Lead me not into temptation. For, I know the way!
So, 2020 is off to a great start? Definitely, for me.
If you know me, you know I am about as regular with my exercise habits as a certain social media company is with removing political ads from its platform. That is, we both know it is the right thing to do, and yet, we don’t do it.
But not in 2020.
I have finally put my behavioral science background to good use and figured out the sweet spot. Thanks to my interventions, now I go to the gym 3 times a week without fail, and that is a glorious 300% increase over the (very low) base I had previously.
So, what’s the science?
Well, turns out reading all that academic literature for my Masters helped! In what is now a famous paper, Katherine Milkman, Julia Minson, and Kevin Volpp introduced the world to the concept of Temptation Bundling. [1] Through a field experiment, the researchers measured the impact of bundling a want, or an instant gratification experience, with a should, or a valuable but delayed gratification experience.
Examples of want experiences would be playing a game, binge-watching a favourite show, or eating something you like. A should experience would be all those activities you would benefit from doing but don’t — or in other words, all your new year resolutions: exercising, reading, not wasting time on social media.
The study used “listening to tempting audiobooks” as a want experience and “exercising” as a should experience. In the experiment, participants are randomly assigned to one of 3 groups: a full treatment group, which provided access to tempting audiobooks, but only in the gym; an intermediate treatment group, which involved encouraging participants to restrict enjoying audio books to the gym only; and a control group, with no audiobooks.
At the end of the experiment period, participants in the full treatment and intermediate treatment groups had visited the gym on average 51% and 29% more than those in the control group, respectively. The effect did wear off with time, but surprisingly, a whopping 61% were willing to pay for gym-only access to audiobooks.
References
- Milkman, K. L., Minson, J. A., & Volpp, K. G. (2013). Holding the Hunger Games hostage at the gym: An evaluation of temptation bundling. Management science, 60(2), 283-299.
- Rogers, T., Milkman, K. L., & Volpp, K. G. (2014). Commitment devices: using initiatives to change behavior. JaMa, 311(20), 2065-2066.
- Worldwide trends in insufficient physical activity from 2001 to 2016: a pooled analysis of 358 population-based surveys with 1·9 million participants
About the Author
Preeti Kotamarthi
Preeti Kotamarthi is the Behavioral Science Lead at Grab, the leading ride-hailing and mobile payments app in South East Asia. She has set up the behavioral practice at the company, helping product and design teams understand customer behavior and build better products. She completed her Masters in Behavioral Science from the London School of Economics and her MBA in Marketing from FMS Delhi. With more than 6 years of experience in the consumer products space, she has worked in a range of functions, from strategy and marketing to consulting for startups, including co-founding a startup in the rural space in India. Her main interest lies in popularizing behavioral design and making it a part of the product conceptualization process.
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