The end of the year is a time to reflect and think—where have we been, who do we want to be, and what do we want to do differently next year? But what if all of the resolutions we’ve been making are missing an important detail? What if all these “New Year’s resolution” articles going viral online right now are all deeply flawed? Might this help explain why almost everyone fails to keep their New Year’s resolutions?

Let’s imagine two would-be-resolvers: Riss (“the resistor”) and Remmy (“the remover”). Like so many Americans, both of them are trying to eat healthier and exercise more, but they approach these goals differently.

Riss follows all the traditional New Year’s resolution strategies out there. He buys healthy foods and workout DVDs. To ramp up his confidence, he reads inspirational quotes, creates a New Year’s playlist, and vows to succeed. He has what health scientists call “high self-efficacy” and the magical “Law of Attraction” readers of The Secret always talk about.

Most importantly, Riss is defined by the passionate goal to resist temptation—he wont be lazy, eat that cookie, or stay at home instead of go to the gym. With resolve like that, it seems like Riss is bound to succeed.

But let’s look at Remmy: what does she do? She really doesn’t make any changes except for two small things: she removes the junk food from her house and the HBO subscription she loves.

Remmy is defined by her goal to remove, rather than resist, temptation. When she comes home, she won’t have any choice but to eat the healthy food in her cabinets. If she wants to see her favorite HBO shows, she won’t have any choice but to use the TV at her gym.

When Riss comes home, though, he’ll have his health food and workout DVDs, but also junk food and tempting Adam Sandler movies. His confidence and resolve will help him resist these temptations for a while, but over time, as research by NYU Professor Andrea Bonezzi and colleagues shows, that resolve will likely fade. It won’t be long till Riss finds himself covered in cookie crumbs watching The Waterboy and shedding a tear every time a character shouts “You can do it!”

Resisting temptation almost always fails, because people are bad at predicting how their future selves will act. We continually fail to realize that the tired, miserable, and aroused versions of ourselves might not make the same choices that our well-rested, happy, and focused selves would make. Over time and after many grueling workweeks, the hopeful people who made New Year’s resolutions after a winter vacation will be replaced by people who just want a few slices of cake. This is why we have to focus on controlling, rather than resisting, temptation.

If we’re smart about temptation, we can even use it to our advantage. In the Remmy example, she does this by making the gym the only place for her to watch her guilty HBO pleasures. Wharton Business School Professor Katy Milkman and colleagues found that stocking gyms with addictive guilty pleasures (like an audio copy of The Hunger Games on gym iPods) lead people to go to the gym more. These gym goers couldn’t resist the temptation to come again and again to consume their guilty media pleasures—all while exercising.

Keeping New Year’s resolutions is like playing chess with our future selves—we have to realistically anticipate what moves they will make come February.

Advice givers and columnists tend to choose to just fill readers with hope, the promise of new products, confidence, and a “you can do it” spirit. Of course it’s important to be confident in any goal pursuit and work to develop the self-control muscle, but resolve alone rarely leads to a successful resolution.

So rather than face a losing battle, we can remove temptation and create a battlefield where we can give ourselves a true fighting chance to keep our New Year’s resolutions.

~Troy Campbell~

Read Dan’s advice for New Year’s resolutions here. 

At our lab, we’re interested in what kinds of tools people can use to make better decisions and reach their goals. When we decided to take part in this year’s Color Run, we tried to use some of these tools on ourselves to help us get in shape and ready for the race.

Like many people, we want to exercise more and get in better shape. Everyday temptation often gets in the way, though. To fight these temptations, we turned to one of the most prevalent behavioral tools: the “commitment contract.”

A commitment contract is an agreement your current self makes with your future self—you decide how you’re going to behave before temptations cloud your judgment.

In our lab, we had everyone agree to do some type of training three times a week in the six weeks leading up to the race. In the spirit of what we know about motivation, the focus was on concrete actions (spend a certain amount of time training) rather than vague outcomes (run a fast race).

