The Effect of Race on the Social-Cognitive-Beliefs of Observers of Behavior Models

Oyibo, K.; Vassileva, J.

During this current COVID-19 pandemic, video-based behavior modeling has become a popular persuasive technique to motivate exercise performance in most fitness apps. However, there is limited research on the effectiveness of race-based tailoring. To bridge this gap, we investigated users' social-cognitive-belief profile when observing behavior models performing bodyweight exercises and the moderating effect of race. We based our study on 567 participants (50 blacks and 517 whites) recruited from Canada and United States. We asked the participants to watch a video modeling a bodyweight exercise and answer questions on three social-cognitive beliefs: perceived self-efficacy, perceived self-regulation, and outcome expectation. The results of a three-way repeated-measure analysis of variance showed that there is an interaction between the race of the observer and the race of the behavior model. Among white observers, there is no significant difference between their overall social-cognitive belief when observing white models and that when observing black models. However, among black observers, there is an effect of the race of the behavior model. They have a significantly higher overall social-cognitive belief when observing white models than when observing black models. We discuss our findings in the context of tailoring behavior models to users of different races. © 2021 ACM.