The scientific reason why you aren’t using your Treadmill

So many of us have done it – you figure that going to the gym is quite an expensive hobby and see that it would be much more financially intelligent to get a treadmill for your own home. After all, you’ll be able to work out whenever you want no matter what the weather outside, and you don’t have to worry about people staring at you, either.

But then after the first few weeks of using the treadmill every day, you find yourself shying away from it, until it eventually becomes a dust covered furniture piece that gets hidden away in the cupboard or the garage, or even sold off on eBay. But now you’ve got a scientific reason for this behaviour.

Authors of the study, reasearchers Robin Tanner and Kurt Carlson has discovered what they believe to be the specific process that contributes to this behaviour, and have come up with a method to help consumers think about their next purchases:

“Consumers adopt the tentative hypothesis that they will behave in an ideal fashion when predicting their future behaviour. 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.”

The research was carried out over many different studies by asking people for their ‘ideal’ estimates and their actual estimates of their behaviour and found that when people are asked both questions at once their second answer is more realistic.

So maybe if you know that your treadmill is never going to quite be the fitness solution you had hoped, you can use this technique next time and save yourself a little bit of money!