In two studies published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers from USC set out to look at the effects of habit, the automatic triggering of behavior, versus conscious awareness of behaviors.
“Much of what we do every day is habitual, but we are reluctant to acknowledge our habits and instead chalk our behaviors up to our mood and our intentions,” stated author Wendy Wood.
In the first study, of 809 adults, completed via online. First, the were to recall a happy, sad, or neutral event. This part of the study set the mood of the participants. Afterwards, the subjects participated in a habit-forming, and supposedly unrelated task, where they were to press a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ key for 40 trials as quickly and accurately as possible to their ability. Afterwards, the subjects were asked if they would like to complete additional trials to assist the researchers. Researchers found that subjects who preferences the ‘no’ key were likely to decline helping the researchers in the last step compared to those who pressed the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ response equally. When asked, participants were more likely to attribute their willingness to help according to their mood, however the test showed the the key-pressing habit developed from the second part of the experiment played a much larger role than what subjects reported.
In their second study, they looked at 112 college students and their coffee drinking habits for a period of a week. When asked initially, most of the college students attributed their coffee drinking to their inner state of fatigue rather than a habit. Then for five days, the researchers regularly tracked and checked in with the students every two hours including asking questions about their mood or whether or not they drank coffee or any other beverage in the past 2 hours.
The researchers found that habit was just as a strong influencer as fatigue on their choice of consuming coffee. “We found that the participants strongly overestimated the effect of tiredness on their coffee consumption and underestimated the effect of habit,” said author Asaf Mazar.
As a follow up study, the researchers even provided the students data on their coffee-drinking habits and financial incentive to tell the truth about their coffee consumption behavior. Despite the strong driver of habit already established, the subjects still cited their mood of fatigue as their motivation for drinking coffee.
This study shows that most people are unable to make proper, logical and informed decisions and how easily and vulnerable the human mind is when it comes to making decisions in our daily lives or even changing our behavior for better ones such as exercising, eating healthy, or making sound environmental decisions such as recycling or mindless online shopping.
“To effectively change behavior, Americans must acknowledge that much of our behavior is habitual and automatic,” said Mazar. “Habits can keep us repeating unwanted behaviors, but they can also keep us on track in maintaining desirable ones, like working out or recycling.”
We have to leverage this vulnerability in the human mind to create better actions in our daily life, and remove the harmful ones. And as always things such as: culture, how you were raised, and whatever you were told about your identity, are absolutely not excuses to continue behaviors that are harmful to yourself, other living beings, or the planet in general. Seriously, man-up.
A Mazar and W Wood. Illusory feelings, elusive habits: people overlook habits in explanations of behavior. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211045345