“Some type of training” is pretty open-ended, so we each defined on our contracts what actually counted as a training session for us—this way we could all train to our own level while maintaining concrete goals. This is important because we all vary in how fit we currently are and how fit we ideally want to be. Research shows personal goals can be more success that striving after a single public standard. The standard becomes too high or too low for many people and leads to demotivation.

Commitment contracts are effective, but we decided to take the commitment up another notch by including social incentives. We each kept track of our training goals on a chart we posted in a very visible high traffic area – right by the kitchen!

The chart helped us track progress from person to person and week to week. The chart made our commitment (or lack of commitment) very visible to each other and ourselves. It’s painful enough to fail privately, but it’s even worse when everyone else can see us coming short of our own standards.

So, how did it work?

For the most part it worked fantastically. However, you can see that a handful of people fell off the bandwagon and never got back on. This is what behavioral economists playfully call that the “what-the-hell” effect.

Importantly though, about one-third of the team succeeded in completing all training sessions, and others were motivated to exercise more or harder than they did before.

It’s important to note that on average, exercise in the lab shot up and as a whole we moved toward our goal. Perfection with any intervention is not expected, but, as a group, we definitely made strides forward.

To better understand what was going on, I talked with some of our lab members to get their assessment.

For some of us, this was an all or nothing endeavor:

“Just knowing that I needed three stickers each week and would be anything less than perfect if I didn’t get all three got me to put on my running shoes without fail.”

Some people used the contracts and the process of defining what “counted” as a training session to eliminate the possibility they would take too much wiggle room:

“For me I always work out but sometimes I don’t feel so good and I ‘call it early’ and stop before getting a full workout. With the pre-commitment this didn’t happen. The fixed time goal kept me from quitting early.”

Other people used the contracts to build in wiggle room, just in case.

“I made my commitment contract loose enough that I could justify yoga or sex as exercise activities, but I never took advantage of the ample wiggle room.”

In the end, the training probably didn’t radically transform anyone from couch potato to athlete or yield dramatic before and after photos (nor did it exactly have randomized and controlled trials), but it seems safe to say that everyone got a little extra boost—even those who didn’t train. As one visitor to the lab remarked “You can’t look at all those smiley faces and not smile back.”

~Jamie Foehl~

Check out the photos we took from our run here, and for more research on how pre-commitment and social comparison affects goal pursuit check out these academic articles:

Setting your own deadlines.

Temptation Bundling.

Social Comparison Theory.

During my recent trip to New York City, I spent quite a bit of time sitting in taxis—taxis with ads that endlessly drill messages into your thoughts. I’ve never watched much TV, so my brain hasn’t evolved that uniquely American ability to tune out the mind-numbing commercials. As hard as I try, I just can’t look away when there’s a TV in sight.

As the commercials looped, one ad stood out to me and had me grinding my teeth each time it popped onto the screen. It wasn’t that it looked like an old-fashioned PSA, or because its protagonist donned a charmingly insincere Mr. Rogers smile. No—this ad grabbed me because of its heartbreaking ignorance of basic psychology. The goal of this ad was to get passengers to buckle up for safety, but its method was painfully misguided.

A number of strategies have been used over the years to get people to buckle their belts. For example, we have:

• Laws. This map shows the seatbelt laws in all US states, and according to the National Safety Council, seatbelt use is 13% higher in states with primary enforcement (meaning you can get stopped and ticketed just for not wearing a seatbelt) than those with secondary enforcement (88% versus 75%).

• Penalties. Although people are probably not thinking about the $69 fine they might have to pay or even the drivers license points they could rack up if they get caught, it is possible that some people may buckle up to avoid these consequences.

• Enforcement. Here, we’re talking about high-visibility enforcement such as checkpoints where all cars are stopped to check for seatbelt usage.

• Incentive awards for police officers to give tickets (ranging from small model cars awarded to individual police officers to much larger grants for police agencies).

