Coordinated Commitments
In principle, one could make a resolution on any day of the year. It’s just a commitment to oneself after all, which can be kept private and broken without consequence, except perhaps for some feelings of guilt or regret. But we don’t tend to make such commitments haphazardly. The ritualistic practice of making resolutions as a New Year is about to begin dates back centuries and has spread widely across the world.
Making commitments to oneself based on a commonly observed deadline of this kind serves two purposes and has some interesting empirical implications that one could try to detect in data.
First, it deals effectively with the problem of procrastination, since the New Year offers a clear psychological break between past and future. We can imagine ourselves exchanging an old and stale reality for a newer and brighter one, like a snake shedding its skin. Making your resolutions a day or two late feels different, and possibly serves as less powerful a commitment. Anticipating this, people tend to respect the deadline.
The second purpose is less obvious and more interesting. Some resolutions are purely personal, while others are more social. A commitment to treat people with greater kindness, patience, and forgiveness belongs to the latter category. Changes in behavior of this kind can be intrinsically rewarding but they are especially so when the behaviors are reciprocated.
One of the lessons that has emerged from the experimental and behavioral literature in economics over the past few decades is that genuine altruism is relatively rare, but reciprocity is prevalent and powerful. People quite generally like to repay kindness with kindness and spite with spite. Even as third parties to an interaction, we are inclined to reward pro-social behavior and punish cruelty. And when generosity is anticipated, it will often be preempted with the same.
This raises the possibility that people may be able to break out of dysfunctional equilibria in personal interactions, at least for a while, until resolutions are broken and things start to unravel. Other things equal, social interactions ought have a different quality in January than in December. If this happens on a large enough scale, it may even be discernible in aggregate data on such things as road rage incidents, interpersonal violence, and perhaps even divorce.
Of course, other things are not equal—there are more gatherings and festivities in December, the tax year is winding down, some people receive bonuses or cash gifts, and so on. This makes causal inference challenging. But given the endless creativity that is directed at identification issues in economics, the challenge can probably be met.
The broader point is that the idea of a New Year’s resolution is not a triviality or superstition that deserves to be mocked. Our collective acceptance of a given deadline for behavior change has real world consequences that may be significant and measurable.
To all those who have visited this site and read the motley collection of thoughts on offer, I wish a very Happy New Year. I understand that 2024 is a tetrahedral number, the only year in our lifetimes with this property (the last was 1771, the next is 2300). In acknowledgement of this, I wish you also symmetry and beauty in the year to come.
