And if you fail to recognize the role of habit, then you’ll keep overlooking better strategies that effectively target habits. When that happens, your old habit is still there to guide your behavior, and you end up back where you started. But we inevitably get distracted, tired or just plain busy. Most of us can achieve this in the short run – think about your enthusiasm when starting a new diet or workout regimen. We make a similar error when we try to control unwanted habits and form new, desirable ones. We habitually use many words that contain “I.” Suddenly, the required 24/7 monitoring turns this simple task into a far more onerous one. Pretty simple, right? But now imagine if you had to maintain this rule for a whole week. To illustrate, imagine you had to avoid saying words that contain the letter “I” for the next five seconds. But consistently reining in a habit is fiendishly difficult. We exert willpower and just push through. Of course, most of us can control a single instance of a habit, such as by refusing a cup of coffee this time or taking the time to offer directions to a lost tourist. The reason that habits can be so difficult to overcome is that they are not fully under our control. Why habits are surprisingly difficult to change But ultimately you’d be barking up the wrong tree – your habit would still be there in the morning. If you believe that you drink coffee because you are tired, then you might try to reduce coffee drinking by going to bed early.
And this gap is key to understanding why people often struggle to change repeated behaviors. The gap between the actual and perceived role of habit in our lives matters. People still overlooked habit and assumed that their reluctance to proffer help was due to their mood at the time. We then replicated this finding in a second study with a behavior that people might consider a “bad” habit – failing to help in response to a stranger’s request. Habits, it seems, aren’t considered much of an explanation. In other words, people wildly overestimated the role of tiredness and underestimated the role of habit. Yes, they were somewhat more likely to drink coffee when tired – as would be expected – but we found that habit was an equally strong influence.
The actual results starkly diverged from our research participants’ explanations. To benchmark these assumptions against reality, we then tracked these people’s coffee drinking and fatigue over the course of one week. They estimated that tiredness was about twice as important as habit in driving them to drink coffee. To test whether people underestimate the role that habit plays in their life, we asked more than 100 coffee drinkers what they think drives their coffee consumption. Habits are formed in specific environments that provide a cue, or trigger, for the behavior.
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