It may be the fault of a friend that you can not continue exercising

By[Nadine Kuhn] Nadine Kuhn

"Friend effect" that whether or not a person exercises is influenced by the exercise situation of that friend's friends is reported in the latest research.

Exercise contagion in a global social network: Nature Communications
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14753

Exercise can be contagious, new social network analysis finds - LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-exercise-contagious-friends-20170418-story.html

Running Is 'Socially Contagious'
http://www.livescience.com/58732-running-socially-contagious.html


PhysicistChristos NicolaidesIn this research conducted by Mr. and others, he continued exercise using fitness tracker for over 5 years and analyzed information of 1.1 million runners sharing activity information with friends using SNS etc. These runners have adopted a mechanism that automatically posts their activity status to SNS, and the connection on SNS has reached 3.4 million.

As I analyzed the data, the researchers said that "on a day when a person ran for more than 10 minutes, that friend would run a little more than three minutes on that day," and every time a person ran for 1 kilometer I found that his friend ran 0.3 kilometers long. " The researchers are supposed to be "publication of social mobility" as a paper published at Nature Communications and it is necessary to design a campaign that takes into consideration the engagement at SNS in order to encourage exercise is.

Even in past research, "socially infecting" behavior has been confirmed, for example, research contents that people with obese friends have increased risk of obesity were announced. However, since there are several factors that affect human behavior, it has been difficult to prove that certain behavior of one person directly affects someone else. Just because two people became obese at the same time, it is difficult to distinguish whether the cause is connected by SNS, or simply because the behavior was similar.

Therefore, in this research, we use "weather change" for this problem. For example, if a rainy person in Boston canceled exercise and a non-rainy Chicago friend canceled exercise, the person living in Boston influenced Chicago friends . According to this method, he succeeded in investigating the influence of a certain element "the motion situation of a person affects the exercise situation of a friend".

According to researchers, "the influence of people who do not run too much on people who run a lot" is relatively large, as this tends to keep superior compared with themselves compared to them who run a lot It is seen as it is seen.

In addition, in the research, "men's runners are strongly influenced by other male runners, but also from female runners are affected moderately" and that "female runners are affected only by runners of the same female" It has been revealed.

ByHunter Johnson

However, as this study only covers people using fitness trackers, it can not be said that the results do not necessarily apply to people who do not use fitness trackers. Also, since we have not confirmed whether friends really saw the data shared by SNS, "People who frequently check the activities of friends at SNS are affected by the activity situation of their friends There is a possibility that there may be hidden elements such as "easy".