• “Click it or Ticket.” This campaign has been particularly effective because it serves as a reminder of the immediate stakes (getting a ticket), even though they are smaller than the larger consequences (such as sustaining an injury in an accident). Reward substitution works. Fun fact: the campaign began in North Carolina, home of the Center for Advanced Hindsight, and was adopted by other states because of its success (most likely due to its catchy name).

• Safety belt reminder systems. These excruciatingly loud alarms get my passengers to buckle up in record time.

• Safety belt ignition interlocks. Some cars will refuse to start until all belts are in, although you can imagine why the idea hasn’t gained much traction.

• Education. Teaching children about seatbelt safety in school, while not an official persuasion method that I can find in any academic paper, has turned diligent recycling enthusiasts who just say no to drugs into relentless seatbelt reminder machines. I imagine that if our kids were the enforcers of just about anything, we would all be better off.

Some of these strategies work better than others, but none of them are actually detrimental to seatbelt compliance. And yet this taxicab ad, which I was forced to watch over and over in agony, conspicuously ignored what we know to be a primary motivator of behavior: social validation.

The ad gave one pivotal piece of information, which you can see in the accompanying photo: “60% of taxi passengers do not buckle up.” This kind of scare tactic is ineffective because it simply sends the wrong message.

Robert Cialdini has shown over and over again that social proof is an intoxicating principle of persuasion. We look to others to decide what to do, and when we are told about how most people behave in a given situation, we are likely to follow their lead. (This is why “word of mouth” can be so powerful, and companies pay top dollar to try and influence what their customers tell their friends.)

So, what message does this ad convey to cab riders?

This statement gives an implicit recommendation, noting that most people do not wear seatbelts. As social creatures, we look to others to determine how to behave in all kinds of situations, and riding in a taxi is no different. Rather than encouraging seatbelt use, this statement lets seatbelt-wearers know that they are in the minority while giving non-seatbelt wearers the comfort of knowing that their behavior is normal. It doesn’t matter why the majority doesn’t wear seat belts—whether it is uncool, unsanitary, too much of a hassle, or even unsafe—now they know that most people don’t do it, and that’s a good enough reason to go along with the flow.

If you want to persuade people to wear seatbelts, you should tell them that 84% of people in the US do wear seatbelts. Or you can further tap into group identity by noting that 90% of New Yorkers wear seatbelts.

It’s a shame that a message as important as “wear a seatbelt” could be so badly butchered. If companies have figured out how to use the concept of social proof to get people to spend more money, why can’t our safety promoters figure out how to use it to get us to make better decisions?

For a quick review of all six of Cialdini’s principles of persuasion (reciprocation, consistency, social validation, liking, authority and scarcity), see this article.

~Aline Grüneisen~

P.S. Some friends have informed me that you can simply turn off the taxicab TV. Noted for next time.

Here’s my Q&A column from the WSJ this week — and if you have any questions for me, you can tweet them to @danariely with the hashtag #askariely, post a comment on my Ask Ariely Facebook page, or email them to AskAriely@wsj.com.

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Dear Dan,

I just got back from a trip to Europe, and although I knew that Europeans were much less obese than Americans, it was still shocking to see the difference. It is also not true that they don’t have fast food joints. Can you shed some light on these national differences? 

—Alvin

Some think that the key factor is the European diet: more homemade food and less prepackaged food, smaller portion sizes, less sugar and corn syrup, etc. I have no doubt that there is some truth to this, but I would propose that our differences in weight also have to do with the fact that Europeans use kilograms while Americans use pounds.

Here is my proposed logic, using me as an example: I weigh 170 pounds, which is also 77 kilograms (well, the truth is that right now I might be closer to 174 pounds, but my real weight is 170). Depending on the time of day and what we eat, our weight fluctuates by a pound or more, as most of us know. This kind of fluctuation lets us convince ourselves that when the scale shows 172, our real weight is still 170, even if it has not shown 170 for a while.

