Cardio with Mr. Treadmill: How Anthropomorphizing the Means of Goal Pursuit Increases Motivation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the motivational consequences of anthropomorphizing the means of goal pursuit. Eight studies show that consumers are more motivated to pursue fitness and academic goals with anthropomorphized (vs. nonanthropomorphized) means because such means elicit a greater sense of companionship and thus stronger beliefs that (1) goal pursuit is enjoyable (perceived enjoyability) and that (2) the goal is attainable (goal expectancy). The authors first find that participants work out harder when using an anthropomorphized (vs. nonanthropomorphized) treadmill (Study 1) and jump rope (Study 2). They then show that this effect occurs due to a greater sense of companionship, which in turn increases both perceived enjoyability and goal expectancy (sequential mediations; Study 3). They further demonstrate these underlying mechanisms through moderation: The effect attenuates when a human companion is present (Study 4), for means perceived as inherently fun (Study 5), and when self-efficacy is high (Study 6). Study 7 identifies a boundary condition: The effect disappears when the means take on a supervisor (rather than partner) role. Finally, Study 8 shows the downstream consequence of the effect on subsequent choice of means. These findings contribute to research on motivation and anthropomorphism, with practical implications for marketers and consumers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".