The Psychology of New Year's Resolutions (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_949)

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad

thesaadtruthwithdrsaad

Society & Culture, Science, Education

4.7 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2025

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Apologies for the patchy audio. Not sure why it happened. Cited paper: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234097 _______________________________________ If you appreciate my work and would like to support it: https://subscribestar.com/the-saad-truth https://patreon.com/GadSaad https://paypal.me/GadSaad To subscribe to my exclusive content on X, please visit my bio at https://x.com/GadSaad _______________________________________ This clip was posted on December 31, 2025 on my YouTube channel as THE SAAD TRUTH_1973: https://youtu.be/UesMEUYv4E4 _______________________________________ Please visit my website gadsaad.com, and sign up for alerts. If you appreciate my content, click on the "Support My Work" button. I count on my fans to support my efforts. You can donate via Patreon, PayPal, and/or SubscribeStar. _______________________________________ Dr. Gad Saad is a professor, evolutionary behavioral scientist, and author who pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. In addition to his scientific work, Dr. Saad is a leading public intellectual who often writes and speaks about idea pathogens that are destroying logic, science, reason, and common sense. _______________________________________

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everybody. This is Scott Sad. I don't know if anybody's here. I've only done this maybe two or three times.
0:08.8	In any case, I wanted to quickly discuss New Year's resolutions. Many years ago, in 2009, I wrote an article on my psychology today column discussing the psychology of new year's resolutions
0:24.2	and since there's been quite a bit of research on the topic so forgive me as I look away this
0:29.0	I want to just mention a couple of things this is a paper titled a large scale experiment on
0:35.4	new year's resolutions approach oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals.
0:41.9	So let me explain what that means.
0:43.8	Approach-oriented goals would be framing a goal positively.
0:48.1	I'd like to exercise so that I can be in better health.
0:52.2	Approach avoidance goal would be framed negatively.
0:55.6	I'd like to exercise so I don't become sick.
0:59.2	So even though both of these might be equivalent objectives,
1:03.6	the frame either positive approach or negative avoidance,
1:08.4	ends up having an effect on the likelihood of you sticking to the New
1:13.6	Year's resolution. Let me just mention. So this is based on a, this is in plus one,
1:20.7	the journal by Martin Oskarsen, per Carbring, Gerhard Anderson, and Rosenthal published December 9th, 2020.
1:31.3	So we just, they asked 1,06 people, a whole bunch of questions about their New Year's resolutions.
1:42.3	So if you adopt an approach avoidance resolution, you will be,
1:49.2	by the end of the year, I think it's a one year timeline, 58.9% of the people were successful
1:57.1	in their new year's resolution, whereas if they take an avoidance approach New Year's
2:03.3	resolution, 47.1%, so more than 10% higher if you take a positive frame versus a negative frame.
2:10.5	What are some of the top topics that people make resolutions about?
2:16.9	Well, it's not difficult to imagine what they are.
	...

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