might fancy, but which end up undermining users’ capacity for self-regulation. People want choices, but as Vohs and colleagues’ research shows, people eventually tire of the endless demands and stresses of making these choices. How liberating are these choices of freedom when they actually impair people’s optimal functioning, health, well-being, and social development?

Key reading(s):

Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M. & Tice, D. M. (2008). Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 883-898.

References:

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1252-1265

Danaher, B. G., McKay, H. G. & Seeley, J. R. (2005). The information architecture of behaviour change websites. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 7(2), e12.

Huffman, C., & Kahn, B. E. (1998). Variety for sale: Mass customization or mass confusion. Journal of Retailing, 74, 491-513.

Rogers, C. R. (1951). Client-centered therapy. London: Constable.

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It is very interesting to see how the perception of the information presented in choice items can influence people’s decisions and actions. The arrangement of choice alternatives can pertain to different underlying goals such as for example food enjoyment and concerns about weight which can elicit different psychological and behavioural consequences.

Together or separate?
Fishbach and Zhang (2008) found that it does actually make a difference if conflicting goals are presented alone (e.g. chocolate cake) or as choice alternatives (e.g. chocolate cake or vegetable soup). When participants were presented with conflicting choice items together, the choice items were perceived to complement each other and participants tended to evaluate the tempting items more positively. When people hold a positive attitude towards an item, they start balancing the conflicting goals as if they were complementary goals (e.g. “If I have the vegetable soup for entrée, I can have the chocolate cake as a treat for dessert”).

Fishbach and Zhang (2008) also found that when items were presented separately, they seemed to compete against each other and participants then tended to evaluate the goal item more positively. This is also the case when being presented to temptations only, as temptations seem to automatically activate the desired goal (Fishbach, Friedman & Kruglanski, 2003). What seems to happen is that the conflicting goals start to compete against each other when presented separately and thus the more important goal is highlighted (e.g. eating healthy).

Highlighting and balancing goals
There is an interesting link between highlighting or balancing goals and the way goals are represented or framed as discussed in the article How to increase motivation to goal adherence. When people highlight a goal they feel very committed to their goal and see their achievements as a result of their past actions or in terms of what has been accomplished to date. In other words, they exhibit a high level of intrinsic motivation or the feeling that the decision to adhere to their goal is fully self-determined. In contrast, people who balance conflicting goals see their actions as part of a progress (i.e. remains to be accomplished). Consequently, they start to balance the conflicting goals as if they were complementary (“If I eat pizza today, I can keep my diet tomorrow”; for example, see Fishbach & Dhar, 2005, Study 3). The problem is simply that today’s calorie intake is not re-set tomorrow. These effects suggests that a focus on commitment or progress promotes subsequent choices of action that either highlights the goal or balances between alternative goals.

Implications
Obviously, helping users or clients decide what goals are important, setting unambiguous goals, strengthening commitment towards change, and avoiding presenting or discussing conflicting goals at the same time seem to highlight important personal goals. However, one important consequence from this discussion is perhaps that we should abandon discussing barriers to treatment altogether as discussing barriers most often involves presenting information about conflicting goals at the same time which according to Fishbach and colleagues’ research results in a balancing of goals (“If I pack my gym bag now, I can go watch TV”). But this may be at odds with both treatment providers and users or clients who often consider addressing barriers very important.

Another very interesting implication of the perception of choice items that have underlying conflicting goals comes from priming studies (see e.g. Stroebe, Mensink, Aarts, Schut & Kruglanski, 2008). Priming refers to the phenomenon of activating concepts by exposing people to objects that increases the accessibility of the mental representation of that object or concept. For example, a website concerning nutritional counseling or weight management may present words or pictures relating to the semantic concept of food enjoyment (e.g. words like tasty or appetizing). At the same page, the website may present words or pictures relating to the semantic concept of eating healthy (e.g. words like slim or nutritious). This seems to trigger psychological processes such as balancing between conflicting goals, creating commitment uncertainty, making short-term goals more salient, etc. – processes that are all related to unsuccessful behaviour change. The implication is that one should avoid triggering a balancing of conflicting goals, but rather focus on food enjoyment or eating healthy separately to activate a highlighting.

Conclusion
It appears to be unproblematic to provide users with for example healthy and nutritious and delicious and tasty recipes or food items separately. The problem is when people are presented with both at the same time which unfortunately often is the case. Just imagine all the choices people have at their local grocery store. It is easy to see how people can end up thinking: “If I buy the low-fat milk, I can have the hot dogs” (i.e. balancing conflicting goals). Furthermore, imagine all the unhealthy products that are presented as healthy under labels such as “natural”, “no added sugar” or “50% less fat”. These products prime people with conflicting goals automatically which provides people excuses for purchasing the salami with 30% fat content because it is promoted as having 50% less fat. Well, it may be healthier relative to salami with 60% fat, but it is still unhealthy.

Key reading(s):

Fishbach, A. & Zhang, Y. (2008). Together or apart: When goals and temptations complement versus compete. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 547-559.

References:

Fishbach, A. & Dhar, R. (2005). Goals as excuses or guides: The liberating effect of perceived goal progress on choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 32, 370-377.

Fishbach, A., Friedman, R. S. & Kruglanski, A. W. (2003). Leading us not unto temptation: Momentary allurements elicit overriding goal activation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 296-309.

Stroebe, W., Mensink, W., Aarts, H., Schut, H. & Kruglanski, A. W. (2008). Why dieters fail: Testing the goal conflict model of eating. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 26-36.

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