BIAS OF THE MONTH: THE FRESH START EFFECT
A Fight Against Food Waste: The Fresh Start Effect Vs. Optimism Bias & Habits
Lewis Allison, Strategist at Ogilvy Change
‘Last-week-Lewis’ was a waster. He spent too much time on that thing, missed exercising and as a consequence wasted all the food he bought. Present and future Lewis though, what a guy! He’s just bought a weeks’ worth of healthy food, planned when to exercise and is completely ready for the week, he knows this week will be great!
My bias of the month has to be the Fresh Start Effect and its constant battle against my Optimism Bias and habits surrounding food waste.
The Fresh Start Effect is the theory that we are more likely to achieve goals that are set at the start of a new time period. Researchers, Dai, Milkman & Riis (2013) found that we are more motivated to pursue good habits by using a new week, month, year or a public holiday as a mark to put past and often bad behaviour behind us. And, because we must maintain a consistent self-image, our current self is the one who is superior – “I was bad last week, but this week I’ll be smarter”. This motivates us to choose the ‘better’ options, for me, this is planning and buying my weekly shop as if I’m going to come home early every night and cook something healthy from scratch.
The new time period helps disconnect ‘Last-Week-Lewis’ from future-Lewis and keeps me optimistic about not wasting the healthy food I buy. However, as soon as we get to the middle of the week there is an intention-action gap. Old habits die hard, ‘Last-week-Lewis’ returns with a vengeance; missing meals, working late and not eating the food he bought. The Fresh Start Effect made him too optimistic, he succumbed to the Optimism Bias, our tendency to be too hopeful, which leads us to consistently exaggerating the anticipated success of our goals.
So, what can my future-self learn ‘Last-Week-Lewis’ habits?
The challenge with this type of Food Waste is to honestly look at my past behaviour. If I could harness the Fresh Start Effect but be more realistic about my behaviour I could potentially rid myself of an Optimism bias and maybe design a smaller, more adaptive shopping list.
Two potential researched ways of reducing the Optimism Bias (Jolls & Sunstein, 2006) are the Availability Heuristic & Loss Aversion. To use the Availability Heuristic, I could emphasise past ‘bad’ behaviours to make them more easily retrievable from memory, for example making it obviously clear that last week I had to throw away fresh ingredients like; chicken, vegetables and fruit. To use Loss Aversion, I could highlight the losses that are likely to occur because of this past ‘bad’ behaviour. Pinpointing which memory and what loss i.e. money, time, food is likely to motivate me the most, is a challenge that will need to be trialled and tested.
Written by Last-Week-Lewis
Dai H, Riis, J, & Milkman, K L, (2013) The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks That Motivate Aspirational Behaviour. The Wharton School Research Paper No.51.
Jolls, C & Sunstein, Cass R (2006), The Law of Implicit Bias. 94 Calif. L. Rev. 969.
Peetz, J & Wilson, A (2013), The Temporally Extended Self: The Relation of Past and Future Selves to Current Identity, Motivation, and Goal Pursuit. Social and Personality Psychology Compass. Volume 2, Issue 6
Sharot, T (2011), The Optimism Bias. Current Biology. Volume 21, Issue 23, R941 - R945
