In recent years, a growing number of people have started sharing their goal progress on social media platforms (e.g., Instagram, TikTok, X). For example, since 2019, TikTok, Reddit, and Instagram users have been regularly documenting their progress towards the “75 Hard”, a 75-day goal that promotes a healthier lifestyle. While some work suggests that there may be benefits (i.e., social support) to sharing goal progress on social media, there is little research, to date, that has identified whether and how posting about goal progress on social media might affect goal persistence. We propose that people will persist more towards their goals if they post regularly on social media about their goal progress, due to greater accountability and social support. We plan to conduct a field experiment in collaboration with a large Philly gym, where we will collect the number of minutes/days that people go to the gym. All participants will be given the goal of exercising for four days a week over the span of one month. They will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions: 1) Control, 2) Private Post, and 3) Public Post. In the Control condition, participants will be awarded $40 for their participation in the study. In the Private post condition, participants will be initially awarded $20 for their participation, and will have the opportunity to receive an additional $1.25 every time they upload a picture of themselves at the gym (i.e., showing their goal progress) to a private survey (i.e., only experimenters can see the results). In the Public post condition, participants will be initially awarded $20 for their participation, and will have the opportunity to receive an additional $1.25 every time they post a picture of themselves at the gym (i.e., showing their goal progress) on their personal Instagram account. To track participants’ social media posts, participants will be required to add us as a follower, and tag us in each post about the gym. We will scrape this data to examine: 1) how often people post, 2) how many people comment/like their posts, and 3) a text analysis of the type of comments people write. We will continue to collect data from the intervention a month after it is over to examine if our intervention leads to persistent behavior change. We will compare the number of minutes and number of days consumers are at the gym across conditions. In addition to examining how these 3 conditions compare in terms of gym attendance, we will also examine how responses to their social media posts affect goal persistence within the public post condition. This research will provide insights into whether, when, and how social media can serve as a means to keep people accountable and thus motivated towards their goals. In doing so, this research can allow us to discover a low-cost and relatively simple intervention to improve goal persistence.
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