New Year's Resolutions

Before the beginning of the new year, the idea of setting important goals, changing yourself and their lives for the better comes to people's mind more often than usual. However, the fate of most New Year's promises can be described in the words of Oscar Wilde's character - Lord Henry Watton, who noticed that good intentions are just "checks that people write out to a bank where they do not have a current account".

Observations of the Strava fitness application on the activity of almost 100 million subscribers show that the enthusiasm of 80% of people who have decided to play sports since the new year will dry up already on January 19. According to another, geolocation application Foursquare, gym visits, having flared up in January, returns to the average annual norm in February, and at the same time the number of trips to fast food cafes increases to the average annual rate, traditionally decreasing in January.

The results of academic research are not much more comforting. One of the first studies of "attempts at New Year's change" in 1988-1989 was conducted by American psychologists John Norcross and Dominic Vangarelli, who tracked the behavior of 200 Americans for two years, who promised to lose weight in the new year, improve family relations or quit smoking. It turned out that only 77% of them fulfilled their New Year's promises during the first week.

After a month, the share of those who kept their promises decreased to 55%, after 3 months to 43%, after six months to 40%, and in two years to 19%.

Such discouraging statistics can make a person who has decided to change give up. But if you look at the numbers differently, it turns out that about 20% of people achieve their goal.

Failure to promise often does not mean that the goals have changed. Long-term goals remain the same: in the Australian experiment, more than half of the participants admitted that they set themselves the same goal before each new year and chronically cannot achieve it. It's all about the choice that a person makes every day. Knowing the mechanisms that turn New Year's promises into what Lord Henry Watton called "fruitless attempts to go against nature" can help avoid traps on the way to achieving the goal, although it does not make this process easy.

How New Year's promises appeared

It is believed that the first New Year's resolutions, like the New Year's celebration itself, were "invented" in Babylon about 4,000 years ago. During the 12-day religious celebrations, which, however, were not held in winter, but before the spring sowing in March, the inhabitants of the ancient city promised the gods to pay off their remaining debts. Failure to fulfill the vows threatened to punish heaven, which strongly motivated the Babylonians not to shy away from what was promised.

Behavioral economics provides three main explanations why promises to change themselves fail in most cases. All of them are associated with cognitive distortions - traps of thinking.

The first of these distortions is hyperbolic discounting: it means that people tend to prefer a smaller, but immediate reward to a larger one in time. In simple words, a cake at dinner today is more valuable for most people than a slim figure in a year. There can be many reasons for such a discounting of the future - for example, it is often difficult for people to deny themselves immediate pleasure, it is difficult to imagine the scale of pleasure in the future, and finally, over time, preferences may simply change.

This phenomenon was first described in 1975 by a psychiatrist and professor at the University of Cape Town School of Economics George Ainsley, who discovered that by attaching less value to what will happen in the future than to what is happening at the moment, people take impulsive and reckless actions, even if the infidelity of their decision is obvious to themselves. As an example, Ainsley cited Adam and Eve, who preferred to be expelled from Eden in order to taste an apple.

When in the early 1990s Ainsley described all this in a book about motivational states, his idea has already captured the minds of other researchers. In particular, in 1981, one of the founders of behavioral economics, future Nobel laureate Richard Thaler presented evidence of the phenomenon of hyperbolic discounting. The rate of this discount decreases over time, that is, the longer the reward is postponed, the less value it is given. However, the decline is not exponential, as an absolutely rational economic agent would have, but in the form of a hyperbole: for example, many will prefer "one apple now" to "two apples tomorrow", but at the same time will prefer "two apples in a year and one day" to "one apple in a year". Polls conducted by Thaler showed that respondents agree to give up $15 now for $30 in three months, $60 in a year and $100 in three years, which corresponds to a reduction in the annual discount rate from 277% to 139% and up to 63%, respectively.

Adaptability and impulsiveness

Like many other cognitive distortions, hyperbolic discounting is a "programmed" error in the processing and interpretation of information. This is an adaptive evolutionary mechanism that once allowed the human race to survive. What is the priority for survival - to eat a sick one lagging behind the buffalo herd or start tracking down the herd to get a few of the largest animals? An immediate reward is guaranteed, while the future one leaves room for problems and failures that can lead to hunger and death. In modern conditions, the tendency to immediate remuneration is often not adaptive, but impulsive, explains Doctor of Medical Sciences Peter Attia. Long-term weight loss or retirement goals are at a disadvantage compared to a Sunday dinner at a bar.

Hyperbolic discounting makes it difficult to achieve goals that require long efforts and discipline, and makes it difficult to choose what is obviously better than in favor of momentary satisfaction. Therefore, those who lose weight crash out and eat chocolate instead of fresh carrots, students procrastinate instead of preparing for the session in advance, and not the day before it, and smokers continue to spoil their health.

But this "flaw" can be "deceived" by forcing it to work for yourself, writes Peter Attia, MD, founder of Early Medical. To avoid impulsive behavior that occurs with hyperbolic discounting, you can break up large goals into small but quickly achievable ones and reward yourself for each step taken.

If a particular action is followed by a reward, a person receives dopamine, and in this case the changes required by the fulfillment of the promise are perceived as less burdensome.

But the main effect of the reward is that it accelerates the formation of habits.

Thus, in an experiment with 120 students from the University of Chicago who agreed to visit the gym for a reward, those who were required to play sports 8 times a month continued to do so 1.5-2 times more often after the end of the experiment than those who had to practice once a month or choose the frequency themselves.

The second cognitive distortion that prevents the fulfillment of New Year's promises is the rejection of losses: people tend to avoid losses, because losses for them look more significant than similar gains. In other words, the majority would rather not lose 1000 euros than find 1000 euros.

