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How Often Will You Use That Treadmill?

Overly idealistic expectations lead to bad results

November 18, 2008
Treadmill sales always go up in January. With people resolving to lose weight and get in shape for the new year, purchasing a piece of exercise equipment just seems logical.

But is it really?

A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research examines why our expectations of our behavior so often don't match reality.

Authors Robin J. Tanner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Kurt A. Carlson of Duke University uncovered a specific process that they believe contributes to unrealistic optimism. They also suggest a method to encourage consumers to think more realistically about their future actions.

"Consumers adopt the tentative hypothesis that they will behave in an ideal fashion when predicting their future behavior," the authors explain. "Unrealistic optimism by consumers may have negative consequences for both marketers and consumers. For example, if a consumer holds unrealistically optimistic beliefs about how often they will work out in the future, then they may overpay for home exercise equipment."

In a series of studies, the authors first had participants provide idealized estimates for particular behaviors; for example, asking themselves "in an ideal world, how often would you exercise next week?"

Then they asked participants to provide a second estimate; "how often will you actually exercise next week?". They found that when people are first asked to predict what would happen in an ideal world, then asked how they actually expect to do, they are more realistic.

Interestingly, when researchers explicitly instructed participants not to be idealistic, the experiment backfired and led to even more unrealistic estimates. Also, the authors found that more decisive people were less realistic.

An important potential consequence of being overly optimistic about one's future behavior is that such optimistic beliefs may contribute to overbuying of products that see little use," the authors write.

It's not surprising that treadmills are often a common item for sale at garage sales in June.

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