Dr. Norcross’s earliest work on New Year’s resolutions began in late December 1985, when he asked a local Pennsylvania television station to run a banner encouraging people to call his team for a study on New Year’s resolutions. Soon they had 200 volunteers who agreed to be contacted for subsequent interviews, and the team could monitor their progress navigating similar predicaments at the same time. When the researchers predicted how many of the volunteers would stick to their resolutions after six months, their expectations ranged from 10% to 25%. The real number turned out to be 40%. Even though the majority of people still failed, Dr. Norcross was stunned by the success rate. The New Year’s resolution-industrial complex was not just a ploy to sell gym memberships.
After that first paper was published in 1989 and showed resolutions were more powerful than he’d suspected, he ran another experiment starting in 1995 to confirm his own results. This time, instead of studying a potentially biased sample of people willing to volunteer for a study, his undergraduate assistants flipped through Scranton, Pa., phone books and randomly cold-called strangers in the week after Christmas. By the new year, they had interviewed 159 people with resolutions and 123 with comparable motivations and goals but no formal resolutions, and they followed them for the next six months. Once again, more than 40% of those with resolutions stuck with them, but only 4% of those without resolutions achieved the behavioral changes they had in mind.
Still, most New Year’s resolutions are meant to be temporary, and the 40% who were successful after six months in Dr. Norcross’s first study fell to 19% after two years. Then again, that’s one in five people who managed to change something about themselves because of the calendar. Failure is a matter of perspective.
ILLUSTRATION BY FABIO CONSOLI
Even those responsible for much of what we know about New Year’s resolutions admit they would like to know a lot more, in part because the entire body of academic literature is limited to the study of several thousand people. There have been more people in a single Peloton class. “I was definitely surprised to find so little research,” said Blake Hallinan, a senior lecturer in communications at Hebrew University, and the lead author of a 2021 pa-per about cultural differences in New Year’s resolutions based on more than 160,000 tweets.
Another recent study came from Per Carlbring, a professor of clinical psychology at Stockholm University, who noticed that he believed in New Year’s resolutions but his friends didn’t. He decided to find out who was right. “I wanted to see if they were as bad as their reputation,” he said. After tracking more than 1,000 people over the course of 2017, Dr. Carlbring and his collaborators discovered something more practical: How New Year’s resolutions were framed helped determine how effective they were. For example, if you want to spend less time on your phone, you have a better chance if you commit to reading a book than if you delete Instagram, as starting a new activity is stickier than quitting an old one. Soon it no longer feels like a chore. It becomes a habit.
We all know how the machines in our pockets distract us. What’s less known is how they can help us focus. It’s a phenomenon that Quentin Zervaas observes every year. A software developer based in Australia, he built an app called Streaks, a to-do list that functions a bit like a game. When users assign themselves daily tasks, they suddenly feel an urge to complete them: They want to extend their streaks. The app’s sales numbers spike in late December and early January, as people look for ways to hold themselves accountable to their resolutions, and Streaks climbed back into Apple’s top-10 paid downloads this past week. “Every now and then,” said Mr. Zervaas, “you get this reminder that it’s actually making a meaningful difference in day-to-day lives.” But it’s oddly contrarian to recognize the value of New Year’s resolutions, and Dr. Norcross’s research is no less counterintuitive today. That’s why someone who says he’s not particularly interested in this subject can’t stop thinking about it.
In fact, if he wants to see how people change on their own, Dr. Norcross can simply look in the mirror: He’s still doing something that started as a New Year’s resolution. It was specific. It was realistic. And it worked.
He now flosses every day.
‘I wanted to see if [resolutions] were as bad as their reputation,’ said Per Carlbring.
If that were a typo and it was supposed to say that only 70 women had ever been nominated for Best Director, it'd still be embarrassing.
