Why make New Year’s resolutions? If you need to start a diet or get up earlier in the morning, why wait until Jan. 1? Why not do it today? New Year’s resolutions do not make any rational sense.
While perfectly logical, that analysis misses the point. New Year’s resolutions help people cope with some of the most difficult conflicts human beings face.
So argues one of the economics profession’s greatest experts on conflict, the Noble Prize Winner Thomas C. Schelling, in the words of the citation, “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.”
One of his best-known ideas is “precommitment.” One party in a conflict, he demonstrated, can often strengthen its strategic position by cutting off some of its options to make its threats more credible. An army that burns its bridges, making retreat impossible, is a classic military example.
Others involve strong diplomatic commitments. By passing a law saying the United States will defend Taiwan if it is attacked, for example, Congress gives future administrations less flexibility in dealing with a crisis, but the threat makes an attack less likely.
“What I have in mind is an act or decision that a person takes decisively at some particular point in time, about which the person’s preferences differ from what they were earlier, when the prospect was contemplated but the decision was still in the future,” he wrote in “Ethics, Law and the Exercise of Self-Command. If the person could make the final decision about that action at the earlier time, precluding a later change in mind, he would make a different choice from what he knows will be his choice on that later occasion.”
New Year’s resolutions help the earlier self overrule the later one by raising the cost of straying. “More is threatened by failure than just the substance of the resolution: one’s personal constitution is violated, confidence demoralized, and the whole year spoiled. At least one can try to make it so,” wrote Professor Schelling in “The Intimate Contest for Self-Command,” a 1980 essay in his book “Choice and Consequence: Perspectives of an Errant Economist” (Harvard University Press, 1984).
As many a broken resolution demonstrates, those consequences often are not a big enough deterrent. To make success more likely, Professor Schelling’s work suggests a few additional strategies.
One is a mild precommitment: not keeping sweets or tobacco in the house, for instance. At the very least, this step forces you to delay indulgence until you can go to the store – and allows time to recover your resolve.
Another approach is to use bright-line rules, which make it harder to cheat through clever reinterpretation. That may explain why many people find it easier to eliminate whole categories of food, like carbohydrates, rather than simply to cut back on calories.
“Just as it may be easier to ban nuclear weapons from the battlefield in toto than through carefully graduated specifications on their use, zero is a more enforceable limit on cigarettes or chewing gum than some flexible quantitative ration,” Professor Schelling wrote.
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