Habits
Habits
CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH INTO HABIT
The term habit receives broad and varied usage across branches of the social sciences. According to essentially all definitions, habits are learned, recurrent patterns of behavior that are enacted with minimal reliance on conscious resources or effort. They typically are tied to an environment or another action that historically has co-occurred with the habit and thereby has come to serve as a stimulus, or cue, for its automatic performance. When habit is defined in purely behavioral terms (e.g., as an action performed almost daily and consistently in response to a specific environment), research suggests that around 45 percent of people’s daily life can be deemed habitual (Wood, Quinn, and Kashy 2002).
Disciplines differ substantially, though, over the subset of behavior to which the term is applied. In general, psychological usage focuses on relatively simple, low-level behaviors, including those that benefit the individual (e.g., typing, coffee making, seat belt wearing, and condom use) and those that exact costs (e.g., nail biting, smoking, drug use, and overeating). Within sociology and related disciplines, the term is often applied more broadly to describe any stable pattern of action that is spontaneously reproduced via humans’ preconscious engagement in the world around them. This broader application can encompass habits of social, linguistic, economic, political, religious, or moral conduct, and may involve the performance of even complex forms of action.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF HABITS
Contemporary conceptions of habit draw from multiple historical traditions, including pragmatism, behaviorism, and phenomenology. Early psychological use of the term can be traced most strongly to the pragmatist and behaviorist schools. For pragmatists, such as William James and John Dewey (1859–1952), habits were acquired reflexes that emerged due to the inherent plasticity of the nervous tissue. As a behavioral sequence is repeatedly enacted, the brain matter underlying the action was thought to become ever more predisposed to reproduce the sequence. Physiologically, this process was thought to be sustained through the development of reflex paths (or “reflex arcs”) in the nervous system that linked a sensory cue with a (typically) muscular response. Once established, the habitual response could then be initiated by the sensory cue alone (i.e., without recourse to an idea, will, or volition) and would run off to completion in a ballistic fashion (i.e., each action in the sequence would prompt performance of the next). For William James, this inherent tendency towards the habitual constituted “the enormous fly-wheel of society” ([1890] 1981, p. 121), explaining myriad forms of routine action, from habits of speech, gesture, and movement to habits of character and even the inertia of social classes.
Behaviorists also viewed habits as learned, stimulus-cued responses, but largely rejected psychological mediators as irrelevant to the explanation and prediction of behavior. Especially for radical behaviorists such as John Watson (1878–1958) and B. F. Skinner (1904–1990), habits were under the direct control of environmental stimuli, and this control was better understood by examining objectively specifiable schedules of reinforcement (e.g., patterns of reward) than by examining mental processes. This stimulus-response model of habit was expanded, albeit unsuccessfully, by Skinner to encompass even verbal behavior.
In contrast to the behaviorists, phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and Alfred Schütz (1899–1959) focused on the role habits play in providing a preconscious, taken-for-granted framework that guides people’s interactions with the world around them. Habits, in this sense, reflect a set of action possibilities that present to consciousness as natural and given (e.g., a chair appears to lend itself to sitting), but are actually the product of the individual’s social and embodied action history. Some phenomenologists (especially Schütz) emphasized the role of social experience in the development of this prereflective framework of habit, and his work went on to influence both ethnomethodologists such as Harold Garfinkel (b. 1917) and social constructivists such as Peter Berger (b. 1929) and Thomas Luckmann (b. 1927). The phenomenologists’ emphasis on the embodied dimension of habit (especially Merleau-Ponty’s) also resonates with Pierre Bourdieu’s articulation of habitus as a set of bodily dispositions that strategically but unconsciously reproduce past action sequences in a contextually tuned manner.
Despite these broad and differentiated applications, the habit construct lost popularity around the mid-twentieth century due to its close identification with the behaviorist research agenda and its apparent neglect of people’s capacity to plan, deliberate, and reflect upon their actions. As a powerful counterpoint, many social scientists rallied around the idea that human behavior is fundamentally purposive, reflective, and under the control of goals, attitudes, intentions, and conscious rules. Rational choice theorists epitomized this view, and indeed their premise that people act to maximize outcomes in accordance with personal preferences remains a dominant theoretical paradigm in contemporary economics, political science, game theory, and some social theory. Within psychology, the value of the habit construct was also challenged by Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen’s influential “theory of reasoned action” (1975), which stipulates that performance of behavior is determined directly by intentions (which, in turn, are said to be influenced by one’s attitudes and perceived norms). By portraying the human actor as a relatively rational, goal-driven entity whose actions are determined by their intended effects, these perspectives left little room for habit as an explanatory mechanism, and the term entered a state of relative hibernation until the 1980s.
CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH INTO HABIT
Fueled by advances in cognitive science and a zeitgeist more skeptical of wholly rationalist, reflective views of human action, contemporary social science has returned to the active study of habit. One catalyst has been evidence that people draw on relatively independent (but interacting) psychological systems in the control of action. These systems are variously termed procedural v. declarative, implicit v. explicit, automatic v. controlled, or nonconscious v. conscious. Habits tend to be associated with the first term in each dichotomy, whereas novel, deliberative actions tend to be associated with the second term. The independent nature of these behavioral control systems is compellingly evident when brain damage affects one, but leaves the other intact (Knowlton, Mangels, and Squire 1996). Patients with Parkinson’s disease, for example, are able consciously to remember a complex sequence of cues, but cannot incorporate these cues into routinized habits. Conversely, patients with amnesia will not be able to remember the cues, and yet will successfully acquire habitual responses to them. Such research suggests that habits are grounded in psychological systems that are distinct from those used to guide more deliberative, reflective behavior.
A similar conclusion flows from behavior prediction studies, which identify the psychological states and environmental factors that are associated with performance of a given behavior (Wood, Quinn, and Kashy 2002). Such studies suggest that nonhabits and habits exhibit distinct predictors. Consistent with rationalist perspectives, the performance of novel or newly acquired behaviors (e.g., sticking to a new gym routine) is best predicted by the presence of favorable attitudes and intentions (e.g., a strong positive attitude or intention toward fitness). When a behavior has been repeated sufficiently to become habitual, however, attitudes and intentions become less determinative of continued performance. Instead, habitual behaviors are predicted by the mere presence of contextual cues (e.g., people, places, other actions, time of day) that co-occurred with the behavior in the past. Thus, whereas novel actions are guided largely by people’s plans, desires, goals, and intentions, habits are guided largely by the context provided by preceding actions and the external social and physical environment.
Due to their highly automated, contextually cued nature habits are not readily inhibited or overcome by methods that are effective at controlling more deliberative forms of action (e.g., public information campaigns that alter people’s beliefs or attitudes). Instead, habits may be more responsive to techniques that mitigate or redirect their underlying automatic associations. These techniques include stimulus control (avoiding environmental cues that trigger habits) and counter-conditioning (identifying environmental cues and substituting desired behaviors). That said, habits are notoriously difficult to overcome, and relapse is the modal outcome following many attempts at habit change (e.g., diet change, smoking cessation).
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Contrary to both strict rationalist and strict behaviorist positions, contemporary social science acknowledges that the human actor can be driven by reflective, goal-directed mechanisms on some occasions and reflexive, habitual mechanisms on others. As discussed, these forms of behavior are subserved by relatively independent psychological systems and neural substrates. That said, research is beginning to address important interactions between the conscious, deliberative dimension of behavior and the nonconscious, habitual dimension. Notably, some sociologists argue that habits are integral to free will and agency insofar as they provide a framework of action possibilities that can be imaginatively reconfigured to meet a person’s current goals and circumstances (see, for example, Emirbayer and Mische 1998). Furthermore, recent work in psychology suggests that habits can be motivated by a very general sense of reward, without necessarily being directed by specific goals (see Neal, Wood, and Quinn 2006). These approaches move away from the earlier sharp distinctions between habitual and deliberative action, and toward a view of human behavior as involving a dynamic interplay of goal-directed, intentional, reflective processes along with automated context-cued habits.
SEE ALSO Habitus
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Ann Mische. 1998. What Is Agency? American Journal of Sociology 103 (4): 962–1023.
Fishbein, Martin, and Icek Ajzen. 1975. Belief, Attitude, Intention, and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
James, William. [1890] 1981. The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Knowlton, Barbara, Jennifer Mangels, and Larry Squire. 1996. A Neostriatal Habit Learning System in Humans. Science 273:1399–1402.
Neal, David, Wendy Wood, and Jeff Quinn. 2006. Habits: A Repeat Performance. Current Directions in Psychological Science 15 (4): 198–202.
Wood, Wendy, Jeff Quinn, and Deborah Kashy. 2002. Habits in Everyday Life: Thought, Emotion, and Action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83: 1281–1297.
David T. Neal