Struggling to achieve your life improvement goals, such as exercising or saving for retirement?
A new study shows that people who struggle with their self-set improvement goals can benefit by emul
ating the successful strategies used by their friends.
The study found that encouraging people to find and mimic exercise strategies used by their friends
increased the amount of time they spent exercising compared to receiving an exercise strategy passiv
ely.
In the study, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and a psy
chologist at UPenn introduce the concept of the “copy-paste prompt,” a nudge that encourages people
to seek out and mimic a goal-achievement strategy used by an acquaintance.
Copy-paste prompts “are easy to implement, virtually costless, and widely applicable with the potent
ial to improve outcomes ranging from healthy eating to academic success,” said the authors, Katie Me
hr, Amanda Geiser, Katherine Milkman and Dr. Angela Duckworth, in the paper “Copy-Paste-Prompts: A N
ew Nudge to Promote Goal Achievement.”
Copy-paste prompts may be more effective than other methods for boosting goal achievement for severa
l reasons — behaviors are more appealing when learned from observation, plus learning from models in
creases both a person’s expectations of their own abilities and their likelihood of using informatio
n, the researchers explained.
However, people may not take full advantage of opportunities to observe and emulate others in their
social network. In this case, copy-paste prompts may add value by helping them better take advantage
of this resource, the researchers noted.
And there’s a bonus: The information is more customized and goal relevant, since people select peers
whose behavior they want to emulate, the researchers added.
In the longitudinal study, more than 1,000 participants were asked how many hours they spent exercis
ing in the last week. They were then randomly assigned to one of three conditions: The copy-paste pr
ompt condition, a quasi-yoked control condition, or a simple control condition.
In the copy-paste prompt condition, participants read the following:
“In this study, we want to help you learn about an effective hack or strategy that someone you know
uses as motivation to exercise. Over the next two days, we’d like you to pay attention to how people
you know get themselves to work out. If you want, you can ask them directly for their motivational
tips and strategies.”
In the quasi-yoked control condition, participants read the following:
“In this study, we’re hoping to help you learn about an effective hack or strategy that motivates pe
ople to exercise. Over the next two days, we’d like you to get ready to learn a new strategy to moti
vate you to exercise.”
The participants who received the copy-paste prompt spent more time exercising the following week th
an participants assigned to either a quasi-yoked or simple control condition, according to the study
’s findings.
“The benefits of copy-paste prompts are mediated by the usefulness of the adopted exercise strategy,
commitment to using it, effort put into finding it, and the frequency of social interaction with pe
ople who exercise regularly,” the researchers said in the study.
The researchers add they believe the new technique could improve the user’s life in many ways.
It may be, they say, that once a person learns to copy-paste in one part of their lives, such as exe
rcise, “she will be able to apply this technique in a way that improves many other outcomes, for exa
mple, retirement savings.”