Social resolutions

A powerful punch towards change

Following the popping of champagne corks and fireworks, some of us are striding into fresh starts and collective action with purpose.

Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash

Today’s post is a psychological look behind modern resolutions, digital influences and the difference between quitting habits and succeeding at goals.

The odds are very much stacked against the complete follow through of New Year’s resolutions, most fizzle out by the second Friday of January according to journalists. Instead, resolution setting is arguably, a habit in itself, a ritual or tradition that is talked about in households, or amongst friends, debated on LinkedIn and increasingly a stable content item for social media calendars

It is thought that what we now think of as resolutions, actually started 4000 years ago as promises to gods, in Babylonian times this took place in March when crops were sown. Although, by 1671 there is diary evidence of a shift in the type of promises being made. Scottish writer Anne Halkett is often credited with capturing the moral changes she wanted to make in her diary, (more about her here, and interestingly she also has a place at ‘The Dinner Party’ by Judy Chicago) and by now the Julian calendar meant this happened to be January not March.

If you were enjoying crimbo limbo and want to stay there a little longer, I think there’s a good argument for taking a Babylonian approach and delaying action until spring, and if you want to get started now take heart, even Anne Halkett wrote her resolutions down after New Year’s Day.

New Year’s resolutions give us all something talk about, specifically they are a socially acceptable vehicle to talk about our hopes and dreams, perhaps when we might not usually dare to expose ourselves. Resolutions sit firmly within our cultural constructs, and I personally love the idea that we can opt in our out of the taking action with conviction or apathy, opting out gives you something to talk about too.

What really fascinates me is the contemporary shift in our approach to fresh starts towards collective action.

It’s worth thinking about the differences between resolutions and goals, they are different mechanisms of taking action towards something, perhaps a dream or ambition or a level of performance. Resolutions are intentions to change, and often these require the formation of different habits to move us from where we are now, to the place we think we need to be. Goals are tangible targets or achievements in the distant future, they can be achieved in part through habit changes, but mostly they require some agility in thinking and behaviour to navigate stages of learning within a permanently changing landscape. Goals when done properly, can be continuum with shifting targets, resolutions are one off statements with a pass/fail threshold.

It’s common to associate goals with the phrase ‘goal setting’, and yet the last thing I want to advise you to do is set a goal in stone, this terminology is rooted in management speak and the psychological theory of being specific which seems to be confused with permanent, it dates back to 1968 when two Psychologists Locke and Latham, put forward a theory around motivation, they set out to define what goal setting should look and feel like. I agree with the mechanisms of the theory, but the way its applied through rigid frameworks like SMART, seems to be less helpful when life inevitably, changes, what we end up with is SMART objectives masquerading as inflexible resolutions.

For this reason, I’m interested in the power of group motivation and perspective taking, not least because it prevents us from sitting with inflexible goals. The odds are stacked in favour of group action, and our digital landscape has provided a fantastic platform for people to come to together to achieve their goals.

Social identity theory helps us understand how the groups we decide to be part of influence how we see the world around us, we seek out people like ‘us’ in social spaces using words, values and even desired habits, it’s a process of social identification. Of course, messaging is pushed to us too through adverts and algorithms, and perhaps unsurprisingly for platforms the most popular New Year’s resolutions on and offline are around physical health, weight loss, and eating habits.

Veganuary, going vegan for a month or longer,  RED January, running or doing something active each day,  and Dry January are great examples of habit change communities popularised by social media, so let’s take a look at the psychological and social change underpinnings, first social contagion occurs, this isn’t something that just happens to us, we actively seek out information through our social media channels (scrolling or viewing stories) and then spread it with likes, shares or instant messaging, then what happens is this habit change is circulated through our communities and social circles, it’s a process of diffusion resulting in the knowledge or brand becoming part of that group of community culture which in turn influences how members think about themselves. People in the RED community might speak about being a REDer in a collective sense, much like someone who runs in the park with a few hundred other people every Saturday thinks of themselves as a ‘parkrunner’. The group membership then spills over into other social contexts, being a committed parkrunner or volunteer would start to influence weekend plans.

Identification and categorisation elements of social identity have a tangible purpose, they, make it easier to see and know who is, or is not part of the group, this process of comparison is the final element of social identity theory. RED January is intriguing when you start to follow it on social media and get behind culture, the brand is about consistency, yet the real people who take part are engaged in conversations that normalise being flexible and compare different approaches, and this is important because we know that new habits need flexibility.  This is best illustrated in the work of psychologist Katy Milkman, (listen to her talking about this experiment ) she conducted a gym habit study on google employees. Half of the group were incentivised with money to go to the gym at the same time, the other to just go to the gym at some point, and guess what, both groups went to the gym when they were paid, but after the incentivisation something interesting happened. The group who went at a specific time of day were derailed when important meetings got scheduled, if they didn’t go at that specific time they were less likely to go at all than the group who had been flexibility going from the start of the study. It is another argument against being too specific.

There is a huge amount of interest in these branded habit changes not least because of public health and social prescribing opportunities as a way to fix the nation, a side benefit has been a flurry of published research around our habit changes and its helping us to understand the mechanisms of successful resolutions and goal achievement, one of these takeaways is the evidence that shows we set more appropriate and flexible goals when we have support from a community.

So the contemporary shift in our resolutions is that social media delivers a powerful punch in the direction of our ambitions. Sub communities that form around hashtags and accounts create the perfect staging area for individual transformations, of course some are safer than others, and there can be the unintentional facilitation of obsessive behaviours, but they also highlight the shades of grey between habit performance, inevitable failure and consistency.

Online Communities enable us to see behind the scenes to what is really going on with peoples success and failure, for every perfect transformation, more authentic accounts show consistency and the blips. Importantly, and this is something I found in my own research around women entrepreneurs and online communities, being in a community as an observer or lurker has its benefits when it comes to weighing up next steps and taking action, it helps to break down all or nothing thinking. Some psychologists think that when we do participate online, we disclose more, in the same way that January gives us permission to talk about our hopes and ambitions, online spaces afford anonymity or risk averse ways of participating.

I used the phrase ‘perfect staging’ intentionally though, for those who want to act the part of their new self, these online spaces with their imagined audiences allow them to test out who they desire to be whilst learning how to flexibly change.

So when we come together for resolutions online and find collective meaning and identity it often leads to something bigger than sticking with a New Year’s resolution, it provides the ingredients of belonginess and connectedness that is required for  wider social change.

Psychologically speaking, New Year’s resolutions give us something to talk about, scoff at and fail at, but digital platforms are creating spaces for individuals to transform themselves with the power of group motivation and action, importantly they help with the magical part of goal achievement, knowing when to stick to the plan and how to move round the stuff you can’t control, social media is not shy at  offering us up alternative perspectives. My final reflection is that perhaps in 4000 years we’ve actually come full circle by making resolutions in the company of others for shared purpose even if we don’t start of thinking that way.

I hope that 2023 is the year you need it to be