2017年4月18日， 國際學術權威刊物自然出版集團旗下子刊《Nature Communications》雜誌上線上發表了美國麻省理工學院斯隆商學院Sinan Aral研究員的一篇研究論文， 論文顯示運動具有社會傳染性。 綜合數位健身追蹤設備所得資料以及社交網路分析， 研究人員發現， 一個人的跑步習慣會影響其朋友的跑步習慣。
雖然之前已有研究人員表示健康相關的習慣(如肥胖和吸煙)具有傳染性， 但是一直缺乏可以證明這種社會性影響的確切證據。 在本研究中， Sinan Aral和Christos Nicolaides記錄了約110萬人的每日鍛煉模式、地理位置和社交網路關係， 他們全體總計在5年的時間裡跑了逾3.5億公里。
綜合而言， 這些結果表明鍛煉具有社會傳染性， 並揭示了最能影響這種健康行為的人際關係。
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原文摘要：
We leveraged exogenous variation in weather patterns across geographies to identify social contagion in exercise behaviours across a global social network. We estimated these contagion effects by combining daily global weather data, which creates exogenous variation in running among friends, with data on the network ties and daily exercise patterns of ∼1.1M individuals who ran over 350M km in a global social network over 5 years. Here we show that exercise is socially contagious and that its contagiousness varies with the relative activity of and gender relationships between friends. Less active runners influence more active runners, but not the reverse. Both men and women influence men, while only women influence other women. While the Embeddedness and Structural Diversity theories of social contagion explain the influence effects we observe, the Complex Contagion theory does not. These results suggest interventions that account for social contagion will spread behaviour change more effectively.