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Warning: I trusted that '87% of people fail their resolutions' stat for 2 gym memberships before I read the fine print
I kept seeing that 87% number pop up everywhere in January, so I just took it as fact and figured there was no point even trying. Then a friend in Boise asked me where it came from, and when I actually tracked it down, it was from one small survey of 200 people done back in 2016. That one group became "most people" real quick, and nobody ever says the study only followed them for like 10 weeks. After I did the digging on my own 90 day streak, I'm at 61 workouts logged and still going, which is nowhere near the 13% success rate the headline promised me. I felt pretty silly for letting a recycled stat talk me out of even starting. Has anyone else traced one of these viral percentages back to its source and found out it was way smaller than it sounded?
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phoenix_grant8d ago
The part about "one group became 'most people' real quick" is the whole trick. I've seen this happen with sleep stats too. Some study of 40 college students in a lab for two nights turns into "scientists say you need exactly 7.5 hours or you'll die." Then it gets cited in a hundred blog posts and a podcast, and by round three nobody even links the study anymore. The 10 week follow up thing you found is the other classic move. Most habit studies stop right when the novelty fades, so the "failure" they measure is really just people getting bored of being watched. Your 61 workouts is a way better data point than a survey from 2016 where half the people probably forgot they signed up.
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