The best New Year's resolutions are positive resolutions

As we approach a new year, it is common for us to take stock of our lives and think about things that we’d like to do differently in the coming year.  Often, the resolutions we think about are negative resolutions.  That is, we have some behavior that we currently perform that we’d like to stop.  It might be quitting smoking, or eating less junk food, stopping drinking or drugs, or even cutting back on bad language.

Unfortunately, if we are thinking about these kinds of resolutions, it is probably not for the first time.  Mark Twain is supposed to have said that quitting smoking is one of the easiest things he ever did, he has done it thousands of times. 

There are many reasons why stopping these behaviors are difficult, and I have written about some of these difficulties in past entries.  Here, I want to focus on the form of the resolution itself.

I called these resolutions “negative resolutions” because they focus on a behavior to be stopped.  Often, this behavior is already a habit, and so it is strongly driven by the environment.  That is, parts of your environment already suggest the behavior to you.  Just drinking a cup of coffee may promote the desire to smoke.  Walking through the kitchen may increase the urge to eat.

In order to try to stop a behavior, you have to think about that behavior consciously.  That is, if you want to cut down on your eating, you must exert effort to think about what you are doing.  To watch yourself to make sure that you don’t eat too much.

Research by Peter Herman, Janet Polivy and their colleagues suggests that people who are actively trying to diet become “restrained eaters.”  Restrained eaters are people who are thinking about their diet and about restricting the amount of food they eat.  The problem with being a restrained eater is that it creates a paradox.  You want to stop eating, so you have to think about your eating behavior.  The more you think about eating, the more that concepts related to food and eating stay active.  As I have discussed in previous posts, when a concept is active, it is easier for people to perform actions relating to that concept. 

So, focusing on reducing your eating can actually make it harder for you to eat less.  The same is true for any negative resolution.  Thinking about not smoking or drinking or cursing will activate related concepts, which will make it easier to smoke, drink, or curse. 

In the end, the problem lies with the resolution itself.  You cannot replace something with nothing.  The habit system will still have connections between the environment and your behavior, and so it will continue to suggest the behavior you are trying to stop.  As a result, you will have to continue thinking about stopping the behavior. 

So, rather than making negative resolutions, make positive ones.  Do not resolve to stop smoking, resolve to start exercising.  If you really start an exercise program, your smoking will get in the way, and you will have a reason to stop.  Do not resolve to eat less, resolve to eat differently.  Cut red meat out of your diet, and start eating other foods.  With the number of really good meat substitutes on the market now, it is easy to replace high-fat foods with low-fat foods without sacrificing taste.

If you focus your energies on positive resolutions, then you will not suffer the paradox of negative resolutions.  If you start exercising, you will not be consciously thinking about smoking.  You will have removed one source of failure in your resolutions.

So in the coming year, think positive!    

When cigarette warnings backfire

Cigarettes are a clear public health problem.  A significant number of people who smoke regularly throughout their lives will develop serious health problems including lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema.  And for 30 years now, governments around the world have worked to change people’s attitudes toward smoking.  Indeed, the US government wants to institute a number of graphic new warning labels on cigarette packages to deter smokers.

There are two classes of measures that have been taken to fight smoking (and related public health problems like alcohol and unhealthy eating).  One is to make smoking less attractive in the short-term to counteract the positives of smoking.  The other is to provide warnings about the dangers of smoking.

As I have written before in previous entries, one reason why smoking is so difficult to quit is that it provides some pleasure in the short term (and for the addicted smoker also the absence of painful cravings).  The health risks are in the long-term and so they have a weaker pull over current behavior.  Thus, measures like making it illegal to smoke indoors in public places and raising the price of cigarettes through taxes are aimed at decreasing the pleasure of smoking in the short term.

The other major public health initiative is to influence the information that is available about smoking.  For example, in the US, there are very few venues in which cigarette manufacturers are allowed to advertise, and so there are few positive messages about smoking in mainstream media.  In addition, by law, cigarette packs have to come with a warning about the dangers of smoking.

A paper by Jochim Hansen, Susanne Winzeler, and Sascha Topolinski in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology examined the effectiveness of these warnings on the attitudes of smokers toward smoking. 

The authors reasoned that there are two kinds of smokers.  Some smokers find that smoking is an important part of their self concept.  They are truly smokers.  Other people smoke cigarettes, but that is not an important part of their self-concept.  They do not identify strongly as smokers. 

