How Do You Keep Promises to Yourself When Nothing Enforces Them?
Keep promises to yourself by sorting each by what stands behind it, using Duckworth, Milkman and Laibson's 2018 review, then log a ledger of backed promises.
In this article5 sections
In the preschool delay-of-gratification task that Walter Mischel built, nearly all children decide to wait for the bigger treat. How long they actually last varies enormously, and the famous follow-ups on what that predicts are less settled than the headlines (the replication story). Angela Duckworth, Katherine Milkman and David Laibson open their 2018 review, “Beyond Willpower” (Psychological Science in the Public Interest), on that gap, quoting Mischel’s own question: after the good intention is formed and declared, “what allows it to be realized?” If you want to know how to keep promises to yourself, that question is the right one. It shifts the problem from how sincerely you promised to what stood behind the promise afterward.
I read the review’s sections on commitment devices, situation modification, goal setting and planning, and I’m going to use its sorting scheme as an accounting rule.
A promise with nothing behind it is a forecast
The review notes that most people predict wrongly that they will win their own self-control battles (it cites Augenblick and Rabin, 2018). A promise made in the evening for the morning is a prediction about a future self who gets to choose again, in a different mood. Nothing in the sentence “I’ll be up at 6:30” changes what that person finds easiest to do at 6:30.
The review’s alternative is to count what you actually changed. Self-deployed strategies fall into two groups: situational ones, which alter the world around the choice, and cognitive ones, which alter how you think about it. A promise backed by neither is willpower alone, which the authors describe as the “brute-force approach,” and they note that programs built on it tend to disappoint (their example is the DARE program of the 1980s).
The ledger
Keep a list of what you told yourself you would do this week. Beside each line, write what is behind it.
| Promise | What is behind it | Count it? |
|---|---|---|
| Up at 6:30 | Nothing; the alarm is on the nightstand | Forecast |
| Up at 6:30 | Phone charges in the hallway, alarm set for 6:30 | Situational; count it |
| Gym three times | A plan with a time and place | Cognitive; count it, tentatively |
| Gym three times | A friend gets $20 if I skip | Situational, with a cost; count it |
Your self-trust score is kept promises divided by counted promises. Forecasts do not enter the ratio, because breaking a forecast is data about the forecast, not a betrayal. This avoids the usual trap of punishing yourself for promises that had no chance, and it makes the useful question visible: how many of your promises had anything behind them?
What the backing looks like in the data
The review lists several backed strategies with numbers. Take the following as the strategies’ track records as the authors report them, not as guarantees:
- Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002). Students offered the chance to precommit to deadlines, with a penalty for late submissions, did better on a series of proofreading assignments than students with no deadlines. See the money-versus-social comparison for more on the penalty types.
- Ashraf, Karlan and Yin (2006). Customers of a Philippine bank who were offered an account that locked deposits until a chosen date or goal had one-year savings rates 81 percent higher than customers offered a standard account.
- Royer, Stehr and Sydnor (2015). Employees who could stake money on gym visits every two weeks went to the gym 25 percent more.
- Duckworth, White and colleagues (2016). Students taught to remove temptations from sight reported better study quality and goal achievement the following week (ds = .56 to .63), though the review flags that these were self-reports over a short window.
Each of these puts something outside your head: a date, a locked account, a forfeit, an object moved.
The daily test
You do not need a quarterly review. Choose one promise that recurs daily and can be checked without judgment calls: the wake-up time. Either you were up by the alarm or you were not, and a timestamp settles it. Log one line a day, with the backing next to it.
DontSnooze is one way to supply the backing for that line: you get 30 seconds after the alarm to record a video that shows you are up, and if you do not, a random photo from your camera roll goes to friends you picked.
After two weeks, compare the days with backing to the days without. If your ratio is much higher on backed days, you have your own evidence about which promises you can afford to make. If it is the same, the backing is the wrong kind for you, and the review’s other categories are the place to look.
Limits
For how much each kind of goal tactic is worth once it leaves the lab, there is a table of effect sizes.
The 2018 review is a synthesis, not a new experiment, and it says that almost all the experiments it covers predate the replication reforms. Bank customers, employees and smokers in its examples chose to take part, and the review reports that commitment devices do not always work. A personal ledger is my adaptation, not a tested method, and the 14-entry figure in the FAQ is a rule of thumb.