New American research has found that copying friends’ successful methods for working out could encourage people to work out more themselves and achieve their fitness goals.
The researchers recruited 1,028 participants and asked them how many hours they spent exercising in the last week. They then randomly assigned them to one of three conditions, including a copy-paste prompt condition in which participants were asked to learn — either by observing or by directly asking — about an effective strategy that someone they know uses to increase their motivation to exercise.
The findings, published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, showed that the participants in the copy-paste group spent more time exercising the following week than participants assigned to either of the other groups.