At the Curiosity Company, our mission is to help decision-makers make better decisions. And there is no better time to talk about decision-making than while contemplating the wreckage of your New Year’s Resolutions.
After all, how hard can it be to keep a New Year’s Resolution? And I don’t mean tricky ones like becoming a more considerate husband or a better listener, but simple ones like learning how to weld.
For six years straight (ever since reading Matthew Crawford’sShopcraft as Soulcraft), I’ve had “learn how to weld” at the top of my (typically short) list of resolutions. I’ve made it as far as enquiring about night school welding classes, but I’m still no closer to being able to tell you the difference between a TIG and a MIG weld. Given my whole professional life has been about understanding behaviour change, this in ability to keep to a simple resolution always surprises me. But should it?
New Year’s Resolutions are tougher than you might think. In one study by Richard Wiseman from the United Kingdom, 88% of the participants failed to stick to their resolutions. This is disheartening enough, but other studies suggest the success rate might even be lower. In Wiseman’s study, half of the participants didn’t even think they’d stick to their resolutions when they made them. And it seems their pessimism is well founded, with most people having abandoned their resolutions long before the end of January. Indeed, the second Friday in January is known in some circles as “Quitter’s Day” to rub salt into our wounds. And if that’s not depressing enough, consider the fact that this year that second Friday fell on January 9th. I have takeaways in the fridge that have lasted longer than most people’s New Year’s Resolutions.
But the failure of those resolutions teaches us a great deal about why behaviour change is so hard. And not just change in our personal lives, but also our organisations, communities, and the world in general.
To understand why, you have to think about the unspoken assumptions that underpin New Year’s resolutions. The whole point of making them is that we assume we know what will make us happy, that we know what “happiness” feels like, and that we know what we need to change in order to achieve it. Given we’ve only got our past experiences to draw on, we also assume that our memories are a useful guide to the future.
These assumptions are so fundamental that we rarely consider the need to question them. But what if some of them are wrong? What if all of them are wrong?
Let’s start with being able to predict what will make us happy. One of the more counterintuitive findings from the social sciences is that we’re just not much good at predicting how we’re going to feel in the future. Predicting future emotions is called “affective forecasting,” and all the research shows that it’s rarely straightforward. The problem isn’t, as the Rolling Stones noted, that we can’t always get what we want; it’s that we rarely want what we get.
This has real implications for your New Year’s resolutions and for the pursuit of happiness in general. It means that while you may think that a new house, spouse, or waistline will make you happy, the chances are they won’t—or at least not in the way you were hoping.
The gap between what we think we’ll feel when we make our predictions and what we actually end up feeling when we achieve our goals is called, imaginatively, “the impact bias.” This bias has two parts: the intensity of the emotion and the duration. What the impact bias teaches us is that achieving our goals seldom makes us as happy as we expected (the intensity of the emotion), and that happiness rarely lasts as long as we anticipated (the duration of the emotion).
Psychologists use the concept of the “hedonic treadmill” to explain how we all grow accustomed to new things in our lives, regardless of how hard we’ve worked to get them. These new things quickly become just another part of the background of our lives. Which is why the metaphor of a treadmill is such an astute one, with all of us constantly needing to chase new goals just to maintain the same level of happiness. It’s our modern equivalent of Sisyphus, fruitlessly rolling his large boulder up that steep mountain in the Greek myth.
If that’s not enough, when it comes to making any change in our life, we have to overcome a deep-seated tendency to prefer things to stay the same. This is the idea of “status quo bias.” Think of it like inertia in Newtonian physics, but in psychology it means that we either like to stay at rest (by doing nothing) or keep doing what we have always done.
In the face of this inertia, self-control (“willpower”) is a pretty feeble thing. One of the reasons it gets sand kicked in its face is that, even at its feeble best, self-control is a very limited resource. Consequently, the more we use of it in one area, the less we have left to use in another. This is the notion of “ego depletion,” developed by Roy Baumeister and his colleagues, and it points to real limits about what we can achieve through the force of will alone. As we experience ego depletion, it becomes harder to stick to the goals we set for ourselves. If you’ve ever had the kind of day at work that prompts you to skip your workout and order pizza for dinner instead, then you already know what ego depletion feels like.
The second mistake we often make with New Year’s resolutions is thinking we need to be “inspired” to reach our goals—that is, that we need to feel like doing the work required to achieve them. So, say my New Year’s Resolution is to start running again to lose some of those extra kilos I put on over Christmas; the inspiration myth says that I first need to feel like running. Inspiration is a weak and fickle fuel for behaviour, and there are much better options. Chuck Close, the American artist and photographer, captured this beautifully when he said, “Inspiration is for amateurs—the rest of us just show up and get to work.” The lesson here is that we need to create the habits that will result in the realisation of our goals. To do this, we need to externalise our motivation so it endures regardless of how we feel. We can do this by telling others of our resolution, keeping an exercise tracker on the fridge, or even betting against ourselves to fail.
The third mistake we make is to reach for resolutions with “stop” in the title rather than “start.” One of the great insights from the social sciences is that we never really break a bad habit; rather, we replace it with a better one.
New Year’s resolutions are useful because they are a stark reminder of how hard change can be, but also because they show that change is possible once you free yourself from any illusions about how easy that change will be. It’s that realisation that will prevent your resolutions going in one year and out the other. And it’s a great demonstration of how social science insights really can help decision-makers make better decisions.