Investigating Churn in Physical Activity Challenges: Evidence from a U.S. Online Social Network

Abstract

Physical activities have been found to be positively contagious, as active exercisers tend to motivate their friends to do more exercise. However, it is not clearly understood if inactive exercising behaviors are also socially contagious. As insufficient physical activity is a huge threat to people's health, understanding the potential negative contagion in physical activities is crucial. We approach this problem by studying the effect of individuals' churn of the online physical activity challenges relying on the physical activity and a large social network data from a renowned U.S. fitness platform. The underexplored online physical activity challenges provide a natural setup to measure churn and opportunities to study the contagion heterogeneities. Consistent with previous findings, we confirm that physical activity churn is socially contagious. Interestingly, unlike the inside-out positive contagion, our analyses reveal that the contagion of churn happens outside-in on the social network. Implications of such findings are discussed.