Skinner’s Law Is the Secret to Keeping Your New Year’s Resolution

Right around this time of year, we journalists feel compelled to write about the ever-popular topic of New Year’s resolutions. We offer suggestions, alternatives, and dig into the psychology of habit change. But we also generally feel duty bound to mention your prospects for success. 

Depending on which study or authority you believe, something like 80 to 90 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail. Given that this process of setting goals and failing dishearteningly has been going on for so long, is there no new insight science can offer to help you actually stick with your resolution? 

Actually, maybe you don’t need a new breakthrough. Legendary psychologist B.F. Skinner figured out how to beat back temptation and keep your commitments 87 years ago. The only question is why so few of us apply his wisdom today.  

If you took an intro to psych course back in high school or college, you may remember B.F. Skinner as the father of “behaviorism.” He’s the guy who trained rats and pigeons to press levers that delivered food or electric shocks in an effort to shape their behavior. 

What does that have to do with your (probably already flagging) New Year’s resolution? Skinner believed people weren’t all that different from the creatures in his lab. Our behavior is also sculpted by our drive to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. It’s a truth summed up neatly in what later became known as Skinner’s Law. 

If you are struggling to do some particular behavior (such as going to the gym regularly like you vowed in December), you have two choices. As the writer George Mack summed it up, you can either “make the pain of not doing it greater than the pain of doing it” or “make the pleasure of doing it greater than the pleasure of not doing it.”

Skinner started laying out the research behind this law way back in his first book The Behavior of Organisms in 1938. So this isn’t at all a new insight. But according to leading Wharton School behavioral scientist Katy Milkman, author of the aptly titled book How to Change, it still applies today. 

“It’s a tool for a person to self-motivate,” Milkman recently told Big Think of Skinner’s Law. What does that tool like in practice? It looks like “creating an extrinsic reward system” that ups the pleasure of doing what you say you want to do, and/or the pain of not doing it. 

That might mean making a bet with someone that you’ll keep your resolution (a technique apparently popular with poker players). You could just tell everyone about your commitment so that the embarrassment of failing (or pleasure of praise) helps keep you on track. Or maybe it involves bribing yourself with a treat whenever you take a step in the direction of your goal.  

What it definitely doesn’t look like is making a resolution and then trusting in willpower and good intentions to get you to your goal. That’s how you get to that abysmal 90 percent failure rate. 

It might be a little bit of a blow to your ego to realize you are more like B.F. Skinner’s rats and pigeons than you’d like to admit, but the legendary psychologist’s 87-year-old law is still the best way to actually keep your New Year’s resolution. 

What works for lab animals works for humans too — if you really want to change your behavior this year, look for external ways to make sticking with your goals more pleasurable and rewarding, and not sticking to them painful and embarrassing.