This article explores the impact of fresh starts on our behavior, citing research that reveals our increased motivation to change during periods like the beginning of a week or year.
When the psychologist John Norcross researched New Year’s resolutions in the 1980s, he found that more than fifty percent of Americans made some sort of resolution. After six months, only forty percent had stuck with it. When Norcross followed up two years later, the number had dropped to nineteen percent. Even among the successes, more than half had experienced lapses—fourteen, on average. Still, we keep telling ourselves that we can lose weight, save money, and go to the gym.
It turns out that timing is important in determining whether or not we succeed. In May 2012, Katherine Milkman, a behavioral economist at the University of Pennsylvania, was invited to the PiLab Summit, an annual gathering of social-science researchers convened by Google to discuss ways of making the company more productive. Milkman found herself in a discussion about “nudges”—small environmental interventions that could shift people’s behavior. “In the course of the conversation, someone posed a question,” Milkman recalled. “When would nudges be the most effective?” Milkman’s research hadn’t focused on that particular aspect of nudges, but, she said, “I had a strong instinct that they’d be more effective at turning points—moments that feel like a new beginning.” When Milkman returned to Philadelphia, she teamed up with two colleagues, Jason Riis and Hengchen Dai, to see if the idea of temporal turning points held any merit. In a series of studies, forthcoming from the journal Management Science, Milkman, Riis, and Dai found that fresh starts do push us to change our behavior. The beginning of a week, a month, or a year forms what the psychologist Richard Thaler calls a “notational boundary.” With that, researchers suspect, comes a sense of optimism, the promise of “a new me,” as Milkman put it. To test that theory, her team looked at daily Google searches for the term “diet” over a period of nine years
NEW BEGINNINGS BEHAVIOR CHANGE MOTIVATION TIMING PSYCHOLOGY
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