Not just for your health alone: Regular exercisers' decision-making in unrelated domains

Do regularly physically active individuals differ in their decision-making from people who are not regularly physically active? Across five studies, we document a novel benefit of being regularly physically active for decisions that require the appropriate weighing of goal-relevant versus goal-irrelevant information. Usually, when faced with a mix of relevant and irrelevant attribute information, decision makers find it difficult to ignore the irrelevant information, and as such, "dilute" their judgments (i.e., judgments become less extreme). Such a dilution effect has been amply documented in past research. In contrast, we find that people who engage in regular leisure physical activity are less susceptible to dilution effects. Beyond the dilution effect, we also find similar benefits of being regularly physically active for decisions involving desirability-feasibility trade-offs. The results hold across multiple replicates, diverse samples, and different measures of regular physical activity. We also rule out several potential alternative accounts (e.g., demographics, personality traits). The results cannot be explained by physical effort alone as these benefits are observed only for regular leisure physical activity and not for occupational physical activity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).