A member who has spent three months adding weight to the same five lifts walks up to the desk and tells you they want to scrap the whole thing. Their squat has climbed, they are sleeping through the night, and the programme is doing exactly what it promised. This is a classic example of novelty bias, when a glossy new protocol lands on their feed, and the plan that has been quietly working for twelve weeks suddenly feels dull and second-rate.

That pull toward the shiny new option has a name. Novelty bias is the brain’s habit of treating anything new as more valuable, more interesting, or more effective than something familiar, whether or not the new thing is actually any better. It explains why “new” sells a treadmill, a supplement, or a six-week challenge, and why the programme that has served a member best can start to feel like a slog the moment something fresher scrolls past.

The Psychology Behind Novelty Bias

  • What it is: Novelty bias grows out of an older drive to explore. For most of human history, anything unfamiliar was worth a look because the unknown was where food, mates, and predators turned up, and the animals that investigated tended to eat and reproduce more than the ones that sat still. That payoff was reliable enough to become a default setting, so the brain still rewards us for noticing and chasing the new, long after the savannah stopped being the problem.
  • Who found it: Daniel Berlyne mapped this exploratory drive in the 1960s. In Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity (1960) he argued that novel and surprising stimuli raise arousal and grab our attention before we decide to give it, which turned curiosity into a measurable force rather than a vague trait. Half a century on, the neuroscientists Nico Bunzeck and Emrah Düzel, working at University College London and Otto von Guericke University, found the brain circuitry that produces the pull Berlyne had only described.
  • The psychology: Novelty lights up the dopaminergic midbrain, the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area, or SN/VTA, which is the same machinery that handles reward. New information runs through what John Lisman and Anthony Grace in 2005 named the hippocampal-SN/VTA loop: the hippocampus flags something as new, the midbrain answers with a pulse of dopamine, and that dopamine does two jobs at once, pushing us to explore and pressing the experience more firmly into memory. The catch sits in the wiring itself. As soon as a stimulus becomes familiar the brain learns it holds no fresh reward, the dopamine response drops away, and the thrill leaves with it. Psychologists call that fade habituation, and it is the reason the buzz of anything new comes with a built-in expiry date.
  • The key study: In 2006, Bunzeck and Düzel put this to the test with a run of fMRI experiments built around a modified visual oddball task. Volunteers watched streams of greyscale photographs in which most images were already familiar and a minority were one of four things: genuinely new, merely rare, emotionally unpleasant, or a target that called for a button press. The design pulled those four apart on purpose, so the team could see whether the midbrain answers to novelty in particular or to anything odd or important. It answered to novelty. The SN/VTA fired harder for new images than for rare ones, unpleasant ones, or ones that demanded a response, which told the researchers that novelty pays out as its own reward, separate from every other form of salience.

How Novelty Bias Shows Up in Your Gym

  • In Marketing and Sales: Novelty is the easiest thing in the world to sell, which is exactly why the fitness industry leans on it so hard. The same six-week shred gets relaunched every quarter under a new name, a tired bit of kit gets sold as a breakthrough, and a programme you have run for years reappears on the timetable in a fresh font. Each of these borrows the dopamine hit of new to make an old idea feel urgent, and it works at the point of sale. The bill arrives later. Once the shine wears off, the member is left holding the same training they could have done without the marketing, and a quiet sense that they were sold a story.
  • In Client Behaviour and Retention: Novelty bias does its quietest damage in retention. A new joiner gets a real dopamine spike from the unfamiliar room, the new routine, and the new identity as someone who trains now, and for the first few weeks that spike covers for any gaps in their motivation. Habituation then sets in, usually somewhere around the six-week mark, the novelty drains out of the experience, and the behaviour that was leaning on it starts to wobble. The same mechanism drives programme-hopping, where a member ditches a plan that is plainly working the second a newer one appears on their feed, never sticking around long enough to let progressive overload do its slow, unglamorous job.
  • In Programming and Class Design: You can put this bias to work rather than fight it, and the first step is to stop treating novelty and consistency as enemies. They are not. The things that actually move the needle, progressive overload, enough recovery, and repeated practice of the key lifts, have to stay boringly stable from week to week. Novelty belongs in the packaging around them: switch the finisher, rotate the warm-up, run a themed month, chalk a fresh challenge on the board. Keep the engine and change the paint, and the brain gets its fix of new while the structure that produces results never moves.
  • In Business Operations and Staff: Novelty bias shapes your own decisions too, not just your members’. The booking software a rival just switched to, the recovery gadget every podcast is talking about, and the class format that appeared at the gym down the road can all start to feel necessary for no better reason than that they are new. Before spending, the honest question is whether the shiny option fixes a problem you actually have, or whether you are just answering the pull of the unfamiliar. More often than owners like to admit, the dull tool already sitting in the building, used properly, beats the exciting one about to land on the invoice.