This effect was discovered in 1979 by American psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky ( 1, 2) during work on the theory of perspective, for which Kahneman received in 2002. Nobel Prize in Economics. The fact that the pain of loss is stronger than the pleasure of acquisition, back in 1759 was written by the "father of the market economy" Adam Smith, but Kahneman and Tversky managed to measure this pain: negative emotions from loss are twice as tangible as positive emotions from comparable profit.

Rejection of losses explains failures in fulfilling those New Year's promises that involve abandoning what people value in their lives. This valuable can be, for example, the opportunity to stay cold in a warm bed on a morning instead of jogging.

Like hyperbolic discounting, the rejection of losses can be "deceived". What seems to be a loss can be represented as the return of what was lost: for example, the task of losing weight is easier to accomplish if you perceive the result as regaining slimness, and not as getting a better shape. Another way to make the rejection of losses work for yourself is a clear formulation of what you will lose if you do not keep your promises. It can be, for example, the thought that a missed opportunity to save now will force you to give up traveling next summer, that is, it will lead to the loss of a good vacation.

Another effective way to fulfill promises is a fine for non-fulfillment. A person can fine himself by transferring money to a long-term account, or ask a friend to do it, as, for example, did graduate students of the Faculty of Economics of MIT Dean Carlan and Jan Ayres (now professors at Yale and Northwestern Universities) in the early 2000s.

Both wanted to lose weight, but after unsuccessful attempts decided to rely on the principles of behavioral economics. Having made another New Year's promise to lose weight, Carlan and Aires signed a contract for its implementation.

The contract stipulated how many pounds each of them should lose per week and what the weight should be at the end of the year. Failure to comply even with the weekly norm was punishable with a tangible fine of $500 - if friends paid such a fine every week, it would deprive them of their annual income. At one of the stages of the experiment, Ayres had to give Carlan $15,000. "If I refused to take this money, no other contracts would work in the future,".

The third cognitive distortion that complicates the fulfillment of promises is super confidence: projecting current circumstances, tastes, preferences for the future, people often overestimate their ability to perform a particular task or underestimate the time it takes.

Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and Director of the Center for Behavioral Solutions Research George Levenstein calls such decisions "hot", that is, made under the influence of emotions or desires. But when emotions go away, a person goes into a "cold" state, his behavior changes, and motivation disappears. So, gym season ticket buyers train on average twice as often as planned.

If a promise is made under the influence of emotions, the gap between intention and actual actions is almost inevitable, warns Jocelyn Miller from the consulting company London Economics. Plans for the future are feasible if they are built in a "cold" state and are step-by-step projects. For example, when it comes to sports, the plan "do more exercise" has much less chance of success than the plan "do exercises for at least 30 minutes 3 times a week". It is better if the plan consists of numerous small but achievable steps (bailed by rewards). This also applies to the number of goals: instead of changing your whole life at once, it is better to start with one or two aspects.

Formulating effect

Studies have shown that the effectiveness of achieving goals depends on how they are formulated. In many cases, a simple reformulation of goals can help achieve them, says Per Carlbring, professor of psychology at Stockholm University. For example, if the goal is to stop eating sweets in order to lose weight, the wording "I will eat fruit every day" is more likely to help to achieve this. Then you replace sweets with fruits and probably lose weight and at the same time do not lose your determination, Carlbring advises: "You can't erase your behavior. But you can replace it with another one." Vague wording is another reason for unfulfilled promises: such formulations contain immeasurable goals (for example, "to be happy" without defining what it means), which is why reference points are lost.

Another effective way to stick to what was promised is to declare your intention publicly, for example, to friends or subscribers on the social network. Studies show that people tend to try to fulfill such promises because they do not want to spoil their reputation, disappoint or become the object of public condemnation.

As soon as a person has a habit, it often turns into an automatic action. This property of human thinking can both prevent the fulfillment of promises made to themselves and help them.

Thinking consists of two systems - intuitive, or adaptive, and analytical: the first one "recognizes" patterns previously laid in the subcortex when processing information, the second "works" through logic and reflection. Kahneman called them System 1 and System 2. System 1 makes decisions "without human participation": for example, a person who constantly works at the computer does not have to think about where the key is - his fingers "press" the necessary letters themselves.

Well-learned skills are gradually moving from the "thinking" System 2 to the automatic System 1 in order not to waste limited cognitive resources on already mastered tasks.

Similarly, habits are "sewn" into System 1. If a person has formed a habit, for example, to eat chocolate when he is nervous, System 1 will do everything to recreate the usual behavior under stress. Almost half of the actions people perform unconsciously - solely on the basis of habits.

On the one hand, such a number of "automated processes" in a person's life frees the brain from routine, that is, a person does not have to think about what to do after he, for example, opens the door and enters his house. On the other hand, it greatly complicates any changes in life.

To change behavior, you will have to change your habits - that is, get rid of the old and acquire new ones. To form a habit, certain actions need to be repeated many times to "transfer" them to the autopilot system. Making a habit is easier to learn something that is easier to learn.

Formulating a task for the future, no matter how many failures await a person on the way to their implementation, is the first and most important step towards change.

The beginning of a new period really increases the motivation to start acting: studies have established a causal relationship between the temporary boundary and the incentive to achieve the goal. Therefore, even if previous attempts to fulfill New Year's promises failed, the beginning of the new year is a reason to try again:

"The beginning of the year gives a new motivation to achieve goals, turn the page of previous failures <...> and tell yourself: it was the old me, but the new self will be different."

As long as it doesn’t become a coping mechanism.

Attac!