New Year’s is just two days away. Have you made your New Year’s resolutions for 2019? What goals are you planning to achieve in 2019?
A few days ago, I made one: in 2019, I’m going to write my first novel (probably a short psychological sci-fi story).
The bad news about New Year’s resolutions is that most of them don’t get fulfilled. There’s a good chance that the wishes you make this year will simply become the content of your 2020 resolutions.
Why do so few New Year’s resolutions come true?
Mostly because of that perennial problem in psychology: not enough self-control.
Here’s a new way to improve your self-control. Hopefully, it can help you (and me) do a better job of putting our New Year’s resolutions into practice.
A new study by Professor Francesca Gino’s team at Harvard Business School shows that rituals can improve self-control.
In one experiment, the researchers recruited a group of female college students who had weight-loss goals. They were asked to watch their diets over the next five days and use an app to record in detail what they ate.
The participants were randomly assigned to either the ritual group or the no-ritual group.
The researchers required the ritual group to complete a fixed ritual before eating during the next five days.
The ritual was something the researchers had dreamed up on the spot, with no particular meaning. It went like this: first, cut the food into small pieces before eating; rearrange the pieces so that they were perfectly symmetrical on the plate (in other words, make the right half of the plate look exactly like the left half); finally, tap the food three times with a utensil.
The no-ritual group only had to record what they ate; they didn’t have to perform any ritual before meals.
The results showed that, compared with the no-ritual group (which consumed about 1648 calories per day), the ritual group consumed fewer calories (about 1424 per day on average). The ritual group also ate less fat and sugar.
Rituals made people eat less and eat more healthily.
In another experiment, participants had to choose between carrots and chocolate. They were assigned to one of three conditions: 1. do nothing and choose directly (the control group); 2. make a few random gestures before choosing (the random-gesture group); 3. complete a fixed knock-on-the-table action before choosing (the ritual group).
The results: under the ritual condition, about 58% of participants chose carrots over chocolate; under the random-gesture condition, only 46% chose carrots; and under the control condition, only 35% chose carrots.
The ritual group ate the healthiest.
Psychologists discovered long ago that people infer what kind of person they are from their own behavior: donating money to people experiencing homelessness makes us feel compassionate, while giving up our seat to someone on the subway makes us believe we are polite.
A ritual means acting by strictly following a series of fixed steps over and over – and that clearly requires good self-discipline. So, from our own behavior of following a ritual, we infer: I’m someone with self-control. This belief helps us act with more self-control in what we do next.
Here’s what you need to do next:
1. List your New Year’s resolutions;
2. Write down what actions you need to take to achieve them;
3. Design a ritual for your actions. No matter how strange or ridiculous it is, that’s fine – as long as it consists of a series of steps that don’t feel entirely natural (young Wei’s demonstration ritual: before opening the computer to write every day, first make a cup of coffee, put the coffee beside the computer, rotate the coffee cup 360 degrees, tap the cup three times with your finger, and finally write Ken Liu three times on the desk).
4. Complete the ritual before each action.
May all your New Year’s wishes come true!
References:
Tian, A. D., Schroeder, J., Haubl, G., Risen, J. L., Norton, M. I., & Gino, F. (2018). Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(6), 851-876.
Francesca Gino. Need More Self-Control? Try a Simple Ritual – Study finds an unusual technique for eating less.Scientific American: Mind. 2018(6).
Note
- This article in the New Findings in Psychology series was originally written as a short popular-psychology essay/ramble to accompany content related to Zhichao Wei: New Findings in Psychology. It was published on the now-closed platform Fantuan, and the original link no longer exists.
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