Teaching temptation bundling to boost exercise: A field experiment

Temptation bundling—pairing a pleasurable indulgence with a behavior that provides delayed rewards—combats present bias by making behaviors with delayed benefits more instantly-gratifying. If people are sophisticated and capable of following self-set rules to overcome present bias, they could benefit from learning about temptation bundling. Participants in a four-week exercise-boosting program (N = 6792) received either an audiobook with encouragement to temptation bundle, only an audiobook, or neither an audiobook nor encouragement to temptation bundle. Giving participants audiobooks and encouraging temptation bundling boosted their likelihood of a weekly workout by 10–14% and average weekly workouts by 10–12% during and up to seventeen weeks post-intervention. Relative to giving audiobooks alone, encouraging temptation bundling had a modest positive effect on exercise on the extensive margin. The marginal benefit of encouraging temptation bundling may be small because free audiobooks leak information: Simply providing an audiobook to exercise program participants suggests they should temptation bundle.