One thing is true about New Year’s health resolutions: They fail. But researchers have found the most effective way to get people to change their behavior revolves around the clever use of . . . hypocrisy. When people feel not only that they are failing themselves but also that are failing to live up to what they tell other people to do, they change their behavior – and stick to it.
Renée Bator, a social psychologist at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, recently corralled students who were on their way to a fitness center. She asked them to sign pledges that they would work out at least four times a week and give each workout their best effort. She also asked them to sign fliers that declared, “If I can do it, so can you!”
Students who had made public pledges about how often they worked out and had exhorted others to do the same – but were then reminded by Bator that they were not living up to their own preaching – used the fitness center far more regularly thereafter than students who had not been made to feel hypocritical. When we reminded that we are not living up to public pledges, we effectively turn the people around us into our enforcers: We feel that the eyes of our friends and colleagues are on us and that they are disparaging us.
Asked whether she had applied her research to her own life, Bator hesitated and laughed.
“I just bought a new piece of exercise equipment,” she said, “and I was going to tell my husband I am going to work out Tuesdays and Thursdays” as a way to trigger feelings of hypocrisy in herself. “And then I said, ‘Maybe not. If I tell him, I am probably going to do it, so I am just going to make the commitment to myself.’ “