There are also two kinds of warnings that are often given about smoking.  Some of those messages are about the negative social consequences of smoking.  For example, a warning might point out that “Smoking makes you unattractive.”  Most of the warnings that actually appear on cigarette packs tend to focus on the danger of death associated with cigarettes, issuing warnings like “Cigarettes are dangerous for your health” or “Cigarettes cause lung cancer.”   

In other posts, I have discussed the idea of mortality salience:  that being reminded of your own mortality can affect your self-esteem.  Hansen and colleagues reasoned that a cigarette warning that highlights that cigarettes may cause death could actually backfire.  When someone identifies strongly as a smoker, then a warning that focuses on mortality can threaten that person’s self-esteem.  Because they identify strongly as a smoker, the easiest way to boost their self-esteem is to increase their favorable attitude toward cigarettes.

To test this hypothesis, a number of cigarette smokers were tested.  Some of these people were ones for whom smoking was an important part of their self-concept, while others were ones for whom smoking was not that important to their self-concept.  The smokers read either a warning that talked about how smoking decreases a person’s attractiveness or a warning that talked about how smoking causes death.  Later, these people rated their attitude toward smoking. 

As these researchers predicted, if people thought smoking was an important part of their self-concept, they rated smoking as much more attractive if they read a warning that focused on death than if they read a warning focused on attractiveness.  That is, for the group of smokers whose identity is bound up with smoking, the kinds of warnings that are typically shown on cigarette packs actually backfire.

This research suggests the importance of gathering evidence about programs that relate to the behavioral aspects of public health problems.  On the surface, nobody could oppose big warnings on cigarettes that trumpet their health risks.  However, we must be careful, because these warnings could actually do more harm than good.

Patience may be a virtue, but it is also really hard.

My dog eats two meals a day, one in the morning and one in the evening.  She is trained to sit until the bowl is on the floor before she leaps to start eating.  She does it, but it is a real challenge.  She gets excited from the moment that she sees the food being put in the bowl, and it requires a tremendous act of will to keep from leaping to the bowl before it is set down.

This daily routine has an important lesson for behavior change.

Animals (like my dog) have a hard time waiting for a good thing.  Even if I set things up so that she would get more food in a few minutes if she could wait, she would have a lot of trouble waiting.  The idea that something now is more valuable than even more later is called delay discounting.  Animals of all types have a high discount rate.  That is, they have a hard time being patient.  They would rather have something now than more of it later.  This is true, even when the delay is just a few seconds or a minute. 

So, what does this have to do with you?

As humans, we pride ourselves on having some patience.  The dog can hardly wait to snap at her meal, but we can wait until the entire table is served before digging in. 

That pride may be misplaced.

A study by Koji Jimura, Joel Myerson, Joseph Hilgard, Todd Braver, and Leonard Green in the December, 2009 issue of Psychonomic Bulletin and Review makes the point that we’re a lot more like animals than we’d like to think.  In their study, they brought thirsty people to the lab and gave them choices between a small amount of a drink of their choice immediately (juice or water) or a larger amount some time in the near future.  The wait times ranged between 5 seconds and a minute.  The people in the study were told that a new choice would be given at a fixed interval, so they would not get more chances to make choices if they always chose the immediate option.

People who selected the immediate drink, were given a chance to drink right away.  Those who selected the larger drink had to sit through the delay period before getting the chance to drink. 

People in this study showed a very high rate of delay discounting, just as animals do.  That is, unless people were offered a lot more juice to wait, they tended to select the immediate drink.

What does this mean for you?

These results make clear that we are not that much different than other animals in our ability to delay our rewards.  If there is a small reward in front of us now, it is hard to give it up for the promise of a bigger reward in the future.  Short-term temptations put a strong pull on us.

So, how do you succeed in changing your behavior? 

If you are trying to lose weight and you have the choice between a slice of pie now or being thin in the future, you are almost always going to take the piece of pie now.  If you are trying to stop smoking, the cigarette being offered to you is going to be much more attractive to you than your future good health. 

You have to remove the immediate option from your environment.  If you want to lose weight, don’t look at the dessert menu, and don’t keep sweets at home.  If you want to stop smoking, don’t stand outside with your friends while they have a cigarette. 