If one day our weight is 174, would we say to ourselves “I am gaining weight, and I need to change what I eat” or would we be able to justify this as part of the random fluctuation around our supposed real weight of 170? By contrast, if we were using the kilogram system, the fluctuations would be much smaller, and when we learned that we were one kilogram heavier, we might act on this change more quickly.

My suggestion: Switch to kilograms (and while we’re at it, maybe we can move to the metric system more generally).

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Dear Dan,

There are people in my office who have a hard time focusing for even 20 minutes on their jobs. Nevertheless, they seem perfectly capable of exercising for long stretches, and they are quite persistent in that. Can you explain this contradiction?

—Michael

This might actually not be a contradiction but rather, as I learned recently, two faces of the same mechanism. A few weeks ago, I flew to California for some meetings. I left home at 4:30 a.m. and got to San Francisco at 10 a.m. I had a few meetings, and by 5 p.m. was exhausted. I had a lot of work-related tasks and was determined to get at least some of them done, but I felt devoid of energy. So I went for a run.

Ordinarily, I go for a run maybe once every 10 years. But this run was fantastic! I ran a bit, walked a bit, listened to music along the way. It was challenging, and I ran out of breath, but in no way was it even close to the mental exhaustion of doing the things I was supposed to work on.

Here is my new understanding: I think that people who either don’t enjoy what they’re doing for work or don’t have the mental stamina to focus on it can take long breaks for exercise. On top of that if your co-workers took a two-hour book or movie break, they would be seen as selfish slackers, wasting time. But because society tells us that exercising is good for our health, it is a perfectly good excuse to escape work. Now that I have discovered this way to take time for myself and not feel guilty about it, I am going to do more of it.

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Dear Dan,

The health-care benefits provided by my employer have just been updated to include a hefty monthly surcharge to smokers. I put little effort into quitting smoking, although I know this is the right thing to do. This smoking tax might motivate me to quit, but at the same time it infuriates me that my employer has the power to charge me for smoking. What is your opinion?

—Anonymous 

The smoking rate in the U.S. is about 20%, and companies that add such smoking surcharges usually find that the smoking rate drops overnight to less than 10%. Or, more precisely, they find that the smoking surcharge dramatically reduces the number of people who say that they smoke.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

According to a report that came out in the British Medical Journal, the risk of death after undergoing non-emergency surgery is lowest on Monday (1%), and goes up every day of the week thereafter. People who have surgery on Friday are 44% more likely to die than those who have it on Monday (the rate increases from 1% to 1.44%). The news is still worse for the small number of people who have surgery on the weekends, when the risk of death from complications rises 82% compared to Monday (the rate increases to 1.82%).

It’s important to note that the risk is still low (it reaches around 1.82% on for people who have weekend surgeries, an increase of 0.82%). That said, obviously there should not be such a notable variation in mortality based on day of the week surgery is scheduled. One solution might be that going forward, high-risk or major surgeries should only be performed in the beginning of the week, saving lower-risk procedures for later in the week. Combined with increased efforts to educate patients on recognizing signs that they need to seek medical attention, perhaps this increased risk can be brought back in line.

As someone who has an advice column of my own, I feel particularly sad that one of the most insightful and influential advice columnists — Pauline Phillips (Dear Abby) died earlier this week. As a tribute to her wisdom, and life, here is one of her favorite responses:

Dear Abby: Are birth control pills tax deductible? — Bertie

Dear Bertie: Only if they don’t work.

For more about the life and contribution of Dear Abby, see this article.

Somewhat recently I’ve noticed that I’m losing a bit of hair. I say somewhat recently because as many of us do with discoveries of this nature, we put off fully accepting them for as long as possible. (In fact, not long ago, I spent several months with bad vision because I wanted to delay getting glasses until after I turned 45.)

