How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

by Katy Milkman

they recruited more than a hundred university students for a study about gym attendance and randomly assigned them to different groups. Some students were told they would earn 175 dollars if they attended an information session and two subsequent meetings, allowed the researchers to track their gym attendance, and visited the gym at least once in the next month. Others were told they would be paid the same 175 dollars only if they attended the information session and subsequent meetings, allowed their gym attendance to be tracked, and hit the gym at least eight times in the month ahead. Unsurprisingly, the students who had to make eight gym visits to get paid exercised more than the others during that month. But what’s really interesting is what happened after the payments stopped. The students who had just finished a month of unusually high exercise activity (those who had been offered 175 dollars for working out eight times) kept going to the gym much more often than the students who were paid to make only a single gym visit, even though no one was being paid to work out anymore. In fact, the eight-visit group members worked out roughly twice as often as the students in the other group over a seven-week follow-up period.