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The Automatic Way To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

The Automatic Way To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

Many New Year’s resolutions are about redemption. Maybe you aren’t the sort of person you want to be. Maybe you aren’t kind enough to others (strangers, co- workers, family members). Maybe you suffer from a self-control problem involving cigarettes, alcohol or gambling. Maybe you procrastinate; maybe you’re impatient or impulsive. Maybe you haven’t taken steps that would enable you to make your life better — with more time off from work, a vacation in a gorgeous setting, an adventure or two.

On New Year’s Eve, you resolve to make a change. But within a month, you’re back to your normal patterns. How come?

Some clues can be found in a study with the revealing title, “Everyone Believes in Redemption.” The paper, by the economists Robert Letzler of the Federal Trade Commission and Joshua Tasoff of Claremont Graduate University, doesn’t involve New Year’s resolutions. But it demonstrates that people suffer from both unrealistic optimism and inertia, which make it hard for them to carry out their plans.

Letzler and Tasoff gave the participants in their study an opportunity to earn $20 by redeeming a mail-in form. The subjects were instructed to print out a “certification page,” which they were required to include with their form.

Participants were also asked to predict the likelihood that they would send in the form. As it happens, their responses were wildly optimistic. Actual redemption rates ended up being about 50 percent lower than what the participants predicted. In other words, they resolved to mail in the form, and they fully expected to do so — but ultimately they didn’t. (Similar patterns are observed in the real world; each year, American consumers fail to mail in at least $1 billion in potential rebates.)

Can anything be done to help? Letzler and Tasoff tried three different interventions.

First, they informed people about the low redemption rates of earlier participants. But this information, helpful though it would seem, had no effect on people’s optimism about what they would themselves do or on the likelihood that they would mail in the form.

Second, Letzler and Tasoff sent people emails to remind them of the approaching deadline for redemption. The researchers had reason to think that this intervention would be effective, because reminders have been found to work in (for example) getting people to pay their bills and to come to doctor appointments. But in the case of the rebates, reminders had no effect. People ignored them.

Finally, Letzler and Tasoff eliminated the requirement that subjects print out and submit a certification page as part of the redemption process. This was the only intervention that worked. By making things easier, they increased redemption rates by about 20 percent.

The important lesson here is that simplification brought people’s predictions closer in line with reality by changing their behavior, not their beliefs. Once the process became a bit easier, people became more likely to take action and thus to make good on their predictions.

When people are unrealistically optimistic about what they will do, Letzler and Tasoff conclude, it is because they don’t pay enough attention to the costs and burdens involved. When they resolve to act, and when they make inaccurate predictions about their own behavior, the benefits of action are salient, but the costs are not.

Consider New Year’s resolutions in this light. It’s easy to resolve to be more altruistic, to exercise greater self-control, to be more patient, or to enhance one’s life, but it’s costly to do these things. Suppose that you aren’t always as generous and kind as you would like to be, or that you have trouble resisting temptation, or that you don’t give yourself enough time off. If so, it’s probably because it’s costly to do those things, and it’s hard to anticipate those costs and burdens in advance.

The best remedy is to find ways to reduce such costs and burdens. If you want to be more altruistic, you might set up automatic monthly gifts to your favorite charity. If you want to increase your self-control, you might alter your environment so that you run into temptations less often — for example, by keeping less food in your refrigerator. If you want to have an adventure or two, you might accompany your New Year’s resolution with a purchase, today or tomorrow, of a plane ticket.

Months or even weeks after New Year’s, many people learn that optimism and inertia are a potent combination. To overcome them, it helps to make redemption automatic — or at least a lot simpler.

Cass R. Sunstein, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the Robert Walmsley University professor at Harvard Law School and a former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He is the co-author of  Nudge and the author of  Simpler. He is also author of  Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas, forthcoming in March.

Photo: nigelhowe via Flickr

It’s Still The Economy, Stupid

As he stood before the old Arkansas Statehouse on Saturday afternoon, talking to thousands of cheering friends and supporters about the meaning of the presidential campaign they began twenty years ago, Bill Clinton seemed to identify with Barack Obama.

“Now the big challenge to our perfect union once again is a terrible economic crisis, different, deeper, and more difficult than the one I faced,” he said. “Another young president is facing similar challenges … and underlying those challenges is the same old debate about whether government is the problem or whether we need smart government in a changing economy, working together to create the opportunities of tomorrow.”

On many occasions during the weekend reunion of Clinton’s 1992 campaigners and former White House staffers in Little Rock, the former president voiced support for the current one, and concern for the predicament he confronts. But what was just as striking as Clinton’s empathy was the anxiety among those who had once worked for him, who are deeply worried about the isolation and inertia they perceive in the Obama White House, and what that may portend for next year’s election. There is almost nothing they desire more than success for their adversary of four years ago. They still believe — with ample reason — that both the ’92 campaign and the administration that followed offer significant clues to the renewal of Obama’s chances. (The Clinton foundation commissioned a collection of essays written for the occasion by the likes of Chelsea Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, historians Sean Wilentz and Ted Widmer, and Center for American Progress President John Podesta, among others, that suggests just how relevant those ideas remain today.)

At the two poles of the Clinton camp are the president himself, who has repeatedly and publicly offered the most positive outlook on Obama, and James Carville, the irrepressible political consultant, media personality, and captain of the ’92 team, who recently warned, with characteristic restraint, that Obama’s declining polls are cause for “panic” and staff firings, at the very least. While the other Clinton veterans may have wanted to laugh at Carville’s outburst, they couldn’t this time — because he articulated what they have been silently thinking. Most agree with the simple advice on a big button available at Carville’s steakhouse reception last Saturday night: “It’s Still the F—ing Economy, Stupid!”

That seems obvious enough, of course, if not a worn cliche. The question is what, if anything, Obama can do about it. From Carville’s perspective, the tax cuts and infrastructure spending of the American Jobs Act probably won’t cure what is driving down the president’s numbers. And while Clinton has endorsed the legislation as “a good plan,” he clearly agrees it isn’t enough, not only because the response is not sufficient to the crisis, but because the White House persistently fails to mount a persuasive case for itself and against its foes. Repeatedly over the weekend, Clinton urged that Democrats learn how to respond to the anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party Republicans with a forceful, emotional storyline. At a panel discussion sponsored by the Clinton School of Public Service on Friday evening, he first listened as Carville and other veterans of his first campaign held forth. Then he seized the microphone to talk again about the topics that have been preoccupying him since the midterm debacle of November 2010:

“We need a coherent narrative. The No. 1 rule of effective politics, especially if the people you’re running against have a simple narrative — that government is always the problem, there is no such thing as a good tax or a bad tax cut, there’s no such thing as a good program or a bad program cut, no such thing as a good regulation or a bad deregulation — if you’re going to fight that, your counter-[argument] has to be rooted in the lives of other people.”

Acknowledging that the radical right has tapped into a powerful, traditional suspicion of government in America, he said, “When the Tea Party started out, at least they were against unaccountable behavior from top to bottom. … If you want to go against that grain, you’ve got to tell people you understand it’s a privilege and a responsibility to spend their tax money — but there are some things we have to do together. And that’s the purpose of government, to do the things we have to do together that we can’t do on our own. If we can make that choice credible, then our candidates, starting with the president, and our principles, will be fine.”