Habits

What are habits?

Strong associations (in memory) between contexts and responses that have developed through repetition

And so they are realtively automatic responses to contexts that are insenitive to changes in the value or contingency of response outcomes

• Does not have to be an environmental context → can also be an internal feeling

• Insensitive to changes → when it is no longer reinforced the behaviour still persists

Patterns of behaviour build up over time and are reinforced

Habits should NOT be equated with frequency of occurrence

• More than just doing something frequently

• Indicator of habits → how long someone has done something or how much someone has done something

Evidence that habits are represented by strong associations between contexts and responses

Adriaanse et al (2011) - Study 1

Identify habits

• What would you usually snack on at home? (habitual response)

• What snack would you eat if this was not available? (alternative response)

Primed lexical decision task

• Decide if a letter string is a word or non-word

• Prime - home

• Targets - Responses that the ppt has generated + filler items

• Ppt never sees the prime as it is outside of conscious awareness

• Activate things which you associated with the prime quicker

Faster response to habitual than alternative as it is more strongly associated with home

Did the associations develop through repetition?

Wood, Quinn & Kashy (2002)

Experience sampling

• Ppts recorded what they were doing at the moment of the watch chime

• The frequency with which they had performed the behaviour in the past month

• The extent to which they performed the behaviour in the same physical location each time

• The involvement of other people in the behaviour (others involved vs others not involved)

About 43% of actionS were performed almost daily and usually in the same context

Chance they were reporting more agentic accounts

• Drawn to differences more than similarities

To what extent are habitual responses ‘automatic’?

(Some) Criteria for establishing automaticity

Do not require deliberation

• ie. are efficient

Occur outside of conscious awareness

Inensitive to changes in the value of the response

• ie. are not dependent on people’s goals

Are difficult to control

Do strong habits remove the need for deliberation?

Aarts et al (1997)

Measure strength of cycling habits for 82 students

• Decide, as quickly as possible, how to travel for nine trips

• The frequency of menotioning the bicycle served as a measure of habit

16 descriptions of travel situations, each with 4 attributes

1. Weather conditions (rain, no rain)

2. Weight of luggage (4kg, 20kg)

3. Departure time (9:00am, 2:00pm)

4. Distance to the destination (2.5 km, 5 km)

Favouribility of using the bicycle in each travel situation (1-10 scale)

The number of attrributes used to make decision

• Operationalised as how predicted attributes were of decision

Results

Weak habits

• They took into account ~ 2.2 of the attributes when considering how they would travel

Strong habits

• They took into account ~ 1.7 of the attributes when considering how they would travel

Do habitual responses occur without people being aware of them?

Wood, Quinn, and Kashy (2002)

Experience sampling

Ppts recorded what they were doing at the moment of the watch chime

Also - what were you thinking about during this activity?

And - Whether they considered easch behaviour to be a habit (yes / no)

IF habits occur without people being aware of them people will be more likely to not think about it

Results

The % of the time that thoughts corresponded with the action

Non-habitual

• Thoughts corresponded more, thinking about

Habitual

• Thoughts less likely to correspond when carrying out habitual behaviour

Are habits insensitive to changes in the value of the response?

Neal et al. (2011)

Habit strength

• How frequently do you eat popcon in movie theaters?

Context

• Cinema or meeting room

Value of the response

• Popcorn was either fresh or stale

Results

Stale popcorn should not reinforce eating

Cinema context

• Amount of popcorn people consume based more on their habits

• Those with high habits were not sensitive to if it was fresh or stale, still ate a high amount

• Low habit more sensitive to the value of the repsonse *stale low percenetage and fresh high percentage)

Meeting room context

• People don’t eat popcorn much in the meeting room

• Whether you were habitual, not a great amount of popcorn consumed, more when it was fresh

Habits are not just about behaviour

Mental heabits (Verplanken et al., 2007)

Habit index of negative thinking (HINT)

Thinking negatively about myself is something . . . .

1. I do frequently.

2. I do automatically.

3. I do unintentionally.

4. that feels sort of natural to me.

5. I do without further thinking.

6. that would require mental effort to leave.

7. I do every day.

8. I start doing before I realize I’m doing it.

9. I would find hard not to do.

10. I don’t do on purpose.

11. that’s typically “me.”

12. I have been doing for a long time.

Are habits part of who we are?

Self report habit index (Verplanken & Orbell, 2003)

Doing X is something that is typically me

Murtagh et al (2012)

‘Being a driver is an important part of defining who I am’

‘In general how often fo you do the following for local journeys?’

