It’s easier to stay active, motivated and achieve your goals if you go to the gym with a friend.
- Research suggests that pursuing goals with a friend might make them more achievable.
- The study shows that people who go to the gym with a friend increase their attendance by 35%.
- For the team, these results show the benefits of making desired behaviors social to promote change over time.
If you want to be more active or take up sports, find friends to go to the gym with you. A study, published in Management Science on April 17, 2024, shows that they will help achieve the goals you have set for yourself.
Social connection: friends encourage you to achieve your goals
To achieve a personal goal, should you go it alone or team up with a friend? Three American researchers wanted to know the answer to this question. To do this, they studied the behavior of 774 members of a gym over 4 weeks. For half of them, a $1 Amazon gift card was offered each time they came to the room. The other group only received the reward if they came at the same time as their friend. The latter therefore had to organize themselves and agree to come at the same time.
The result: People who received payment only when they went to the gym with their friends doubled the frequency with which they went together and increased their overall gym visits by 35%.
The team concluded that the logistical costs of coordinating with someone else were dwarfed by two benefits. First, participants enjoyed their visits more when they reunited with their friend, which made future visits more likely. Second, a feeling of responsibility appeared.
“Our study identifies two types of responsibility”specifies Rachel Gershon of Berkeley Haas School of business, one of the three leaders of the study. “People feel responsible towards their friends, because they want them to get the reward. Additionally, they may also have reputational concerns, because their friends would think less of them if they didn’t give following.”
The less sporty benefit more
Furthermore, going to the gym with a friend seemed to be more beneficial to those who exercised less. Specifically, of the two partners, the one who exercised more frequently before the study showed an increase in the frequency of their visits. But the least active friend before the study had an even greater increase in gym visits.
The researchers highlighted another surprising point: more than 8 in 10 participants indicated that they would prefer not to have to coordinate their visits with a friend, if they had the choice. “This suggests that people might easily see the downsides of coordinated visits, but fail to recognize the potential benefits, ranging from increased motivation to creating stronger social bonds”add the authors in their communicated.
For the researchers, their results show the benefits of tapping into social connections to promote desired behaviors and increase people’s engagement.
