Did you make a New Year’s Resolution? While good intentions are plentiful on January 1, it is clear that many people have dropped their resolutions before the month is even a week old. So are New Year’s Resolutions just another pointless tradition or is there a way to make a resolution stick for the year?
FiveThirtyEight is a web site most famously devoted to politics and elections. However, they also include unique stories on a wide range of topics. Last week they posted thoughts on New Year’s Resolutions from Christie Aschwanden. The article reported some interesting insights into how to succeed with them. For example, Christie writes:
I dug into the literature and talked to some psychologists, and what I discovered is that science can’t tell me exactly what to resolve, but it has narrowed in on a few tricks that can help me succeed. The first, perhaps most crucial thing to do is pick a goal that you’re truly committed to. Not just something you think you should do, but something you truly want to do, said Marina Milyavskaya, a psychologist at Carleton University. “Wanted goals are much more likely to be attained,” she said.
Read more advice for resolution success on the FiveThirtyEight web site.
The pursuit of efficiency often requires a cleanup of our physical spaces. While clearing out clutter should be easy to do, in practice it is hard to throw away objects we own. For example, maybe you got a mug at a conference six years ago. The conference was unmemorable and the mug is an awful yellow color. As you are considering parting with it, a colleague asks if they can have it. You quickly decline and put it back on the shelf. This is a direct experience of the Endowment Effect.
Remember, a sunk cost is not recoverable, which gives rise to the famous expression, “Chasing good money after bad.” The trick is to evaluate the current status of a project, investment, or commitment in light of where it stands now and ignore past contributions. This way, it is possible to stay nimble and take advantage of better opportunities when they arise.
In this book, Head in the Cloud, author William Poundstone explores the question of whether all this online information is only serving to make us less informed. Online information is easier to skim, but hard to dive into deeply. Poundstone specifically highlights a phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect which can lead people to overestimate their own level of knowledge in a subject area.
This is a question of great interest to behavioral economist Dan Ariely. So much so that he did several experiments which aimed to probe deep into how people assign value to the work they do. The results of the experiments were shared in a TED Talk. From the video description:
Illusory Superiority is a cognitive bias whereby individuals overestimate their own qualities and abilities relative to others. It is sometimes called the Lake Wobegon Effect after 
Optimal stopping : when to stop looking
To be clear, this curse has nothing to do with magic or ancient mystical tombs. The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when individuals are unable to ignore the knowledge they have which others do not, or when they are unable to disregard information already processed. This is the reason why an expert musician can make a lousy teacher of novices, because the expert forgets what it is like to know so little.
entails searching through the available alternatives until an acceptability threshold is met. (Satisficing = Satisfy + Suffice) Often this is a viable strategy since searching for the perfect product or solution would run into the law of diminishing returns where additional effort leads to fewer results. So a natural tendency is to find the first good choice and stop there. While satisficing can be a good short term option, it may result in long term inefficiencies. The quick purchase of running shoes now could produce regret over the colors and painful blisters a few days later.
