![econlifelogotrademarkedwebsitelogo[1]](/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/econlifelogotrademarkedwebsitelogo1.png#100878)
New Year’s Resolutions: The Top Ten Ways to Sound Like an Economist
January 1, 2025
Where Popeye Is a Scary Sailor Man
January 3, 2025
Having made our New Year’s resolutions, we can ask a behavioral economist how to keep them.
New Year’s Resolutions
The Resolutions
To begin, Statista says we place money at the top of our resolution lists:
However, 2020 research in Sweden displayed different priorities:
The Success Rate
Asking whether resolutions work, the 2020 paper had surprising results. They divided their 1062 participants into three groups. While each could select its own resolutions, the groups had different instructions. Trying to achieve success, Group 1 was basically on its own, Group 2 had more support, and Group 3, the most attention:
Astoundingly, Group 3, with the most support and precise instructions had a lower success rate than the Group 2 people:
Concluding, researchers hypothesized that saturation could have had a negative impact on Group 3. But then, more positively, they also suggested that approach focused resolutions were more effective than those that required avoidance.
Our Bottom Line: The Fresh Start Effect
Providing a rationale for New Year’s resolutions, a University of Pennsylvania economist, Katherine Milkman, identified an approach that lets us divide our life into slots. Called the fresh start effect, those slots are the mental accounting periods that separate past “flawed” behavior from our plans for a more perfect future. Scholars also tell us that by stepping back from life’s daily details, a fresh start moves our focus to long term goals.
Diets were the perfect example. Reflecting our quest for a fresh start, diet searches are more common at the beginning of calendar periods:
So, where are we? Whether we take the more positive approach focus or the negative avoidance commitment, and whether we have more or less support, a fresh start is the one common encouraging denominator. Shown by our featured image, it started yesterday, just after midnight
My sources and more: As in the past, I recommend Penn Professor Katy Milkman’s Choiceology podcast and her paper on the “fresh start effect.” But also do take a look at the commitment devices we shared in past New Year’s posts, here and here. And finally, for 2025, our newest source is this paper.
Please note that several of today’s sentences were in a past econlife post and our featured image is from Pixabay.
