Taking the New Year's Resolution Test seriously: eliciting individuals’ judgements about self-control and spontaneity

Abstract Self-control failure occurs when an individual experiences a conflict between immediate desires and longer-term goals, recognises psychological forces that hinder goal-directed action, tries to resist them but fails in the attempt. Behavioural economists often invoke assumptions about self-control justify proposals for policy interventions. These arguments require workable methods eliciting individuals’ goals verifying occurrences of failure, developing such confronts two problems. First, it is not clear are context-independent. Second, facing actual desire self-acknowledged goal, person may consciously choose desire, thinking spontaneity more important than self-control. We address these issues through online survey elicited self-reported judgements relative importance conflicts enjoyment health-related goals. To test context-sensitivity, judgement-elicitation questions were preceded by memory recall task which directed participants’ attention either acting on or satisfaction achieving found little evidence context-sensitivity. In both treatments, however, favoured expressed with roughly same frequency strength as judgments