This is the week that gym memberships swell to match our post-Christmas waistlines. Filled with mince pies and good intention thousands of guilt ridden folk sign on the dotted line for a year of spinning, rowing and swimming. Come February, an inch thinner and over the guilt, these same people begin to conveniently forget their gym kit in the morning and slowly drift from a life of peddling to one of pizza.
So it is with great timing that gym-pact.com launch a service that offers to ‘incentivise your exercise’ (their words not ours). The service operates via iPhone and lets you set a financial stake for going to the gym. If you fail to make it to the gym you pay out real money via your credit card. But you can also earn real cash for every workout you do - courtesy of the other users who didn't manage to make it to the gym! The idea came after Yifan Zhang, an economics major, took a class in behavioral economics and noted the power of loss aversion (that losing money is a stronger motivator than winning money) and decided to put it into practice.
We have also seen an anti-smoking initiative based on the same principle, in which aspiring quitters commit to make financial payments over a period of months. For them, a nicotine test at the end determines whether or not they get to keep their money.
These approaches are exciting because they recognise that cost - and financial value - is not fixed, but experienced highly subjectively. There is a keen psychological difference between gaining a reward from a third party, paying a ‘sunk cost’ like gym membership and experiencing the ongoing risk of financial loss. If the concept works as a motivator for the gym, how can the same thinking be used to encourage other positive behaviours?
