Meet Mr. Treadmill, Your Workout Buddy

However we choose to motivate ourselves, a universal truth is that it is difficult to keep it up. “Motivation is tough,” says Rima Touré-Tillery, an associate professor of marketing at Kellogg. “And so it interests me: what makes people more likely to sustain motivation over time?” Achieving career goals, for instance, requires years of persistence, often in the face of setbacks.

Along with Lili Wang of Zhejiang University, Touré-Tillery looked into whether people’s tendency to anthropomorphize objects—or to give them human traits—might help them stay motivated, specifically in the context of pursuing fitness goals.

The researchers show through a series of studies that people who associate their exercise equipment with human traits are not only more willing to work out but also do so for a longer period of time and with greater intensity. They find that this boost in motivation stems from a sense of companionship, which makes working out seem more enjoyable and achievable.

If it only had a name

Through eight experiments, Touré-Tillery and Wang studied how anthropomorphism might influence motivation.

In one study, the researchers recruited two groups of people at a university gym: one group was told to imagine their treadmill coming to life as a person and then asked about its personality; the second group was simply asked to describe the treadmill’s features without having to ascribe human traits to it.

After this simple intervention, the researchers found that those who anthropomorphized the treadmill spent more time exercising—running for about 3.5 minutes longer than the other group (21 minutes compared with 17.5 minutes). They also ran about a half kilometer farther and burned 30 percent more calories. These results also held when the researchers factored in the age, gender, and exercise frequency of participants. Overall, when ascribed human traits, the treadmill appeared to increase motivation.

The same findings occurred in a second study where participants exercised with a jump rope instead of a treadmill. And in yet another experiment, people reported having a stronger intention to work out again when they assigned human traits to their jump rope.

Why does attributing human characteristics to exercise equipment make someone more motivated to work out? Because, the researchers suggest, this provides people with a sense of companionship.

And this sense of companionship can make a task feel more enjoyable, which is especially important in the world of fitness, where working out can often feel like a drag. Touré-Tillery notes that most people find it more enjoyable to work out with a friend than alone, and so humanizing a treadmill can make it feel, in a way, more like a fun workout buddy and less like a hunk of equipment.

In addition, people who view exercise equipment as a companion may feel more confident in their ability to achieve their fitness goals. Just as a gym buddy might encourage someone to push harder, “companion” machines can do the same. This, in turn, makes goals feel more attainable.

“We see that considering a treadmill or jump rope as a sort of companion on this journey has these two effects: it makes the process more enjoyable—as though we’re doing it with a friend—and it makes me feel more likely to achieve my goals,” Touré-Tillery says. “These are two very powerful drivers of motivation.”

The limits of anthropomorphizing

Touré-Tillery notes that a decrease in motivation has consequences not only for consumers—in this case, people who are trying to stay in shape—but for companies as well. If somebody joins a gym but their motivation to exercise fades over time, then that person will eventually cancel their membership. In this way, motivation can be a necessary first step for building customer loyalty.

To assess this downstream effect, the researchers ran an experiment in which they measured participants’ plans to exercise after considering the use of a jump rope versus a jump rope ascribed with human traits. As in the previous experiments, people who considered a jump rope with human traits expressed a stronger intention to exercise. Furthermore, they were more likely to choose a jump rope (rather than a set of exercise bands) when offered the chance to win new exercise equipment. In this way, when a particular product increased people’s motivation, they had a stronger commitment to it.

Yet the researchers also find that there are limits to these effects.

Anthropomorphizing an object, for example, is less useful for motivation when people are already very confident they can achieve a particular goal. And it’s also less effective for activities that people find inherently enjoyable. In these situations, it stands to reason that it’s not very valuable to create a “companion” to increase motivation. Though it doesn’t hinder motivation, it doesn’t do much to enhance it either.

More subtly, Touré-Tillery and Wang find that people gain the most motivation when the exercise equipment fills the role of a partner as opposed to a supervisor or rival.

“If the personality of the object comes across as too bossy, then the anthropomorphism becomes more a mechanism for monitoring, tracking, or supervising, which essentially kills the fun that is such an important driver of motivation,” Touré-Tillery says.

Getting motivation right

These limitations point to a larger truth: if anthropomorphism is going to help motivate people, then it must be done right.

For companies, the features are relatively easy to incorporate, perhaps a smiling face, or a voice that talks in the first person. However they choose to manifest a human personality, it must be done in a way that suggests the product and its owner are working together, as partners.

Consumers, on the other hand, should be on the lookout for humanizing traits that speak to them: for one person it might be a cartoonish avatar; for another it might be a realistic personality.

“In the end, the idea is to have some accountability: when you’re dealing with another person—a workout partner—you get this accountability, and in the absence of that, perhaps your watch or exercise bike can help you,” Touré-Tillery says. “This is a pervasive human tendency, so it’s good to know there are some positive consequences in the way anthropomorphism can motivate us to chase our goals.”