The Future of Fitness: Massively Multiplayer Online Training

If you are a serious cyclist or runner, dedicated to your performance goals, then you will likely find yourself riding, running, or lifting indoors at some point during the year. Traditionally, that has been a pretty boring affair that involves staring at a motivational poster on your wall while trying to drown out the sound of your own heavy breathing with some rocking tunes. But lately, there are a bunch of cool apps that certainly make your time on the trainer or the "dreadmill" both more productive and entertaining.

Before we get into that, I want to talk psychology.

The audience effect

What is known in psychology as the “audience effect” is simply something that happens when a person’s behavior changes because they believe there is someone else watching them. These effects have been known about for well over 100 years, but the cognitive mechanisms of this audience effect still remain unclear.

Cyclists were faster when competing against each other than they were when competing against themselves or the clock.

The earliest study that looked into whether or not having an audience could affect a person’s behavior is found in the work of Triplett (1898), who found that cyclists were faster when competing against each other than they were when competing against themselves or the clock.

As I said, this effect is one of the oldest phenomena that has been studied in psychology and was the subject of intensive study in the 1960s and 1970s, with less and less interest over the last 40 years. But in a review called Audience effects: what can they tell us about social neuroscience, researchers once again examined the hypothesis. They concluded that “Unpacking the simple question of ‘what changes when someone watches’, may have important implications for our broader models of human social neuroscience and the interactive behavior across diverse populations.”

What I find interesting is that the audience effect does not apply to just us humans. A quick PubMed search shows that mice perform differently when they have an audience. I recently heard about a fascinating study from back in 1969 at the University of Michigan where a professor named Robert Zajonc set up a miniature stadium that housed a race track for cockroaches, lined with cockroach bleachers from which cockroach fans can watch. (Tip of the hat to...

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