Additional Thoughts on Precommitment

At the beginning of her Good Habits, Bad Habits, Wendy Wood relates the weight-loss travails of her cousin whose strategy includes public Facebook declamations.

She doesn’t just say she would like to lose some weight; she vows that this time she will make it happen. Her friends respond with advice appropriate for a hero starting her journey: “Never believe them when they say you can’t.” She isn’t going to just lose fifteen pounds; she’s going to start a new life. Her resolve is clear and strong, and she’s made that resolve public…

She went beyond simply choosing to change. She started to craft her own social environment into one that made it harder for her to not lose weight. This should have worked.

It did. Two weeks after her first post, she updated: down two pounds. “That’s a great beginning.”

But then: silence. A month later, she posted that she was still trying, but without much success. “No weight loss to tell you about yet.” And that was her last post for a while on the topic.

When I met up with her again six months later, she hadn’t lost any additional weight. In fact, the only change was that now she had an additional failure to feel bad about. A costly public one. The end result for her, as for so many people who try to change their behavior, is that it just didn’t happen. She had desire, she had determination, and she had some peer support. They’re supposed to be enough, but they’re not. (3-5)

Now, I don’t think that precommitments are a bad idea. I mention the beneficence of such an approach in my “Principles of Life-Change” post. Sharing your resolution with others; asking them to cheer you and call you to task; having to give money, should you fail, to a dreaded nonprofit such as Planned Parenthood or the NRA, depending on your political orientation—all these and others are potentially very helpful. (Trust me, I know the pain of that of having to give money to a hated organization upon failing to meet a promise made to self and others.)

But any precommitment has to be a part of a balanced life-change strategy; a strategy that takes into account our frailty in the face of self-control challenges. Thus, my repeated emphasis on habit formation and the traps of the hot-to-cold empathy gap. In other words, if precommitment is but one tool in creating a supportive context, if it aids us in removing bad frictions and adding good ones, then yes, I would consider it to be a useful craft-of-living tool. Otherwise, the update posts are going to stop, sooner or later.