Dr. Alia Crum

So these are women working in hotels who were on their feet all day long, pushing carts.

It was clear that they were getting above and beyond at least the Surgeon General's requirements at that time, which were to accumulate 30 minutes of moderate physical activity per day.

But what was interesting was when we went in and surveyed them and asked them, hey, how much exercise do you think you're getting?

A third of them said zero.

And the average response was like a three on a scale of zero to 10.

So it's clear that even though these women were active, they didn't have that mindset, right?

They had the mindset that their work was successful.

just work, hard, maybe thankless work that led them to feel tired and in pain at the end of the day, but not that it was good for them, that it was good exercise.

So what we did was we took these women and we randomized them into two groups, and we told half of them that their work was good exercise.

In this case, it was true, factual information.

We oriented them to the Surgeon General's guidelines.

We oriented them to the benefits that they should be receiving.

And then we had measured them previously on their physiological metrics like weight and body fat and blood pressure.

And we came back four weeks later and we tested them again.

And what we found was that these women, even though they hadn't changed anything in their behavior, they had benefits to their health.

So they lost weight.

They decreased their systolic blood pressure by about 10 points on average.

What this reveals is that we have to be more thoughtful in how we go about motivating people to exercise or teaching people about the benefits.

Our current approach is just to basically tell people writ large, you know, here's what you need to get.

The intention with that is to motivate them.