#NewYearNewMe?

The Problem

For many, the start of a new year brings the desire for change. People all around the world create their own ‘New Year’s Resolutions’: an undesirable trait/behaviour that an individual seeks to change. Despite the widespread desire to bring about individual change, many people are unsuccessful in achieving their goals; Research shows that only after 1 month into the new year, around 50% of people fail to meet their goals (Norcross & Vanarelli, 1989) and after one year a staggering 88% of people end up failing to follow their resolution (Wiseman, 2007). As new year's resolutions are normally self-initiated, most of the failure can be attributed to the individual. Research shows that individual willpower and motivation is one of the most common factors predicting an individual’s success in achieving their resolution (Norcross & Vanarelli, 1989).

Why is this problem important?

Creating and achieving new year’s resolutions can influence an individual’s mental health. As new year’s resolutions are personal goals, failing to achieve them can be debilitating to an individual’s self-worth and self-esteem (Wolfe & Crocker, 2003). Personal goals are also positively correlated with wellbeing, studies show that goal commitment and goal attainment positively impact one’s subjective and psychological well-being over time (Brdar, Rijavec & Miljkovic, 2009; Brunstein, 1993). The negative effects of failing a new years resolution can be looked at in more detail when looking at specific goals. Research shows that some of the most common new year’s resolutions involve losing weight/eating healthy, visiting the gym, and quitting smoking (Wiseman, 2007). Starting a resolution to increase your exercise/go to the gym has been shown to improve mental health: physical exercise has been shown to reduce depressive symptoms for people with depression (Cooney et al., 2013). Furthermore, going to the gym and achieving personal body goals can also increase a person’s self-esteem and self-confidence (Ekeland, Heian & Hagen, 2005). Research also shows that healthy eating behaviours are a protective factor for depression, whereas a diet consisting of unhealthy foods is a risk factor for depression (Akbaraly et al., 2009). Studies also shows that quitting smoking is associated with reduced depression and anxiety, and has a positive impact on an individual’s quality of life (Taylor et al., 2014). It is therefore clear that common new year’s resolutions such as the ones discussed above have clear implications on an individual’s mental health and wellbeing, and failing to achieve these resolutions can negatively impact it.

The Intervention

Our intervention takes the form of several posters, with each one specialised towards a common new year's resolution. Our target audience for our intervention are university students with new year’s resolutions who are struggling to achieve or failed them. We decided to make 3 posters motivating and helping people to achieve their new year’s resolution: one on going to the gym/exercising, one on eating healthy and one on stopping smoking. During the month of February, these posters were placed in areas where people with those resolutions would be most likely to see them. The poster on exercising/going to the gym was put up in the University of Warwick gym/sports hall, the poster on eating healthy was put up around cafes and shops around campus, and the stopping smoking posters was put up around popular smoking areas around campus.

Before making the posters, we conducted a poll on Instagram to gain an insight on the amount of people (particular university students) that failed to follow their New Year’s Resolutions. Halfway through february the poll was posted, out of 132 respondents, 63% of those with new year’s resolutions had failed them (Figure 1).

(Figure 1)

Poster 1 (Gym/exercising)

Poster 2 (Eating healthy)

Poster 3 (Smoking)

Each poster has a QR code which, when scanned with a smartphone, links directly to an online quiz (Figure 2) that gives you a score on how likely you are to achieve your new year’s resolution (http://www.richardwiseman.com/resolutions). The quiz was created by psychologist Richard Wiseman, who studied the factors that influence success in new year’s resolutions. Some of these factors includes creating implementation intention plans, the use of a diary, looking up to a role model and rewarding yourself. Based on the score, the individual can see how likely they are to succeed with their resolution and the steps they can take to increase the likelihood of achieving their goal.

(Figure 2)

Psychological and Persuasion Techniques

Our intervention used several psychological and persuasive techniques. Firstly, our posters follow the ‘central route’ of Petty and Cacioppo’s (1979) Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). The central route of persuasion relates to information that directly relates to a particular topic in the person’s life. As our posters concerned specific resolutions, the reader would process the information centrally as it will be much more relevant to them. This means that they have the motivation as well as the ability to think about the message on our posters and process it. If, however, the audience’s motivation and ability to process the message is low, there are peripheral cues in the posters that can enhance persuasion. The ‘peripheral route’ from the ELM relies on heuristics and mental shortcuts to influence behaviour. Each one of our posters contained quick, snappy statements regarding the issue that would take little effort to process, but still be meaningful. For example, our smoking poster contained a high statistic on the rate of smoking relapses coupled with the statement ‘be the one to change this statistic’, such information requires little mental effort to understand and reinforces the severity as well as the individual’s responsibility of the issue. Furthermore, the QR codes on our posters are another easy low-effort way of getting information across. The reader simply needs to scan the code with their smartphone and they are instantly directed to the website, where they have the simple task of completing a quiz.

