May we suggest one more resolution for this New Year? Take your groups seriously!

Issue 41: Why groups are good for you and can help you achieve your goals; the myth of tribalism; and here's to a socially vibrant 2022!

Turning the calendar from one year to the next provokes reflection—on what we’ve done and left undone over the past twelve months, and on what the next dozen may hold in store. Twenty twenty-two is still mostly a blank page, a chance to write a new chapter in our lives. Many of us compile ambitious lists of resolutions, inventories of the ways we hope to do and be better moving forward.

Buster Keaton’s New Year’s Resolutions

Katy Milkman (the author of How to Change) and her colleagues call this “the fresh start effect”. Using internet activity as a reflecting pool for our collective psyche, they found that Google searches for diet spike immediately following “temporal landmarks”—including the new year, national holidays, and even the start of a new week. In experiments, they found that these sorts of transition points help people start to pursue new goals because they provide a “psychological disassociation” and a parting of the ways with the imperfect self of the past.