Exercise needs the right messenger

Australia is now the fattest nation on earth – with four million Australians classified as obese and another 5.4 million as overweight and experts say exercising is one way to reduce this frightening trend.

New research by Victoria University’s (VU) Dr Erin Pearson shows that when it comes to changing people’s exercise behaviour having the right messenger is as important as having the right message.

Dr Pearson said: “We hear all the time the message that exercise is important and yet many of us don’t take any notice. This study has given us a clue about why that might be. What we have found is that the person delivering the message needs to be someone the audience identifies with and respects in order to bring about a desired change in behaviour.

The study investigated intervention strategies designed to get sedentary women exercising and found that interventions based on women’s social identities were far more likely to be effective.

From a pool of 214 female volunteers, Dr Pearson identified two groups whose social identities were based on the personality based self-characteristics – the ‘strong’ and ‘independent’ group and the ‘spiritual’ and ‘caring’ group.

A third control group was randomly selected. Women in all groups were aged 25 to 45 and spent less than 150 minutes per week exercising.

At the final evaluation after three months only the women in the two social identity groups were found to have maintained the increased levels of exercise.

Dr Pearson said: “By creating a mental association between a valued aspect of their social identity and the goal of physical activity it was possible to get the women to maintain an increase in their rate of exercise activity.

Dr Pearson said that in the future it should be quite easy for exercise providers to classify people according to their social identities and then design interventions that will continue to be effective over a long period.

(Source: Victoria University: August 2008)