Real-World Examples from Other Industries

  • Apple’s annual release cycle: Apple has become one of the most valuable companies on Earth partly by turning “new” into a product in its own right. Every autumn brings another iPhone, often with only modest changes over the last one, wrapped in a launch event engineered to make the model in your pocket feel dated overnight. The hardware step is frequently marginal, yet the upgrade still sells, because the novelty itself is what people are buying. Customers who were perfectly content with last year’s phone feel the tug the moment a newer one exists, which is novelty bias running at industrial scale.
  • Fast fashion and the constant drop: Zara and Shein run on a cycle of new stock so fast it has its own name in the trade, fast fashion, with fresh styles hitting stores and apps every week instead of every season. The clothes are not built to outlast last month’s clothes, and are usually cheaper and flimsier. What brings shoppers back is the unbroken stream of new, the promise that this visit will turn up something they have not seen yet. The whole model is engineered around the brain’s appetite for novelty, and the sheer speed of the drops never gives the dopamine response long enough to habituate.
  • McDonald’s limited-time menu: The McRib has vanished and returned so many times that its comeback is now a seasonal joke, and the joke is the strategy doing precisely what it was built to do. By pulling the sandwich off the menu and reintroducing it as a limited return, McDonald’s switches the novelty response back on in customers who would stroll straight past the thing if it were always there. The recipe has not changed in decades. That on-again, off-again rhythm keeps a permanent product feeling fresh, bolting a hit of novelty bias onto a dose of scarcity.
  • Mere-Exposure Effect: The mere-exposure effect is the direct counterforce to novelty bias. Where novelty makes the unfamiliar feel valuable, mere exposure explains how sheer repetition slowly warms us to something, which is why a solid programme can grow on a member over the weeks instead of going stale.
  • Von Restorff Effect: The Von Restorff effect is the memory half of the same story. A distinctive or novel item stands out from the things around it and gets remembered better, which is the very memory-stamping mechanism that novelty bias leans on.
  • Curiosity Gap Effect: The curiosity gap effect is novelty’s close cousin in marketing. The itch to close an information gap runs on the same explore-for-reward circuitry, which is why “new” and “you won’t believe” end up sharing so many headlines.
  • Salience Bias: Salience bias is easy to confuse with novelty bias, though the two are distinct. Salience is about whatever stands out in the moment, while Bunzeck and Düzel showed the midbrain answers to novelty in particular, not to anything merely attention-grabbing.

The “BS” Takeaway

Most of the fitness industry treats novelty as a sales tactic and nothing more. Slap “new” on the poster, watch the signups roll in, and move on before anyone clocks that the programme underneath is the one they were already doing last year. That trick works exactly once per member. What it also does is teach them that the answer is always the next new thing, which is the precise belief that sends them looking elsewhere the moment your new wears off.

The ethical play is to put novelty where it actually belongs. Hold the training principles steady and a little boring, because steady and boring is what produces results over months and years. Then spend novelty deliberately to keep people attached to the thing that works, through a fresh challenge, a themed block, or a clean restart after a holiday (the same logic that powers the Fresh Start Effect). New is a brilliant way to start a behaviour and a hopeless way to sustain one.

Your members’ brains will always be pulled toward whatever is new. The work is to make sure that the new thing in front of them is also the thing that is good for them.

Bibliography and Further Reading

  • Berlyne, D. E. (1960). Conflict, arousal, and curiosity. McGraw-Hill.
  • Bunzeck, N., & Düzel, E. (2006). Absolute coding of stimulus novelty in the human substantia nigra/VTA. Neuron, 51(3), 369–379.
  • Lisman, J. E., & Grace, A. A. (2005). The hippocampal-VTA loop: Controlling the entry of information into long-term memory. Neuron, 46(5), 703–713.

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