Didn’t Make It to the Gym? How to Come Up With a Good Excuse

It’s the same story every year on New Year’s Eve: People make a resolution to lose weight, eat better, or work out more. With the best of intentions, many of us announce these plans to friends and family members as the clock strikes midnight. However, research has shown that people frequently fail at pursuing their New Year’s resolutions (Liu, 2022). This makes lots of sense because pursuing goals such as eating more healthily and exercising more requires not only much discipline and willpower, but also requires a considerable investment of money and time.

If people want to pursue their health and fitness goals, they might need gym subscriptions or new workout clothes, or they might need to buy fresh produce and cooking equipment. They might also need to free some time for their workouts and set aside time for grocery shopping and cooking, instead of grabbing takeout. Yet, people often find that their money and their time are scarce, and many other goals compete for these resources (e.g., work, family, or simply binge-watching a favorite show). Thus, failure at self-control, for example failing to pursue one’s New Year’s resolution, is very common.

What can people do when they’ve failed, but have also announced their goal to friends and family? One option is to quietly hope that everyone has forgotten one’s exuberant proclamations of the many gym visits to come. Another option is to provide an excuse. After all, people don’t want to appear as if they have little self-control, but instead want to maintain a positive image in the eyes of others, even after they’ve failed at something. After all, people judge others negatively whom they perceive to have little self-control (Mooijman et al., 2018).

In my research (Steinmetz, 2023), I study which excuses help to make people appear to have good self-control even after they’ve failed at a resolution. Because people need money and time for many resolutions, using a lack of money or time as an excuse both seem like good strategies to justify having abandoned one’s plans. However, these two excuses are not equally effective. I consistently find in experiments that using lack of money as an excuse leads to better outcomes than using lack of time.

For example, in one experiment, 200 online participants read about people who failed to eat healthier food. Some lacked the money, whereas others lacked the time. Those who lacked money were seen as having better self-control than those who lacked time, and they were more likely to be selected as gym partners in the future. This pattern emerged because participants believed that lacking time is a choice, and people could have made the time to pursue their resolution had they really wanted to. However, lack of money is less controllable, thus people who said they lacked money were seen as unable to pursue their resolution and not blamed.

In reality, failing at a resolution often has many reasons. When trying to explain a failure to others, people would be wise to focus on the reasons outside of their control. If lack of money or other uncontrollable factors are the reason, others are more forgiving for such failures. Ironically, people sometimes believe that lack of time will make them seem busy and important, and might therefore be a good justification for failing to do something. My research shows that this logic is misguided, as people feel that others could have made the time had they tried hard enough.