Research by an FGCU associate professor of psychology has got people all around the world talking about thinking.
Radio stations, TV networks and magazines here and abroad have been calling Dr. Todd McElroy since his paper on the relationship between thinking and physical activity was published by the Journal of Health Psychology.
“It shocked me,” McElroy says. “I just did a talk show from Bogota, Colombia. Hundreds of media outlets have reported on the story and one of them had over 150,000 shares. I can’t really wrap my head around it.”
With headlines like these, it’s no wonder the news has gone viral:
– “Being lazy could mean you’re very intelligent, study says” (Huffington Post)
– “Why your smart friends can seem like such slackers” (Washington Post)
– “Are you lazy? You might be a genius” (Barry Morgan Show on SoundCloud)
To be clear, the words “lazy” and “laziness” do not appear in McElroy’s work, “The physical sacrifice of thinking: Investigating the relationship between thinking and physical activity in everyday life.” But hey – headlines are by their nature are brief, simplified and catchy — and these are generating plenty of buzz for FGCU.
More precisely, the study found that people who preferred not to think too much tended to be more physically active than those who enjoyed wrestling with complex intellectual tasks and ideas. The differences were more pronounced on weekdays than on weekends, according to McElroy.
“People do seem to want to call it laziness,” he says. “But we’re finding that young people don’t view laziness as negatively as older adults. They talk more about ‘me time.’ ”
Sixty college students at Appalachian State University in North Carolina — McElroy’s former post — were recruited for the study. Their responses to questions determined if they were high or low on the Need for Cognition scale, a well-established tool for measuring interest in thinking. Their physical activity was measured over the course of a week by a wrist tracker.
“Physical activity level is an important contributor to overall human health and obesity,” McElroy writes in the study’s abstract. “Research has shown that humans possess a number of traits that influence their physical activity level, including thinking about social interactions. We examined whether the trait of ‘need for cognition’ was associated with daily physical activity levels.”
The idea for the study grew out of National Science Foundation-supported research McElroy and Appalachian State colleague Dr. David Dickinson had been conducting involving sleep. As he started looking into the connections between thinking and physical activity, McElroy discovered the relationship had not been studied before. He hopes to continue exploring the topic with a different cohort.
“Although college students are a standard participant pool in the vast majority of experimental psychology studies, their behavior and habits may be more indicative of young adult behavior than adult behavior in general,” notes McElroy, who earned doctoral and master’s degrees in social psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. “With the attention this study has gotten, we can only assume we struck a chord. To not follow up and further investigate this would be foolish.”
Besides, web and media chatter aren’t the only indicators that his research hit a nerve. His paper already has been read more than 2,000 times online.
“That’s quite amazing,” McElroy says. “Usually, if 30 or 40 people read a paper it’s a success.”