How Does Quantified Self Run?

While self-tracking applications are often advertised with a healthier life and more movement scant studies investigate the effect of self-tracking and those few studies reported contradictory reactions of self-tracking users. Hence, we conducted 12 interviews with self-tracking users to find out which psychological mechanism explains the different responses. As a foundation the cognitive dissonance theory from Festinger (1970) was used. The theory states that people who are aware of two different cognitions feel psychological stress and try to reduce this stress by changing their behavior, finding new information or ignoring the inconsistent information. While the theory was often criticized because of an experimental testing which also allowed other interpretations, our qualitative analysis gives further support to this theory. Furthermore, we found out that self-tracking increases the awareness of two different cognitions and reduces the tendency of denying.