Don’t put yourself in the position of having to protect big rewards in the future from the small ones in your path right now.

Why is it so hard to quit smoking?

If you take even a quick look at the newspaper, you can see that there are massive public policy efforts aimed to curb smoking.  States are raising their cigarette taxes.  Cities around the world are banning smoking in restaurants.  Even Holland (where it seems like almost every vice is legal) no longer allows cigarette smoking in restaurants and public places.  What makes it so hard to quit smoking?

That would, of course, be a topic for a whole book, and not just one blog entry.  It does provide a good excuse for me to talk a bit about some research that I have done with Miguel Brendl, Claude Messner, and Kyungil Kim.  The question of interest to us is how a goal or a need affects what you like.  For now, let’s think about smoking.

The need to smoke is affected by many factors.  Some of them involve a physiological addiction to nicotine.  However, the situation also affects the need to smoke.  Smoking is often associated with drinking coffee, for example, so a cup of coffee will often trigger the need to smoke in a smoker.  So, the strength of a goal will grow and shrink.  Sometimes, the need will seem desperate, but at other times (say right after having a cigarette), it won’t seem so strong at all.

When the need to smoke is triggered, it affects what you like and dislike at that moment.  The idea that likes and dislikes can change over short periods of time shouldn’t be surprising.  After all, you may grab a CD to listen to in the car in the morning, only to find that you no longer feel like listening to it in the evening.  Foods that were quite appealing on one day may be much less appealing on another day.

One factor that changes your preferences is the goals that are engaged at any given moment. Most of us have the intuition that if you have any strong goal, then your preference for things that would help you satisfy that goal will increase.  If you really need to smoke, then suddenly, cigarettes will look really good to you.  We call this effect of goals valuation.  That is, having an active goal makes things related to that goal more valuable.  There is some experimental evidence for this kind of valuation.

What is potentially more interesting, though, is that in a 2003 paper in the Journal of Consumer Behavior, and a 2007 paper in Emotion, we find strong evidence for devaluation.  That is, having an active goal will decrease your liking for things that are unrelated to that goal.  So, a smoker with a high need to smoke is less interested in things like DVD players, french fries, and camping tents than that same person is when the need to smoke is low. 

We found evidence for this in many ways.  In one study with smokers, we had smokers participate in a study after sitting in a long lecture class.  They could not smoke during class.  One group was asked to stay in a classroom and was given a cup of coffee (to stimulate the need to smoke).  This group really had a high need to smoke.  The other group went outside the classroom. They were also given a cup of coffee, but the experimenter lit up a cigarette, and all of the participants did too.  For this group, the coffee was a way to help us make sure enough time went by that the nicotine would help dull the need to smoke.

Before getting on to what they thought the study was really about, the participants were asked if they were interested in buying raffle tickets.  For half of the people, the prize was three cartons of cigarettes that would be given out in a drawing a week later.  For the other half of the people, the prize was an amount of money equivalent to what you’d pay for three cartons of cigarettes.  So what happened?

People who were offered the raffle to win cigarettes were somewhat more likely to buy tickets if they had a high need to smoke than if they had a low need to smoke.  That is, there was some evidence for this idea of valuation. 

People who were offered the raffle to win cash bought tickets if they had a low need to smoke.  The group in the classroom (who had a high need to smoke) bought almost no tickets at all.  That is, when people had a high need to smoke, they were really uninterested in cash. 

There are two important things to take away from this.  First, even though people know abstractly that cash can be used to purchase cigarettes, their goals have a very concrete effect on their preferences.  So, things that are not obviously related to smoking are devaluated.  Second, the people who are inside the classroom and need a cigarette probably walked out of the classroom after the study and smoked a cigarette.  Presumably, if we had offered this raffle to them after having their cigarette instead, they would have been more interested in buying tickets to win cash.  So, cigarettes can change people’s preferences pretty rapidly.

This means that a smoker trying to quit smoking can talk quite a bit about how they are going to resist the urge to smoke.  But when that need gets strong, the goal system is going to make cigarettes more and more attractive and is going to make everything else less and less attractive to help make the smoker satisfy their need to smoke.  This operation of the motivational system is usually a good thing.  It operates for all sorts of beneficial goals that people have.  But for habitual smokers, it creates a lot of problems.