I’ve been asking people’s advice about my hair situation, and many tell me to conceal the change for as long as possible until baldness, should it come to that, becomes inevitable. This seemed reasonable enough, but then I came across a study that suggested the opposite might be a better idea. The study showed that men with shaved heads are thought to be more dominant than men of similar stature and looks with full heads of hair. In fact, when people viewed photos of men whose hair had been digitally shaved, they reported that the men were taller, stronger, and more dominant than the unaltered photos where the men had hair. While I don’t think I’m ready to shave my head just yet, I’m sure I wouldn’t mind the extra height, imaginary or not.

The moral of the story is that we should always question prevailing opinion. And maybe it’s best to think of aging as Mark Twain did: “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

One thing is certain though: never, ever attempt a comb-over.

In compliance with a federal integrity agreement, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer released details of its financial involvement with the medical community.

According to the New York Times, the drug maker disclosed that it paid $20 million in consulting and speaking fees to 4,500 doctors in the second half of 2009. The company also shelled out $15.3 million to U.S. academic medical centers for their clinical trials.

A few other drug makers have disclosed their payments to physicians in the past, but this is the first time a company has disclosed its payments for clinical trials. As such, some may see this as a good deed on Pfizer’s part, a noble step towards eliminating or reducing some of the conflicts of interest in medicine.

Only, disclosure doesn’t seem to help. Several studies have shown that when professionals disclose their conflicts of interest, this only makes the problem worse. This is because two things happen after disclosure: first, those hearing the disclosure don’t entirely know what to make of it — we’re not good at weighing the various factors that influence complex situations — and second, the discloser feels morally liberated and free to act even more in his self-interest.

So, in this case the people who run Pfizer will likely feel even more entitled to disregard the public good, and the public, in turn, will not know what to make of the numbers it released. After all, what do you make of the numbers? It’s hard to figure out from a statement of disclosure just how much influence the conflict of interest had on the discloser, and to what degree we should be wary of them as a result.

The real issue here is that people don’t understand how profound the problem of conflicts of interest really is, and how easy it is to buy people. Doctors on Pfizer’s payroll may think they’re not being influenced by the drug maker — “I can still be objective!” they’ll say — but in reality, it’s very hard for us not to be swayed by money. Even minor amounts of it. Or gifts. Studies have found that doctors who receive free lunches or samples from pharmaceutical reps end up prescribing more of the company’s drugs afterwards.

It’s just a fact of human life: we are compelled to reciprocate favors, and an ingrained inability to disregard what’s in our financial interest. As author Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

According to an article in SmartMoney, as many as 48% of U.S. dentists have seen their profits plummet thanks to the recession.

In and of itself, this isn’t a particularly remarkable statistic – after all, most of our wallets have taken a hit this past year – but what follows is an interesting discussion:  how are dentists coping with this drop in income? Angie C. Marek reports a variety of tactics in her article (including lowered rates, freebies, eliminated IOUs, etc.), most of which benefit the patient – but they don’t all. Some dentists are softening the financial blow by upselling and overtreating patients.

One example came from a woman who, upon switching cities and dentists, was surprised to learn that her hitherto problem-free mouth was suddenly rife with problems: several cavities required coatings and two veneers needed replacement. Or so her dentist told her. However, this turned out to be just another case of overtreatment.

The problem here is conflicts of interests (COIs), which are instances when professionals are pulled in two directions, torn between personal gain and the good of the patient. And the sad news is that when faced with COIs dentists (or physicians) sometimes end up going the self-interested route, and this can have undesirable consequences for the patient.

Conflicts of interest are nothing new, they have been a problem for as long as there have been professions, and they are very pervasive. For instance, there’s the doctor who at accepts consulting fees from a drug company and studies their drug, the one who prescribes the treatment a drug rep pushed on him the week before over a free lunch, and even the doctor who urges a treatment on a patient in part so that he can use his costly new medical equipment.