Secondly, our intervention also followed Ajzen’s (1991) Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). This theory argues that one’s attitudes towards behaviour, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control shape their intentions and subsequent behaviours. Our posters targeted the individual’s perceived behavioural control in order to make the challenge of achieving their goals seem easier and less difficult to perform. To do this, we included information in each poster about creating implementation intention plans and the usefulness of them in increasing the likelihood of goal attainment. Implementation intention plans are explicit statements that guide your behaviour in specific situations, they are designed to increase availability and make responses automatic.  Research shows that creating implementation intention plans leads to successful increases in exercise behaviour (Andersson & Moss, 2011), significantly more people quitting smoking (Armitage, 2007) and increases the likelihood of including healthy food in one’s diet (Adriaanse et al., 2011). In addition to information on implementation intentions, we also included a scannable QR code on each poster that links directly to an online quiz that gives you a score on how likely you will achieve your resolution. The quiz asks questions such as ‘will you create a step-by-step plan?’’, ‘will you record your progress?’, ‘will you reward yourself?’ etc. This is designed to tell the individual, based on their score, the areas they are neglecting that is affecting their ability to achieve their goals. The individual can take the quiz multiple times, until they get a perfect score. By doing this, they can learn which steps to implement into their everyday life to increase the chances of succeeding in their resolution. Therefore, we included details on creating these implementation intentions, as well as the online quiz,  in order to make the individual’s perceived ease of performing their resolution higher, which, according to TPB, would influence their subsequent behaviour.

Thirdly, our intervention used persuasive methods from the ‘MINDSPACE’ technique. The mnemonic MINDSPACE, refers to 9 factors that influence behaviour in automatic ways (Dolan et al., 2012). For our intervention, we focused on ‘A’ - Affect. Affect refers to the experience of emotion and emotional responses, which can induce instant and automatic behavioural change. Each one of our posters addressed this aspect of ‘affect’; the poster on the gym cited a statistic that 60% of people fail their new year’s resolutions coupled with the statement ‘don’t let this be you’ which would make the individual feel guilt. Our healthy eating poster argued the statement that an unhealthy diet ‘can take years off your life’ which can induce fear. Also, our poster on smoking has a picture of a healthy person’s lungs, compared to a picture of a smoker’s lungs, which could also induce feelings of fear and disgust. By evoking experiences of emotions in our posters, automatic decision making reactions should ensue, prompting the reader to make behavioural change.

Conclusion/Future Ideas

The posters we created were designed to help, motivate and persuade people to achieve their new year’s resolution. We hope that, by putting these posters up in the relevant areas around campus, we brought about change and persuaded people into achieving their goals. However, it is worth noting that we focused on the more common new year’s resolutions (quitting smoking, eating healthy and exercising/going to the gym). In the future, another way of tackling the problem of failed new year’s resolutions would be to focus on more resolutions, such as drinking alcohol less and studying more.

References

Adriaanse, M. A., Vinkers, C. D., De Ridder, D. T., Hox, J. J., & De Wit, J. B. (2011). Do implementation intentions help to eat a healthy diet? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the empirical evidence. Appetite, 56(1), 183-193.

Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 50(2), 179-211.

Akbaraly, T. N., Brunner, E. J., Ferrie, J. E., Marmot, M. G., Kivimaki, M., & Singh-Manoux, A. (2009). Dietary pattern and depressive symptoms in middle age. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 195(5), 408-413.

Andersson, E. K., & Moss, T. P. (2011). Imagery and implementation intention: A randomised controlled trial of interventions to increase exercise behaviour in the general population. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 12(2), 63-70.

Armitage, C. J. (2007). Efficacy of a brief worksite intervention to reduce smoking: the roles of behavioral and implementation intentions. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(4), 376.

Brdar, I., Rijavec, M., & Miljković, D. (2009). Life goals and well-being: Are extrinsic aspirations always detrimental to well-being?. Psihologijske teme, 18(2), 317-334.

Brunstein, J. C. (1993). Personal goals and subjective well-being: A longitudinal study. Journal of personality and social psychology, 65(5), 1061.

Cooney, G. M., Dwan, K., Greig, C. A., Lawlor, D. A., Rimer, J., Waugh, F. R., ... & Mead, G. E. (2013). Exercise for depression. Cochrane database of systematic reviews, (9).

Dolan, P., Hallsworth, M., Halpern, D., King, D., Metcalfe, R., & Vlaev, I. (2012). Influencing behaviour: The mindspace way. Journal of Economic Psychology, 33(1), 264-277.

Ekeland, E., Heian, F., & Hagen, K. B. (2005). Can exercise improve self esteem in children and young people? A systematic review of randomised controlled trials. British journal of sports medicine, 39(11), 792-798.

Norcross, J. C., & Vangarelli, D. J. (1988). The resolution solution: Longitudinal examination of New Year's change attempts. Journal of Substance Abuse, 1(2), 127-134.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1979). Issue involvement can increase or decrease persuasion by enhancing message-relevant cognitive responses. Journal of personality and social psychology, 37(10), 1915.

Taylor, G., McNeill, A., Girling, A., Farley, A., Lindson-Hawley, N.,&  Aveyard, P.(2014). Change in mental health after smoking cessation: Systematic review and meta-analysis. British Medical Journal, 348,1-22

Wiseman, R. (2007). Quirkology: How we discover the big truths in small things. Basic Books.

Wolfe, C., & Crocker, J. (2003). What does the self want? Contingencies of self-worth and goals.