The Relationship between Monetary Incentives, Social Status, and Physical Activity

We conduct a field experiment to better understand the role of social status and 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 an effect in the number of daily steps. This effect 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 income treatment with exogenous social status—uncorrelated with physical activity— provides robustness to our findings and, together with the control treatment, 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