Good Habits, Bad Habits (Wendy Wood)

Chapter 1: Persistence and Change

Making public commitments raise the stakes of failing by creating accountability. [Anecdote about author’s cousin posting on Facebook that she would lose weight]

John Stuart Mill theorized Homo economicus utility maximizer model of humans.

Since then, economics has developed a more realistic understanding of human nature.

If people were purely rational, there would be no need for public commitments.

We know intuitively that it’s hard to change ourselves.

Author’s cousin ended up failing to lose weight.

We need to understand our irrational nature to be able to change ourselves.

Ethos of culture is that willpower is everything. Self change becomes a test of personhood. If you aren’t “just doing it”, then you must be choosing not to.

3/4 of people believe obesity results from lack of control over eating.

In university setting, intelligence and motivation have little to do with getting things done on a regular basis.

Science is showing we are not one single unified whole. Our minds are multiple mechanisms that guide behavior.:

1. Executive-control functions that we are aware of, but are expensive and exhausting.
   1. Decision making ability
   2. Willpower
2. Habits. e.g. your first 15 minutes after waking up are probably habit.

Our conscious minds have little contact with habits. Same learning mechanisms are responsible for both good and bad habits.

Many life changes require changing your procedures, like reducing your environmental footprint, or forego making purchases repeatedly, or continuously make offers to people to connect.

Author and Judy Ouellette reviewed studies. One-time decisions like enrolling in a class or getting a vaccine had good follow-through from intention to action. Other repeated actions like recycling or taking the bus did not.

Finally after decades, we know that habit creates persistence. This book explains how to create habits.

Weight loss: after 5 years, only 15 percent have kept off at least 10 pounds. Involves constant struggle. Same dynamics are at play if you want to spend more quality time with kids, save money, or stay focused at work.

Cousin’s weight loss was in hostile environment: crackers, chips, cookies, soda, ice cream around house. Food industry is creating hyperstimulating foods. Her suburb was built for driving, not walking.

Every day is thus filled with difficult decisions, which is too taxing.

Daniel Wegner white bear experiments: Trying not to think of a white bear caused the thought to come up more.

Trying to suppress a thought/desire makes us preoccupied with it. Consciousness then confabulates a reason for quitting.

Think of habits as a “second self”. Many people use consciousness to exert executive control to override their habits during the instances they become aware, but there is a better way to do this.

Many virtues are already habitual: locking front door, using turn signal, kissing kids in morning before school. Better way is to replace undesired habits with desired ones.

Chapter 2: The Depths Beneath

What is a habit?

Experience sampling method for collecting data.

Study showed 60% [sic] of actions recorded were done without thinking.

One way to become more conscious of habits is to be with others.

Individual character/personality didn’t have much effect on what percentage was habitual for each person. Total percent was about 43% [sic] of behaviors performed out of habit.

• 88% of daily hygiene
• 55% of tasks at work
• 44% of exercise
• 48% of relaxation

Even repeated entertainment like TV, people were only paying sporadic attention.

Habit isn’t “what” the action is, it’s “how” you perform an action.

Only occasionally do we notice we did something out of habit. We more often notice bad habits than good.

Introspection illusion: We are overconfident we are acting on intention and desire. People preferred the right-most stocking in a set of four identical ones but didn’t realize they had that preference. This makes us overlook and fail to take advantage of the full power of habit.

“Turnout as a Habit”: People who voted before, who continued voting in future elections that they didn’t care about. After people move house, the habit is broken.

Stable context leads to stable habits.

Traffic: 50+% of auto accidents happen within 5 miles of home. Rise of “distracted driving.”

Creative performance: Comedians generate about 6 funny endings to a scene in 4 minutes. Estimated they’d be able to add 5 more (i.e. less than their first round) in 4 more minutes, but actually did 20% more than they estimated. If we persist, we keep producing and our later work is better than the earlier work.

Chapter 3: Introducing Your Second Self

Radical behaviorism: Popular before 1980s, we react in fixed ways to stimuli around us. Became less popular due to the Cognitive revolution that showed that top-down executive thinking mattered, and motivation mattered. Psychology shifted from studying learning/behavior to studying the mind. However, idea of “habits” were pushed to the side. “Habits” fell out of favor with book authors starting around 1930 and declined until after 2000, but has had an uptick during the 2000s.

Partly enabled by fMRI – showed that initial performance of a task had activity in decision-making/executive control regions (prefrontal and hippocampal). After repetition, activity moved to putamen and basal ganglia.

New word for habit: automaticity.

With rats, initially they press a lever to get a reward and stop if reward goes away. After much practice, they don’t need the reward anymore.

Rewards are important when you first do something.

Later, the reward is irrelevant. The rat presses the lever in a particular corner of the cage. The human pulls the refrigerator door because they are standing in front of it.

Study by the author demonstrating this with habitual runners using “speed of thought” as the metric.

Similar to the habit of 2+2 “looking like” 4, the path by the lake “looks like” it’s time for a jog.

Working definition of habit: “a mental association between a context cue and a response that develops as we repeat an action in that context for a reward”

Automaticity is a superset of habit. Other types of automaticity: snap judgments of people, reflex, Pavlovian conditioning, or goals and ideas being activated by our surroundings.

Example habits:

offering to help out with soccer a few times and getting positive regard from other parents leads to having a habit of helping out triggered by seeing the soccer field.

getting insomnia once and trying out a video game a few nights leads to computer games coming to mind automatically every time it gets late.