Do New Year's Resolutions Work?

At the start of a New Year, almost half of us make resolutions to work out more, eat less, be better parents, blow up less, be more grateful, stop smoking or travel the world. Do New Year's resolutions work? Recent research by psychologists shows they work better than we think. But the real cause might be something else. What really works, behavioral economists say, is posting your promises and boxing yourself in. Online witnesses of your commitments raise the stakes and make you much more likely to meet your promises. One site takes this quite literally: tens of thousands of people use StickK.com to make contracts and put money on the line to elevate the price of failure.

In a conversation with friends around New Year's, several of them were down on New Year's resolutions. "I have stopped making them altogether.," one of them said. "They're all a bunch of hot air." (Actually he used another word unprintable here.)

Is that true? Are New Year's resolutions just empty words and lip-service?

Dr. John Norcross, a clinical psychologist at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, and his colleagues studied random people's New Year's behavior.

41% of the 400 random people the team called between 26 and 31 December were ready to make New Year's resolutions. Their top three choices were weight loss, exercise, and quitting smoking.

Of the people who were not ready to make a change at New Year's, about half (51%) were still successful after two weeks. But after six months, their success rate dropped dramatically, to 4%.

By contrast, of those who made a commitment at New Years, 71% were still successful after two weeks. Naturally, their success rate dropped too after six months, but only to 46%. So almost half of them were still meeting their commitments.

So people who picked New Year's as their time to make new commitments were ten times more successful than those who picked another time during the year (see video).

These results could be skewed by selection bias: perhaps the participants were not truly random. Or the Hawthorne Effect could have been at play.

In a series of well-known experiments at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Illinois between 1924 and 1932, three organizational psychologists from Harvard studied the effects of lighting on workers’ productivity. 

They brightened the lights in a factory; the workers’ output promptly went up. They turned the lights down, and productivity went up further. 

In a phenomenon that came to be called the Hawthorne Effect, it finally dawned upon the scientists that it was not the lighting or other changes that influenced performance; it was the fact that the workers knew they were being observed.

So perhaps it was not the New Year's resolutions that changed people's behavior, but the fact that people were studied.

This leads us to another observation: the very fact that you make your promises public "increases the price of failure," as Dean Karlan, an economics professor at Yale University, put it. You increase the social costs of failing. Economists call that reputation costs.

One site that takes the price of failure literally is StickK.com, co-founded by Dr. Karlan. In addition to staking your reputation on success, here you literally put your credit card information on the line (though the card is charged only upon failure) and designate where the money will go if you don't meet your commitment.

Users might select their favorite charity or, for perverse added incentive, a charity they would never support. Then they pick a person as their referee and others as their virtual cheerleaders.

Some people go so far as to post their goals in YouTube videos, one of the least anonymous ways to declare them to the world. Kevin Allocca, YouTube's trends manager told The New York Times.

That's a bit much for people in some cultures or of older generations. But the point is: make your commitments to people whom you would hate to disappoint.

What do you say? Do you make New Year's resolutions and do you believe in them? What are your resolutions for this year? And how do you make sure you will deliver your commitments? I look forward to reading you on my blog: http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

Dr. Thomas D. Zweifel is a Partner & Managing Director at Manres AG in Zurich, Switzerland, and the author of seven leadership and strategy books such as The Rabbi and the CEO (SelectBooks, 2008, with co-author Aaron L. Raskin; also available in German, Polish, Russian; finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Foreword Award of the Year).