What New Year’s Resolutions Say About Us

What New Year’s resolutions say about us

If you’re reading this on New Year’s Day, there’s a good chance you’ve made a few resolutions. Drawing up a new set of resolutions can be a bracing, hopeful, even comforting ritual. If you succeed, you’re the better for it, and if you fail — well, try again next year.
A resolution seems like a simple thing: a promise we make to ourselves to change. Butin recent years, philosophers and psychologists have been focusing on resolutions — the promises we make to ourselves not just on New Year’s, but throughout our lives — and have concluded that there’s far more going on than we might realize.
Our resolutions, it turns out, are also surprisingly revealing windows into our inner lives, and the ways in which we deceive and manipulate ourselves. Weuse resolutions, research is finding, not only to tell ourselves how we’d like to change in the future, but to make ourselves feel better about who we are today. Even when they fail — especially when they fail — resolutions can be revelatory.
The study of resolutions offers some uncomfortable truths, not least of which is that resolutions alone can actually be an impediment to meaningful change.But it’s also yielding some valuable insights into how they work when they’re effective. We’re learning more and more about how deceptive resolutions can be — but we’re also discovering how we can use them to learn more about ourselves, and to turn our hopes for change into something real.
People have been making New Year’s-style resolutions all over the world for thousands of years. The month ofJanuary has resolving built right into its name: The ancient Romans named it after the two-faced god Janus, who, with one face looking backward and the other forward, symbolized the hope that we might learn from the past to improve ourselves in the future. Influential early Americans like Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards published widely imitated lists of resolutions.
We’re all familiarwith this way of thinking about resolutions: By stating your plans in plain English, you create a clearly defined target for your willpower. If you say those plans out loud, or even write them down where you can see them later, you are putting your dignity on the line. Ideally, by making a resolution, you take a longing — a desire to improve — and convert it into an action.
For many of thephilosophers and psychologists who study them, however, resolutions aren’t just a straightforward act of resolve. Much of the newest research in the psychology of resolutions shows that, when you make a resolution, you’re also telling yourself a story — not just a story about the person you’ll become, but also about the kind of person you are right now. And there’s a good chance that, in telling thisstory, you’ll be lying.
Take a common example: resolving to go to the gym. Make that resolution, and you’re not just saying you’ll go in the future, you’re also saying that you’re already the sort of person who can simply resolve to get fit. Needless to say, there’s a good chance that reality has already proven you wrong. If a straightforward decision on Jan. 1 were really all that were keeping youfrom going to the gym, you’d likely have spent countless hours on the elliptical by now. In fact, you’ve probably resolved to hit the gym many times — and the simple truth is that more will have to change than just your decision to get you to start going. In resolving to go to the gym, you’re not just making a resolution that you probably can’t keep — you’re actually making an overly optimisticmistake about who you are.
Those mistakes, in fact, are part of the reason why making resolutions is so enjoyable. Overly optimistic resolutions might not have much of an effect on your actual behavior, but they do wonders for your self-image. That’s especially true when you share them. Peter Gollwitzer, a psychologist at New York University who studies the ways in which we pursue our goals,...