Erika Kirgios

Erika Kirgios

Erika L. Kirgios is a behavioural researcher listed in the Department of Operations, Information and Decisions at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, on "Teaching temptation bundling to boost exercise: a field experiment", published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in 2020. Her co-authors were Graelin Mandel, Yeji Park, Katherine Milkman, Dena Gromet, Joseph Kay and Angela Duckworth.

Who they are

Kirgios's affiliation is given here as it appears on the 2020 paper, which is the work this site draws on.

This page records only what the paper and its published record state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Teaching temptation bundling to boost exercise (2020), with Mandel, Park, Milkman, Gromet, Kay and Duckworth. The study ran inside StepUp, a free four-week exercise programme offered to members of the 24 Hour Fitness gym chain, with recruitment between March 2018 and January 2019. Members earned points for each gym visit. Some were given a code to download a free audiobook, some were given the code together with encouragement to temptation bundle, and a comparison group from the same programme received neither.

In the main analysis of 6,792 members, a free audiobook plus encouragement to bundle raised the likelihood of a weekly workout by 10 to 14 per cent and average weekly workouts by 10 to 12 per cent, during the programme and for up to seventeen weeks afterwards. Compared with a free audiobook alone, encouraging temptation bundling had only a modest additional effect. Download rates were low and similar in both audiobook groups, about 14 and 13 per cent, and the authors could not verify whether members used the audiobooks while exercising.

Key ideas

The authors explain the small difference between the two audiobook groups through information leakage: an exercise programme that hands out an audiobook already hints that it should be enjoyed while exercising, so many members may have reached the idea on their own. The study was one of twenty run inside StepUp, the project later reported as a megastudy in Nature in 2021.

Sources

  1. Kirgios, E. L., Mandel, G. H., Park, Y., Milkman, K. L., Gromet, D. M., Kay, J. S., & Duckworth, A. L. (2020). Teaching temptation bundling to boost exercise: a field experiment. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 161(Supplement), 20-35. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.09.003