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years, we have been involved in a large project with a major health insurance company that tries to use incentives to help its members. Theirs is a win-win situation: the members get in better shape, and the company saves money. The problem is that the incentives come on top of strong, already existing motivations. Think about the amounts of money and effort that people spend on dieting in frustrated efforts to lose weight. They are already motivated to shed pounds. Could paying them a little help get them to change their exercise habits?
    The trick in using money, of course, is to entice people to change their habits. Here’s an example of an incentive scheme that we designed and tested. 9 We wanted to use the simplest incentive possible, so we invited students to our lab, and then randomly divided them into two groups. One group was simply used as a control; we “bribed” the other by offering to pay each participant $100 to go to the gym eight times during a month. Following the principle of “paying enough,” there are very few things you can’t get students to do for the right amount of money. Not surprisingly, the participants came to the lab and went to the gym as required.
    But we weren’t after temporary compliance. The important question was whether the incentive led to habit formation: what would happen once the month was over and we stopped paying the bribe?Would the incentive backfire, as happened in the day-care study? Would it make any kind of difference at all? Or would the students form some kind of habit of visiting the gym—enough so that they might continue to visit the gym after we stopped paying them?
    The results were encouraging. We found that attendance, even after we stopped paying, doubled for the group we’d paid to visit the gym eight times. The incentive seemed to help these people “get over the hump” of exercising regularly. Those who said they didn’t exercise because they didn’t have time “found” the time after we “forced” them (with incentives) to find it, and they continued to find the time afterwards. Others may have noticed that they just felt a lot better. Still others might have looked forward to seeing new friends. Whatever the reasons, the important thing was that they managed to change their habits, and they were rewarded with better health as a result.
    What can we learn from this study? Many of us want to exercise more than we do. The experiment told us that the hardest part of doing this is not the sweating, panting, and changing clothes; it’s adapting to the routine. Adaptation, indeed, is what it’s all about. Think about this for a moment. There are certain routines you probably can’t see yourself living without—your morning cup of coffee, brushing your teeth at night, and so on. So if you give yourself enough time to get over the hump and adapt to a new routine of exercising, it will become a habit.
    Start by committing to going to the gym a couple of times a week for a month. Even if you initially feel the cost of exercising will be higher than the benefit, you’ll find that after just those four weeks, you’ll have gotten used to the effects of exercise. You’ll notice your pumping heart, the psychological lift, the feeling of accomplishment. After this month of exercising you’ll find that the effort of heading to the gym is much less difficult than it was during the first week or two of your personal experiment. In fact, you’ll have become so used to the way you feel afterwards that you’ll start tomiss that feeling if you skip a gym visit. At this point, you’ll decide that either the cost of going to the gym is lower, the benefit is higher, or both—such that exercising will become a net positive.
    Now, it’s too simplistic to think we can throw money or other positive incentives at people over time and expect them to do what we hope they will do. Changing deeply embedded habits is difficult for most people. After all, some people