This isn’t to say that these are dishonorable people who only see dollar signs and say to hell with the patient. Rather, COIs can deeply color the person’s perception, and thereby end up leading even the most upstanding citizens astray, and this happens often.

The long and short of it is, next time you are at the dentist’s office – think about your dentist’s conflicts of interests.

Over the years I’ve written all sorts of blog posts on dishonesty, and because the new book release, I want to repost an updated version of them to accompany. For the next few days I’ll post one every other day. Enjoy!

Janet Schwartz of Tulane University and I once spent an evening with a few former pharmaceutical reps, men who used to be in the business of selling a wide range of drugs to treat all kinds of diseases and conditions, from fibromyalgia to depression to restless leg syndrome. As drug representatives, they would go from doctor to doctor attempting to convince physicians to prescribe their company’s drugs. How? Typically they would start by passing on informative pamphlets and giving out products like pens, clipboards, and notepads advertising their drugs.

But we knew there was more to the story, so we tried the pharmaceutical reps at their own game – we took them to a nice dinner and kept the wine flowing. Once we got them a bit sauced, they were ready to tell all. And what we learned was fairly shocking.

Picture these guys: attractive, charming young men. Not the kind of guys who would have trouble finding a date. One of them told us a story about how he was once trying to persuade a reluctant female physician to attend a seminar about a medication he was promoting. After a bit of persuading, she finally decided to attend – but only after he agreed to escort her to a ballroom dancing class. This, according to our new friends, was a typical kind of quid pro quo where the rep does a personal favor for the doctor and the doctor promotes the rep’s product in return.

Another common practice was to bring meals to the doctor’s office (one of the perks of being a receptionist), and one office even required alternating days of steak or lobster for lunch in exchange for access to the (well-fed) doctors.

Even more shocking was that when the reps were in the physician’s office, they were sometimes called into the examination room (as “experts”) to inform the patients about the drug directly. And the device reps experienced a surprisingly intimate level of involvement in patient care, often selling medical devices in the operating room, while the surgery was going on.

Aside from learning about their profession, we also realized how well these pharmaceutical reps understood classic psychological persuasion strategies, and how they employed them in a sophisticated and intuitive manner. One clever tactic they used was to hire physicians to give a brief lecture to other physicians about a drug. Now, they really didn’t care what the audience took from the lecture, but were actually interested in what the act of giving the lecture did to the speaker himself. They found that after giving a short lecture about the benefits of a drug, the speaker would begin to believe his own words and soon prescribe accordingly. Psychological studies show that people quickly start believing whatever comes out of their own mouths, even when they are paid to say it. This is a clear case of cognitive dissonance at play; doctors reason that if they are touting this drug, they must believe in it themselves — and so their beliefs alter to align with their speech.

The reps employed other tricks like switching on and off various accents, personalities, political affiliations, and basically served as persuasion machines (they may have mentioned the word “chameleon”). They were great at putting doctors at ease, relating to them as similar working people who go deep-sea fishing or play baseball together. They used these shared experiences to develop an understanding that the physicians write prescriptions for their “friends.”  The physicians, of course, did not think that they were compromising their values when they were out shooting the breeze with the drug reps.

I was recently at a conference for the American Medical Association, where I gave a lecture about conflicts of interest.  Interestingly, the lecture just before me was by a representative from a device company that created brain implants.  In his lecture he made the case for selling devices in the operating room because doctors could need help learning how to use the device. And in order to fight conflicts of interest, the company no longer takes physicians to Hawaii for their annual conferences — and instead they have their conference in Wisconsin.

So, what do we do?  First, we must realize that doctors have conflicts of interest.  With this understanding we need to place barriers that prevent this kind of schmoozing, and to keep reps from undue access to physicians or patients. They, of course, have the right to send doctors information, but their interactions should stop there.

I have one more idea: What if we only allow people to be drug reps if they are over 75 and unattractive? Not only would these individuals have more personal experience with the healthcare system, it also could reduce conflicts of interest and open up job opportunities to an undervalued population.