Increasing physical activity and decreasing sedentary behaviour in older adults: Examining the effects of trending norms on intentions and behaviour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aging population in Canada is increasing, and with this increase, comes a corresponding increase in chronic diseases (Roberts et al., 2015). Among aging Canadians, two predictors of chronic disease development are physical inactivity and sedentarism – both of which are pervasive in society (Prince et al., 2020; Ross et al., 2020). As humans are social beings\n(Baumeister & Leary, 1995), one possible way to target a change in these behaviours is using social norms (Cialdini et al., 1990). The purpose of the current study was to examine whether trending norms (i.e., a minority norm that is increasing, Mortensen et al., 2019) would influence older adults’ intentions and behaviours with respect to increasing physical activity and decreasing sedentary behaviour. Using an experimental design, older adults were randomly assigned to one of three message conditions: trending norm (an increasing number of older adults are increasing their walking and decreasing their sitting, n=20), trending norm with outcome expectation (an increasing number of older adults are increasing their walking and decreasing their sitting and are getting health benefits from the behaviour changes, n=28), or attention control (more older adults are increasing their hobbies, n=25). Results from a MANOVA revealed a significant omnibus main effect for messages on reported intention, Wilks’ lambda F (4, 138) = 2.50, p = .045, ηp2 = .07. Follow up ANOVAs revealed that intention to decrease sedentary behaviour was significant, F (2, 70) = 4.03, p = .022, ηp2 = .10. Pairwise comparisons with Bonferroni correction examining intention to decrease sedentary behaviour revealed that those exposed to the trending norm combined with the outcome expectation reported a greater intention to decrease sedentary behaviour than those in the control condition (p = .038). No significant differences emerged between message conditions when examining physical activity or sedentary behaviours. These results provide preliminary experimental evidence that trending norm messages may serve to increase older adults’ intentions to decrease sedentary behaviour, but no evidence was provided to support trending norms increasing physical activity or decreasing sedentary behaviour.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".