In parks there are more runners and in pools there are more swimmers, sales of new gym memberships are up and sales of fast food are down. I have no data to support these claims, but intuitively they seem plausible descriptions of behavioural trends during the first half of January in London. The start of a the new year provides us all with the opportunity to reset our lives, trying a little harder to be the people we would like to be. We want to be healthier and more focused on the important things of life. We want to stop giving in to temptation and being distracted by ephemera. This year, we say to ourselves, I resolve …
By mid-February, things might seem different. Doing what we consider to be in our long-term best interest often turns out to be more costly, more tiring, and, perhaps most importantly, less fun than just doing what seems most desirable right now, even when we know that much of the appeal of the immediate pleasure is likely to be a gross overestimation. I have always enjoyed the saying, with regard to the drinking of cocktails: One is good / Two is better / Three is too many / Four is not enough. I recently came across an improved version, from Dorothy Parker: I like to have a martini / Two at the very most / After three I’m under the table / After four I’m under my host. We all know how quickly alcohol weakens our resolve, but even for the sober among us there will be something which functions in our lives as the “third martin”, the point at which our resolve fails us and we start to do the things we know that we should not do.
Western philosophers have long disagreed about how to account for this phenomenon, which the Greeks called akrasia, meaning the “weakness of the will”. Some have taken the view that we always do just what we want. If after work on Friday evening we go to the pub, drink lots of beer, eat a large kebab with chips on the way home, and then sleep in late on Saturday morning, we do so because that is exactly what we wanted to do. Pretending that what we actually wanted was to do the weekend shopping on the way home, eat some quinoa salad, read some poetry, go to bed early, and then run 10k around the park early on Saturday morning, makes no sense because we could have done all of those things but did none of them. What we do shows us what we want. Others take the opposite view, claiming that we regularly experience conflict between our many desires, and that despite knowing what would be the better choices, we often take easier options because our wills are not strong enough. We may later regret these choices, and try harder the next time to choose better.
Whether our moral lives are governed mostly by the brain or the senses – our intellect or our passions – remains a major source of controversy in philosophy. Either way, it does seem plausible that we could learn to improve our decision making processes, better aligning our choices more regularly with our beliefs about what is most important in life. Maybe trying to change our fitness regime, our diet, or our level of alcohol consumption, might be more successful if we avoid relying solely on the resolutions we made on the morning of the first day of the year. What are the other options?
One popular view, drawing upon research in behavioural economics, suggests that we need to be “nudged” into doing the better thing, and that this can best be achieved by establishing some default good choices in our lives, that require little energy or determination to make. Well-known examples include companies automatically enrolling all new employees into pensions savings schemes, and health services using messaging systems to prompt patients to take medicine or to turn up for their appointments. If, at the time we make a choice, we are firmly reminded by someone else to do the right thing, we are more likely to choose to do the right thing, so the argument goes.
An alternate approach suggests thinking about the will as a muscle, and says that the best way to strengthen it is to exercise it regularly. If we set ourselves sets of easy tasks to do, each of which might be of only minor consequence but which also takes up a little of our time or energy, we learn the benefits of self-discipline and the pleasure of achieving our goals for the day. Over time, we can increase the scale and cost of these tasks, and as our will power improves, so we can trust ourselves to make good decisions and stick to them.
My preference is for the latter approach, which improves our capacity to get something done, even when it is tempting to give up. While I see some value in using “nudges” to get people to choose better, the problem with this strategy is that we have outsourced the power over choice to some other agent. We do not improve our own ability to stick to a choice, we let others do that for us. It suggests a condition of permanent infantilism on the part of the employee, the customer, or the citizen. Worse, it also makes us vulnerable to malign actors who can afford to pay for more expensive nudges. If we consider the history of advertising, it seems clear that the quality of the adverts made to promote the purchase of cigarettes, beer, and snack food, was much higher than the quality of the public health adverts made to explain to consumers the health risks of nicotine, alcohol, and sugar. We can be nudged both ways.
Will power is not just a personal challenge, but also a problem for organisations. Many senior executives know that they should be devoting time and energy to creating sustainable value for their various stakeholders, but are tempted instead to take the easy route: quick profits, more focus on presentation that outcome, and anything to avoid the attention of social media mobs. At present, the haste with which many large financial institutions are finding reasons not to renew their membership of “net zero clubs”, which were established to make the funding transition from carbon to non-carbon energy sources easier to manage, is regrettable. Some of these clubs were, for sure, mostly about virtue-signalling, and did not represent a material shift in funding allocations. But when major firms feel no need to continue with virtue-signalling, you know something bad is going on: corporate hypocrisy at least hints that the occupants of the C-suite know what they should be doing.
Similarly, the pace with which social media companies are dispensing with fact-checking of content is of serious concern. These policies were widely known to be mostly window-dressing, but now the windows are to be left naked. No need to pretend to do the right thing, when the loudest voices are celebrating their intention to do the wrong thing. (Of course, one side benefit is that this makes it easier for us all to keep our new year’s resolutions, since we can post details on our social media accounts describing all the runs, swims, and gym sessions we have attended, all the healthy food we have eaten, and all the alcohol we have avoided, and no-one will know any better. There is no need for will power, when you can simply make up your own story. Eventually you believe your own lies.)
Over the next few weeks, all three of the company Boards that I am a member of will meet for the first time this year. I suppose that it is possible that one of my colleagues will suggest that we abandon our employment policies that support diversity and inclusion, that we switch our energy suppliers to increase our carbon consumption, and that we post mis-leading information about our performance on our company website. But I am not anticipating having to deal with any “third martini” moments at my upcoming meetings. Why? Because, despite the news headlines, there are many people and many organisations who take seriously the need to act – firmly and consistently – to improve the society and environment in which they operate; because there are many people and many organisations who never cared much for the double-speak of the large, high profile corporates, but like even less their new shamelessness; because there are many people and many organisations who are resolved not follow the path of weakness and cowardice.
There is an old Latin proverb, etiam si omnes ego non, which translates roughly as, even if all others do, I will not. It remains as relevant today as it ever was.