The whys and hows of habits

You’re late for class and speed walk across campus to reach your destination. You’re fully prepared to slink to the back of the room while your professor glares exacerbated daggers at you, but, to your surprise, you discover that your entire class is outside the room.Everyone is mulling around and someone informs you that the door is locked; they’re waiting for the professor.

You have no reason to doubt what you’re told. The visual evidence of 23 students twiddling their thumbs is very convincing. You believe the door is locked. Yet you can’t resist the urge to walk to the door and jiggle the handle. It doesn’t budge. You laugh at yourself and your redundancy, and join the patient milieu. Two minutes later another person arrives late. You inform her that the door is locked. She mumbles an acknowledgement, sees the 24 students waiting outside the classroom, and then proceeds to tickle the doorknob just like you.

Why did you both do that? What compels normally rational people to ignore obvious information and act in flagrant opposition? It’s not that you or your tardy compatriot believed the door was unlocked. You tried opening the door not because you thought it would get you into the room but because that’s just simply what you do with a closed door. You open it with a handle.

You’ve done it so many times throughout your life that it has become a habit. Like nail biting, nose picking, and smoking first thing in the morning, habits are routines of behavior repeated so frequently that they may occur subconsciously. They occur without goals or intention, simply an automatic behavior.

There are two schools of thought in the psychological world of how habits are formed. The first comes from old-school behaviorists, who believe it is a simple stimulus-and-response phenomenon, repeated numerously to induce associate learning, and that forms the habit. In the opening scenario, the stimulus is a closed door that you want to enter and the response is twisting the doorknob. Because you have associated these two things, a closed door and the action of turning the doorknob so many times, they become strongly linked in your brain and that is reflected in your behavior; one inevitably leads to the other.

The other school is more modern, a product of social and personality psychologists. Here, habits are thought of as consistency of response. People like consistency. It is predictable, reliable, and unlikely to get you killed. Consistency of action stems from your various dispositions—the summation of all developmental influences—that lead you to repeatedly evaluate a situation in the same way, then repeatedly act on that situation in the same way: identifying a goal and then working toward the goal. Repeated enough, these behaviors become deeply ingrained and form a habit.

However, as with all things “liberal arts”, the best argument comes from a synthesis of the two opposing ideas. Wood and Neal (2007) explain habits in terms of a habit-goal interface, with two main principles.

The first is the principle of context: the object, action, or location that precedes the habit is the trigger for the habit. Performance of the habit is entirely context dependent, such that behavioral control is outsourced to the contextual cue without much, if any, conscious deliberation. This frees the conscious mind to focus on other, more pressing events.

The second principle is the absence of goal-mediation for the performance of the habitual action. Habits are the residue of past goal-seeking behavior, just without the goal. When a habit is acquired, it is usually to accomplish a particular goal in a particular context. After enough occurrences though, the original basis for the action—the goal—is removed from the picture. What is left is a purposeless behavior—the habit.

Consider something that many people try to cultivate: the daily habit of reading of the New York Times. It is initiated with the goal of becoming more informed about politics, the world, and the arts. Suppose someone picks it up every morning from the library, with the intent of reading it later in the day. After a length of time, the original motivating goal of gaining information from the paper becomes less and less necessary as the action of taking the paper is associated with a visit to the library. Eventually, the individual will pick up the paper in the morning only to throw it away at night.

Neurological evidence supports this line of reasoning. Reports from drug addiction studies suggest that the progression of an action from a voluntary performance to a habitual, compulsive behavior represents a transition at the neural level, largely in two structures.
The prefrontal cortex, associated with planning and goal-oriented behavior, is very active during acquisition of a task or behavior. It gradually becomes less involved as a habit forms, giving way to an area called the striatum. The striatum serves as the major input center of information to the basal ganglia, the structure that determines which actions you actually carry out. With more of the striatum and less of the prefrontal cortex involved, behavior occurs with more automaticity. These findings imply that habits are literally subconscious—they occur without conscious intervention.

Therefore, armed with a technical definition and understanding of habits, how can you turn a New Year’s resolution into this year’s habit? The answer is simple but difficult: just do. Pick a cue to trigger your habit and every time you encounter the cue, just do it. Without thinking. Perform, act, accomplish, and simply execute your goal without hesitance or deliberation. The closer you pair your response to the stimulus, the better you will associate the two. Before you know it, you won’t even need your prefrontal cortex and you’ll be cruising your way through a successful new habit on the back of your striatum.