While inconsistency with ourselves might result in some guilt, inconsistency with others results in interpersonal risks. This pressure will be even stronger at the social level - that is, if the promise is public and involves others: if you and a friend both agree to meet at the gym in the mornings, you will feel more committed to your resolution and more likely to follow through. This is the individual level - the pressure to keep a promise made to oneself. Once you have made that decision, you will feel compelled to stick with it. Let’s say you make a New Year’s resolution to go to the gym three times a week at 6:00 am. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision.” As Cialdini states, “Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. In Cialdini’s research, he found that not only will people go out of their way to behave consistently, they will also feel positively about being consistent with their decisions, even when faced with evidence that their decisions were erroneous.īehavioral consistency acts at both the individual and the social level. From an evolutionary standpoint, behavioral consistency also serves us well: in a social environment, unpredictable people are less likely to be liked and to thrive among others. In this article we discuss the last principle in this list - that of commitment and consistency.ĭefinition: Behavioral consistency refers to people’s tendency to behave in a manner that matches their past decisions or behaviors.īehavioral consistency is a judgement heuristic to which we default in order to ease decision making: it is easier to make one decision, and stay consistent to it, than it is to make a new decision every single time we are presented with a problem. In his book Influence: Science and Practice, Robert Cialdini identifies six principles of influence: But what if I told you that it is possible to influence behavior - to nudge people in the direction of sticking to their goals? The gym traffic eventually slows, productivity and budgeting dwindles, and most of us return to our bad habits, despite our best efforts. This “honeymoon” phase rarely lasts, though. People decide they are going to be healthier, richer, wiser by starting some new, positive habit - a phenomenon known as the “ fresh start effect.” When the last of the New Year’s confetti settles, the New Year’s resolutions begin.
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