• Cycle / use local bus / walk / take a train, tube or tram?

rs vary between 0.02 and 0.07

Albini et al (2018)

‘How important is it to you to eat two or more positions of fruit a day / vegetables a day?’

‘Eating fruit every day is something…’ (eg. I do frequently - SRHI)

‘Eating vegetables every day is something…’ (eg. I do frequently - SRHI)

Correlation for vegetables (r = 0.49), but not for fruit (r = 0.06)

Verplanken and Sui (2019)

How much does this activity reflects who you really are as a person (ie. your ‘true self’)?

How frequently do you do this activity?

The median correlation between these two measures was r = 0.46

A quote from Verplanken & Orbell (2022)

“habits are often seen as ills of society that need to be overcome … in order to create healthier, safer, or more sustainable societies. However, this narrow view of habits overlooks the important role habits play in regulating desirable everyday behaviour or in consolidating long-term behaviour change”

We do not what to be deliberate about eveything during the dyay so that we can think about other things

Is it possible to change or break habits?

Motivation alone is unlikely to be enough

Webb & Sheeran (2006)

Meta-analysis of 47 studies that changed ppts intentions to do things

Divided the studies into habitual behaviours and less habitual behaviours and compared the effect of changing intentions on both these groups on both these groups

Changes in intentions led to larger changes in behaviours that ppts performed sporadically (d+ = 0.74) than in behaviours that could be repreated into habits (d+ = 0.22)

• If you change people’s intentions to do less habitual things, it has more of an impact

• If you change peoples’s intentions to do habitual things it has less of an impact

Intentions have much less of an impact

• Not zero though so maybe wr need to pair this change in intention with something substantial

Why do people fail to act on their intentions?

Intention viability

• It is impossible for some decisions to find expression in the absence fo particular abilities, resources or opportunities

Counter intentional habits

• Intentions have smaller effects on behaviours performed frequently in similar situations (Ouellette & Wood, 1998)

Lack of resources / outside personal control

• Need a supportive environment

Why is it so hard to break habits?

This automaticity means that when we come to change them it is very hard to due to this super fucntionality

• Have to start deliberating and thinking about action

People may not be aware…

That habits drive behaviour

• Coffee shop study

Of the cues that trigger habits

• Primes not even seen consciously can infleunce our behaviour

Of the habitual responses themselves

• We are not even thinking about our habitual behaviours

Habits are also…

Insensitive to changes in the value of the response

And may come to define us

• People may notice you are the type of person to do this

• Evene if you stop doing this they may still think of you as that person

• Habits may come to define how others see you

Strategy 1 - Change circumstances

If habits are cued by recurring stimuli, then changes in circumstances that remove these stimuli should disrupt habits

Wood, Tam & Guerrero Witt (2005)

Looked at students moving to a new uni

• Experience naturally occurring changes in the context (familiar contexts are likely to change)

Basic prediction - these behaviours would persist if the cues fo the associated behaviours stayed the same

• If things stay relatively the same then habits should not change

• If the cues change then habits should not transfer to this and persist

Time 1 - 4 weeks before moving

Frequency of performance

• Ppts reported how often they → Exercised , read the newspaper, watched tv

Stability of context

• Ppts indicated whetehr they typically perfomred each behaviours in the same location, with the same people (or alone), and whether those around them perform the behaviour

Time 2 - 4 weeks after moving

Frequency of performance

• Ppts reported how often they → exercised, read the newspaper, watched tv

Changes in context

• Ppts indicated whether they typically performed each behaviour in the same location, with the same people (or alone), and whether those aorund them perform the behaviour

• Ppts also reported the extent to which the context in which they perfomed each behaviour at the university to home was similar / different

Exercising behaviours results - location

Strong exercise habits - characterised by frequently carrying out that behaviour in the old location and doing so in the similar context

People with strogn habits are really disrupted in the change in contextual cues

People with weaker habits are less disrupted

• More flexible and can adapt to new circumstances

• More similar across the two contexts

If you have strong habits and the characteristics that underpin those strong habits changes then it breaks those habits

Watching tv results - location

Same trend as exercise

Reading newspaper results - people

Same rend as the other

The presence or absence of other people is one of the cues which can drive habitual behaviours

Strategy 2 - Vigilant monitoring

We cannot always change contextual cues

Natural changes in context is useful and sometimes there may be opportunities to direct our contextal cues to change our behaviour

• Can be strategic with this but it is challenging to change these contexts

Vigilant monitoring is paying attention to things that you otherwise were not paying attention to

Habits are relatively automatic and so people are nto thinking about them

What if we effortfully paid attention to it?

