Towards Better New Year’s Resolutions

by Gary Berg-Cross

I’m not a big one for making New Year’s resolutions. Mark Twain touched on it-
“New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions.” Further, according to Wikipedia New Year's Resolutions come from the old Summerian-Judeo-Christian concepts of human imperfection. This has evolved to institutionalize the idea of getting God’s mercy by apologies for one’s wrong doing over the past year. It also fits the Protestant idea of self-improvement which is OK.

It also fits what Barbara Ehrenreich calls America’s love affair with positive thinking, which is taken to task (along with an urgent call for a new commitment to realism) in Bright-sided How Positive Thinking is Undermining America.

There’s the older Catholic ethic of giving up pleasures (e.g. alcohol and meat) during pre-Easter Lent as an act of discipline. Discipline is good, self discipline better and looking as these as personal vows not religiously dictated makes sense as a secularist. It;a a gift we give ourselves to enhance the self, others or the world in a way that makes sense to oneself.

I see that people are still getting and giving advice on how to get personal improvements. It is understandable that people try to take possession of 2012 by setting a reasonable personal goals. There are some smaller scale, modern ones such as Nick Bilton’s promise to take breaks from his tech devices (see his Bits blog post “Disruptions: Resolved in 2012: To Enjoy the View Without Help From an iPhone,” )

Getting a job, living the American dreams, change a lifestyle, and losing weight are all popular. More denotations to the poor, become more reflective or becoming more environmentally responsible are all grander goals and sets them apart from ordinary resolutions. In this category I’ve seen worthy goals/projects listed on this blog:

· “Turn-off the TV,

· elect intelligent School Board members,

· void excessive debts from student loans,

· support Head Start”

Edd Doerr might add a resolution to write more letters to the editor on topics of interest.

But as Tara Parker-Pope noted in her New York Times column, a third of resolutions are ditched by the end of January. Four out of five people simply give their resolutions up (see Why Your New Year's Resolution Will Fail by February 1.

One problem comes from the type of resolutions we make. Many of then are just too extreme all-or-nothing New Year’s decisions. Taking on a big challenge is heroic and it is nice to start the year that way, but this one step transformation is often something that is so unrealistic we can’t possibly keep the commitment. Eric Zorn, put it this way-

“Making resolutions is a cleansing ritual of self assessment and repentance that demands personal honesty and, ultimately, reinforces humility. Breaking them is part of the cycle.”

People know they will have difficulty especially losing weight or making health gains. Deep down we might not expect ourselves to keep to such a goal, but are proud to start. But as CNN noted in its Why bother with resolutions? Because failure inspires there is value in trying. And maybe there is value in just developing the self control that resolutions require. It may be a dramatic end to procrastination. It seems good in itself to commit to developing what Psychologists call our own “locus of control”

OK, so let’s try. Does Social Science suggest anything useful? Dan Ariely, Decision Scientist at Duke University, has several ideas. They aren’t exactly new, but being based on study have some value.

A place to start is that many resolutions are general and vague (support Head Start might be vague). We don’t really believe we can hit them because the goal is uncertain. So the obvious remedy is Be specific, very specific. Ariely suggests the obvious fact that:

“the more clear cut your resolutions are, the easier they are to handle. Very specific restrictions make it easy to know if you are following the resolution.”

Maybe there is time to rescue that vague resolution before February. So to lose weight it helps to understand where your calories are coming from. You may need to cut down on desserts, but “ don't say you'll simply eat fewer desserts." Instead locate the action in space and/or time. Maybe you have the will power to avoid eating desserts late at night or on weekdays or at that expensive restaurant. This becomes a pragmatic/operational definition of what “fewer” means.

What else? Here are 4 more I’ve adapted from a summary by Ariely and his Duke Colleagues:

Get inspired. That is, make it meaningful to you (but also concrete as noted above). Meaningful resolutions have sticking power even if they aren’t grand challenges. Beth Reardon, director of integrative nutrition at Duke Integrative Medicine put it this way:

"If you want your resolution to act like Velcro rather than Teflon, be sure to link it to deep, authentic intentions. For example, resolving to order more food from Community Supported Agriculture is more powerful if you link it to your desire to support local businesses as well as your own health."

Reflective, Planned Readiness Resolutions are most effective if they are based on a genuine readiness to change a behavior – evidenced by development of a plan and consideration of likely effects, difficulty etc. Don’t just jump into it, but consider it.

Andy Silberman, director of Duke's Personal Assistance Program counsels not resolving to take on a big change until “you can explain how concerned you are about the behavior. It is also useful to outline what your motivation is to change, what specifically you want to accomplish and how confident you are that you can make the change.”

Environment & setting yourself up for success. Scott Huettel, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke who studies decision-making, cites pre-committing to, and expecting, changed circumstances. Environmental structuring is a powerful tool for making a resolution stick. An example might be changing your environment to help reduce monthly spending. OK, so pre-commitment to cutting up a credit card (or placing one in the freezer) to slow down spending.

