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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
HU Caifeng
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5542/2026.05.003
Chongqing Sanxia University of Science and Technology, Chongqing, China
Short videos have become an activity that occupies an extremely high proportion of college students’ daily time structure. They do not directly “cause” students to be physically inactive; rather, they reduce the probability that exercise behavior occurs by changing reward structures, self-control resources, affective evaluations, and the process of motivation internalization. Drawing on three lines of theorizing—dual-process theory, the strength model of self-control together with habit research, and self-determination theory—this paper proposes four pathways through which short videos weaken exercise motivation: raising the threshold for immediate reward so that exercise appears “not interesting enough”; depleting limited self-control resources; strengthening the automatic activation of negative affective evaluations of exercise; and squeezing out autonomy-supportive activity space, thereby delaying motivation internalization. On this basis, four pathways for reconstruction are proposed: reducing initiation costs through situational self-control; rebuilding perceptible immediate feedback; replacing reliance on willpower with the cultivation of habits; and taking behavioral substitution rather than behavioral deprivation as the intervention goal.
short videos, physical exercise, motivation, self-control, habit, college students
HU Caifeng. (2026). The Weakening and Reconstruction of College Students’ Exercise Motivation in the Short-Video Era. Psychology Research, Vol. 16, No. 5, 257-262. doi:10.17265/2159-5542/2026.05.003.
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