#22: Why Would Anyone keep making New Year's resolutions?
#22: Why Would Anyone keep making New Year's resolutions?
Reality checks + a permission slip
There is abundant advice going around this week about New Year’s Resolutions (let’s call them NYRs), and more broadly about #goals.
Set goals this way. Formulate objectives that way. Not too many, lest you get overwhelmed! Tell your accountability buddy about your NYRs; meditate on them, alone, in the woods. Chop your goals into manageable chunks; set a theme for the year; distill your objectives into a one-word intention; stick one adjective on a tee-shirt; call it a practice, not resolutions; set quarterly goals instead; focus on what you want to gain, not what you want to avoid; make them fun and gamify your life; don’t make them at all, you’ll only feel bad.
Plus it seems that:
almost everybody sets New Year’s resolutions
few people stick to them
yet we do it again every January until the end of forever
Is that true? Why?
1. Does everybody set New Year’s resolutions?
Many people do, but they’re far from a majority.
According to an Economist/YouGov poll carried out in December, about a quarter of U.S. adults surveyed1 said they planned to make NYRs in 2022. A 2020 study quotes much lower figures in similar polls in Sweden, with 12 to 18% of participants saying they intend to make resolutions the following year. (It also mentions recent US polls with higher figures—44%—than in the ones carried out by YouGov.)
Regardless of the actual numbers, maybe it feels like everybody is busy making resolutions because we hear so much about it at this time of year, not least in advertising (gym subscription! diet diet diet) and on social media.
A cross-cultural analysis of NYRs, published last year, says the “ritual declaration of commitments crosses centuries, calendars, cultures, and modes of communication,” and that NYRs have recently become a ‘social media ritual’ in very different places in the world.
The study compared NYR tweets in English, German, Japanese, Italian, and Korean. Apart from English, these languages are tied to specific places that represent different value systems, although they are all located in the developed Global North2. (If you live in, or know of, a place where NYRs are not a thing at all, please let me know.)
2. How many of these people achieve their New Year’s resolutions?
Previous research backs the idea that “people start the year feeling strong in their resolutions, but success tapers off as the year progresses,” wrote Hannah Moshontz, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison, in her 2020 PhD in psychology and neuroscience, which focussed on New Year’s resolutions. For instance, a 1988 study of 200 New Year’s resolvers found that, one week into the new year, 77% of participants had maintained their resolutions; that proportion dropped to 55% after one month, 40% after six months, and 19% at the two-year follow-up.
In her own work, Moshontz found that “contrary to theory, many resolutions were neither successful nor unsuccessful, but instead were still being pursued or were on hold at the end of the year.”
We are not equal before goals. “Some people are high in conscientiousness, born with a temperament where they can plan, stick to things,” said psychology researcher Richard Koestner in an interview on the Being Human podcast last year. “But even they have a set amount of self-control,” adds Koestner, who leads the human motivation lab at McGill University in Montréal, Canada.
And success can be hard to measure, anyway: Are you aiming to, say, laugh three minutes per day with your kids, or to “live more joyfully”?
3. Do people keep making resolutions until they die?
Eventually, people seem to drop the idea.
According to the YouGov survey I cited above, the proportion of respondents who say they make NYRs decreases with age: from 40% of people between 18 and 30 years old, down to 14% of respondents over 65.
Of course, we would need data from the exact same survey carried out decades in the past and in the future (and in other places), to draw solid conclusions3. I, for one, used to write down earnest NYRs as a teen, and don’t anymore.
It makes sense for humans to set an intention at special times of the year: it’s the fresh-start effect, in the words of a 2014 study by Hengshen Dai and other researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (at the time). They showed that Google searches for the term “diet”, actual gym attendance, and commitments to pursue goals all increase following “temporal landmarks” like the beginning of a week or semester, or a birthday.
The authors say that these landmarks “relegate past imperfections to a previous period, induce people to take a big-picture view of their lives, and thus motivate aspirational behaviors”.
How do I set good resolutions and stick to them?
You still want to know.
In the podcast interview I mentioned above, Koestner says we are more likely to achieve goals that are intrinsically motivating, as opposed to something you feel you have to do:
“I’ve built a 20-year research program showing over and over and over that you really want to select goals that you’re interested in, and that seem meaningful. It should be a goal that you endorse. It should be a goal that you feel like: ‘Holy cow! I can’t believe I’m getting to do this’.”
“if you set an autonomous goal—the ones you do out of interest and value—you’re more likely to make an implementation plan, too; being specific about when, where and how.”
Moshontz warns that, in her study, goal properties (like, say, specificity) “did not have large, universal, or practically meaningful effects on success”. She writes of the setting of New Year’s resolutions:
“[It] is broadly assumed to be meaningfully affected by goal-varying factors (as evidenced by the advice columns published even in reputable news outlets about setting better resolutions every January). […] such advice [is] likely unwarranted. […] It seems that nothing – not even motivation, likely the most robust factor supported by thousands of empirical studies and hundreds of theories – can sway outcomes of goal pursuit dramatically.”
That doesn’t mean that none of it matters. But real life is complex, real people are all different, and there is no silver bullet to set perfectly attainable New Year’s resolutions.
Also, we are in the midst of a never-ending pandemic! As Koestner points out:
“The self-control demands of getting through everyday life when you’re worried about being infected or infecting others and worried about the future are so great that it’s actually very hard to set new goals.”
So: Set resolutions if you want to; formulate them how you prefer. I hope you have a kind, truthful 2022 either way.
The proportion is rather stable regardless of gender, income bracket, urban or rural dwelling. Blacks and Hispanics in the sample are more likely to say they make NYRs than white respondents.
This quote from the paper is a little off-topic, but very interesting:
“we cautiously propose that worsening socio-economic conditions may drive a shift towards inward- looking value priorities. […] we can speculate that relative socio-economic stability allows German- speakers to focus their resolutions on long-term societal goals while increasing pressure to function in a ‘flexible low wage economy’ […] motivates Korean-speakers to focus on individual achievement. Similarly, the enduring effects of the Eurozone crisis […] may be a factor behind a disproportional concern for self-care and the widespread use of dark humor in Italian tweets.”
I did find similar trends by age group in other surveys from recent years, including this one from 2013.