Quinn et al (2010)

Ppts asked to identify behaviours that they tried to inhibit or change during a typical day

Measure strength of ppts habits

• How often they had performed the unwanted behaviour in the past

• The extent to which they perfomed the unwanted act in the same location each time

At follow up

• Reported the strategies they used

• Vigilant motoring → thinking don’t do it, watchig carefully for mistakes, monitoring behaviour

• Distraction

• Stimulus control (eg. removing opportunity)

• Nothing

Rated the overall success of each attempt to change their behaviour

One of the dangers of vigilant monitoring is trying not to do something by thinking baout it may be counter intuitive

• May work in some contexts but not others

Results

Vigilant monitoring was effective when having strong habits

• Self report may not be entirely accurate

More effective than distraction and stimulus controls

Seems at odds with wood’s study

• Found that changing these circumstances was very effective

• But we do not know the extent to which people were effectively able to control the stimulus

What if you are not able to change the context

• In this study it may not have been effective as they may not have been able to change the context

To what extent are we actually able to recognise the conext which drives our behaviour

• If you want to change the context you need to know what the context is

• Requires a level of meta-reflection and the understanding of behaviour

• Coffee shop study shows us that people may not jabe great insight into their own behaviours

Strategy 3 - make a plan study 1

If then plans

If the gap between the intentions and behavour is habitual

We know planning seems to help people translate intentions into behaviour

Perhaps planning is actually an effective behaviour that helps people, weven when the underlying behaviour is relatively habitual

Adriaanse et al (2011)

Forming an implementation intention creates a new association with the critical cue that is then pitted against the habitual association in a ‘horse race’

Snack food at home study

Has a second condition where people would plan what they eat

• Specify what they would eat or specifying specifically that they would eat something instead of the usual

If you have a plan how quickly do you repsond to the planned response when it is primed with the contextual cue

Creating an association between the if (contextual cue) and the then (response)

Forming instant habits - association creations mirrors that association you make with habits

• If it mirrors this then they should respond as quickly to the planned alternative repsonse as the habitual reponse

Results

Blue - without plan (normal activation response)

Yellow - if there was a planned response

Those who planned responsed quicker to the alternative repsonse when primed with the cue

Also responded slower to the habitual response

Suggests that a new association has been formed and partly that is inhibiting the old association

• Could maybe compared the relative sixe of the blue and yellow bars and see which may drive behaviour → difference between the habitual and non-habitual looks bigger than the different two planned responses so maybe the habit is a stronger association

Planning may be useful in breakign habits as it seems to forge associations between stimuli and response which is what you have with habits

• If we can form these alternative responses

Strategy 3 - make a plan study 2

Holland & Aarts & Langendam (2006)

A telecom-company installed recycling boxes for old paperwork and plastic cups, but the amount binned did not seem to be reduced

One group of employees asked to plan when, where and how they would recycle their paper and plastic cups

Recycling behaviour

• Weight of paper and cups in each ppts distbin at the end of the working day (in the wrong bin not the recycling bin

Successful resonse → reduction in the weight of paper and cups in the wrong bin

Results

More paper is bad

Measured

• Before

• After 1 week

• After 2 weeks

• After 2 months

Basic constrast between control questionnaire (yellow) and those who formed plans (black and purple)

Planning seems to be helpful

• When people form plans on what they will do with their waste, they are disrupting their habits and are putting more of their paper in the recycling

If we want to break habits we just have to form plans

• Simplistic conclusion

Does not account for how strong the habits are

But perhaps the effectiveness of planning depends on the strength of the habit?

Forming these conscious plans and forming these new associations may be helpful with weak associations but not strong ones

Webb, Sheeran & Luszycynska (2009)

Recruited regular smokers who wanted to quit from high schools

Measured strength of smoking habits

• Faegerstrom Test for Nicotine Dependence, number of months as a smoker and number of attempts to give up smoking

One half from implementation intentions

• When I feel stressed, then instead of smoking I will…

• When someone offers me a cigarette, then in order not to smoke I will…

• When meet up with my friends who smoke, then in order to not smoke I will…

• When I observe someone who enjoys smoking, the in order not to smoke I will…

Control condition completed one of three control exercises concerning seatbelt use

One month later, ppts smoking bhevaiour was followed up

• Number of cigarettes per day

Results

Moderating effect of the strength of the habit

Forming implementation intentions was effective in breaking habits but primarily for those with weak smoking habits

• Moderate habits - almost no effect

• Strong habits - no effect

Think about what the nature of the habits you are trying to break

• May be boundary conditions to the effectiveness of some strategies