TY - JOUR

T1 - Taking the New Year’s Resolution Test seriously

T2 - Eliciting individuals’ judgements about self-control and spontaneity

AU - Grubiak, Kevin

AU - Isoni, Andrea

AU - Sugden, Robert

AU - Wang, Mengjie

AU - Zheng, Jiwei

N1 - The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Behavioural Public Policy, ? (?), pp ?-?, 2022, © 2022 Cambridge University Press.

PY - 2024/1/1

Y1 - 2024/1/1

N2 - Self-control failure occurs when an individual experiences a conflict between immediate desires and longer-term goals, recognises psychological forces that hinder goal-directed action, tries to resist them but fails in the attempt. Behavioural economists often invoke assumptions about self-control failure to justify proposals for policy interventions. These arguments require workable methods for eliciting individuals’ goals and for verifying occurrences of self-control failure, but developing such methods confronts two problems. First, it is not clear that individuals’ goals are context-independent. Second, facing an actual conflict between a desire and a self-acknowledged goal, a person may consciously choose not to resist the desire, thinking that spontaneity is more important than self-control. We address these issues through an online survey that elicited individuals’ self-reported judgements about the relative importance of self-control and spontaneity in conflicts between enjoyment and health-related goals. To test for context-sensitivity, the judgement-elicitation questions were preceded by a memory recall task which directed participants’ attention either to the enjoyment of acting on desires or to the satisfaction of achieving goals. We found little evidence of context-sensitivity. In both treatments, however, judgements that favoured spontaneity were expressed with roughly the same frequency and strength as judgments that favoured self-control.

AB - Self-control failure occurs when an individual experiences a conflict between immediate desires and longer-term goals, recognises psychological forces that hinder goal-directed action, tries to resist them but fails in the attempt. Behavioural economists often invoke assumptions about self-control failure to justify proposals for policy interventions. These arguments require workable methods for eliciting individuals’ goals and for verifying occurrences of self-control failure, but developing such methods confronts two problems. First, it is not clear that individuals’ goals are context-independent. Second, facing an actual conflict between a desire and a self-acknowledged goal, a person may consciously choose not to resist the desire, thinking that spontaneity is more important than self-control. We address these issues through an online survey that elicited individuals’ self-reported judgements about the relative importance of self-control and spontaneity in conflicts between enjoyment and health-related goals. To test for context-sensitivity, the judgement-elicitation questions were preceded by a memory recall task which directed participants’ attention either to the enjoyment of acting on desires or to the satisfaction of achieving goals. We found little evidence of context-sensitivity. In both treatments, however, judgements that favoured spontaneity were expressed with roughly the same frequency and strength as judgments that favoured self-control.

KW - spontaneity

KW - self-control

KW - libertarian paternalism

KW - nudges

U2 - 10.1017/bpp.2021.41

DO - 10.1017/bpp.2021.41

M3 - Journal article

VL - 8

SP - 1

EP - 23

JO - Behavioural Public Policy

JF - Behavioural Public Policy

SN - 2398-0648

IS - 1

ER -