Today, people use a variety of social and gameful (mobile) applications in order to motivate themselves and others to maintain difficult habits such as exercise, sustainable consumption and healthy eating. However, we have yet lacked understanding of how social influence affects willingness to maintain these difficult habits with the help of gamification services. In order to investigate this phenomenon, we measured how social influence predicts attitudes, use and further exercise in the context of gamification of exercise. Our results show that people indeed do “work out for likes”, or in other words, social influence, positive recognition and reciprocity have a positive impact on how much people are willing to exercise as well as their attitudes and willingness to use gamification services. Moreover, we found that the more friends a user has in the service, the larger the effects are. Furthermore, the findings of the empirical study further provide new understanding on the phenomenon of social influence in technology adoption/use continuance in general by showing, in addition to subjective norms, how getting recognized, receiving reciprocal benefits and network effects contribute to use continuance.
In their daily lives, people are often ridden with a tendency to favour short-term rewards instead of long-term rewards. This cognitive bias, titled hyperbolic discounting (Ainslie, 1975), leads us to sometimes neglect behaviours that would be beneficial to us and consequently causes us to, for example, procrastinate, skip exercise, smoke, and overconsume. When trying to break these cycles, a strong willpower is not always enough, and therefore, people are constantly seeking for novel ways to motivate themselves. During the last couple of years, new technological approaches for these motivational problems have been introduced. For example applications for fitness (Fitocracy; Zombies, Run!), housekeeping (Chore Wars), and even keeping up with one’s aspirations in life (Mindbloom) all attempt to motivate people by restructuring relatively long-term goals by providing the users with short-term goals, activities, rewards and social support.
This emerging technological approach for motivating people toward different types of beneficial behaviours draws from the design of social network services as well as games and has commonly been titled as gamification which refers to implementation of elements familiar from games to create similar experiences as games commonly do (Deterding et al., 2011 and Hamari et al., 2015). Such features have thus far been implemented in various contexts (Hamari, Koivisto, & Sarsa, 2014). Furthermore, very positive views and perhaps even unwarranted expectations regarding gamification have been expressed (see e.g. IEEE, 2014). However, doubts have also been cast on the concept and its effectiveness in truly motivating people (Gartner, 2012). Thus far, meta-studies indicate that most studies do report positive findings from gamification implementations. However, understanding over what kind of gamification works, which psychological aspects mediate the effects, and in which contexts the approach can be beneficial is not yet sufficient (Hamari et al., 2014). Nevertheless, the amount of research on the topic is rapidly increasing (Hamari et al., 2014), and to further highlight the timeliness of these developments, business analyses by Gartner (2011) and IEEE (2014) have reported predictions that the number of gamification endeavours will be increasing considerably in the coming years.
Moreover, common to many such motivational applications is the attempt to employ social influence through a user community in order to entice people to maintain their sustainable behaviour. The generally increased use of social features in technologies can also be observed elsewhere. People adopt technologies increasingly through word-of-mouth (Cheung & Thadani, 2012) or different kinds of recommendation systems (Li et al., 2013, Stibe et al., 2013 and Xiao and Benbasat, 2007) as well as consume socially (Zhou, Zhang, & Zimmermann, 2013). Moreover, social networking services frequently expose people to opinions and attitudes of others, which may further influence the behaviour of the participants (see e.g. Zhou, 2011). While the number of technological approaches invoking social influence and related psychological phenomena for steering human behaviour towards sustainable, healthy, and otherwise beneficial behaviours is growing, research-based knowledge on whether these technological solutions with social features are able to actually motivate people to pick up and continue with the encouraged behaviours is still somewhat scarce.
Therefore, in this study we investigate how social influence aids people in continuing and maintaining the beneficial behaviours promoted by the gamification technology. We specifically focus on one category of beneficial behaviour; namely physical exercise and the gamification service devised to encourage such behaviour. In particular, in this study we seek to magnify ‘social influence’ and investigate how several social factors work in parallel to increase willingness to use gamification and continue exercising. We compose the social influence from four factors: (1) subjective norms, (2) recognition from accepting the social influence, and (3) perceived reciprocal benefits. As an antecedent to social influence we measure (4) network effects (in order to investigate on which aspects of social influence having a larger network affects). The theorization expands upon the traditional measurement of social influence by extending the widely employed models, the theories of reasoned action (TRA) and planned behaviour (TPB). The study employs data gathered through an online survey from the users of an exercise-related gamification service.