The right circumstances just help one to make better decisions that are less impulse driven. That’s a step towards more control & less procrastination which is a good end in itself. And it may help avoid Mark Twain’s observation about New Year's Day… “now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”

Rationalizing Irrational Choices: That $45 entree and presidential choices

By Gary Berg-Cross

The size of the Sunday supplement is one sign that officially holiday shopping season. Modern day products and their ads presents us many choices of conflicting quality, quantity and various extras (such as free delivery, insurance, return policy.) Cognitive Psychology & Decision Science tells us quite a bit about human choice behavior and it is in part a story of irrational decisions and inadequate knowledge employed in the service of “shopping”, but also with such things as political choices.

To be sure there is an external element of advertizing manipulation and demand characteristics of over stimulating, shopping environments that pump us full of misleading facts. Something similar might be said of political choices and their campaigns. The combo of exploding stimuli and controlled circumstances sometimes leads us to hasty decisions. Both commercial and political interests want this to be the case. But these type of manipulations works because there are cognitive biases built into the human info processing system by evolution. We are a mix of lofty reasoning layered on top of some tendencies for hasty, impression-based decisions that makes us prone to error.

The basic understanding of this comes from psychological theory, but there is a big, applied area of work done is other areas of Social Science. Economists investigate cognitive biases in a sub-area they call Behavioral Economics which uses experiments to study what people actually do when they buy, sell, change jobs, date, marry and make other real-life decisions such as what gifts to buy. (I find the behavioral term a bit of a misnomer since the behavior they observe is based on a thinking process, but it does get the point across that we are looking at realistic behavior, often scaled down a bit to be studied. Dan Ariely, formerly of MIT and now a Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics is one of the many researcher in this area. An overview of his findings on human quirks is in his book “Predictably Irrational as well as in an entertaining TED video here . Ariely studied,” which is a captivating read for those curious about the oddities of human nature starting with the role that relative choices have on our decisions.

The starting point for Ariely’s work, now a famous example in his book, came to him while browsing the Web he contemplated an ad, on the Web site of the Economist. A portion of his discussion of this is described below.

There were 3 subscription options:

1. Internet subscription for $59 seemed reasonable.
2. $125 print subscription-seemed a bit expensive, but still reasonable.
3. a print and Internet subscription for $125 – expensive, but no more than print only????

Ariely wondered would want to buy the print option alone since both the Internet and the print subscriptions were offered for the same price. Reasoning through this he realized that the Economist folks, like political advisers, were actually manipulating readers using an important aspect of human behavior: humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don’t have an internal value meter that tells us how much such things as a magazine subscription is worth. The same is sort of true in judging the value of candidates. How bad is it for a candidate to be extreme on immigration, but good on the environment? Such situations amount to a cognitive dilemma so we use a simplifying strategy. We focus on the relative values. We often ask how does one thing compare to another?

In the case of the Economist, we may not be certain that a $59 Internet- only subscription was a better deal than the $125 print- only option. But he could believe that:

“the print and-Internet option for $125 was better than the print- only option at $125. In fact, you could reasonably deduce that in the combination package, the Internet subscription is free! “

We might say that our choice in the print-only option slants us towards a different. The print-only choice is a phony choice because it makes us think relatively that the print-and-internet option is a better deal because it has something ‘free’, when in fact , this impression is just created because we’ve just been presented with a fake, worse deal.

Something similar happens with restaurant choices. A few years ago people noted a sudden rise of $40 entrees. It wasn’t just a price creep, but the result of sophisticated calculation by a new breed of menu “engineers” using what we know of relative choice. Research had proved that highly priced menu entrees increase revenue even if no one orders them. Why? Because a $45 steak entree makes a $36 lamb choice seem like “a deal.” As one of the menu consultant put it:

“Just putting one high price on the menu will take your average check up, …. “My mom taught me to never order the most expensive thing on the menu, but you’ll order the second.”

And looking at some of the political candidates it occurred to me that political engineers are counting of similar 'entree" strategies. It’s much more complicated than a restaurant situation, but I get the impression that the presence of some candidates slants voters towards other candidates as the reasonable choice. If there were not, for example, so many extreme conservative candidates in the Republican field than other candidates would seem too conservative to “independent voters.” If there were not so many choices on the right Obama would look more like the centrist politician he is and couldn't be portrayed as a socialist.

The political issues are too complex for most people to know exactly what they want in a candidate. But seeing them and reading about them in a particular context gives a hasty impression of who is extreme and who is moderate. Of course if candidates were like cars we could test drive one, but the closest we get to this is in these very artificial candidate debates with talking point sound bites. Not much rationality and knowledge of the facts shown there. It’s a sorry state for political shopping. A problem is that we can't easily exit this restaurant of inadequate choices for an old fashion political diner down the road serving better entrees.