The relationship between monetary incentives, social status, and physical activity

We conduct a field experiment to better understand the role of social status with and without monetary incentives as motivation to increase physical activity. We find that social status alone does not induce a change in physical activity. When social status is combined with monetary incentives, however, we find a change in the number of daily steps. This change is heterogeneous. Individuals with low physical activity increase their number of steps by 12%, while those with high physical activity decrease the number of steps by 25%. An incentives treatment with exogenous social status – uncorrelated with physical activity – provides robustness to our findings and, together with the control condition, rules out potential experimenter demand effects and other factors driving the results. Our results call for a cautionary approach for analyzing the role of social status, in many cases unobserved, for physical activity intervention programs.