Psychologists play an important role in helping people make positive changes to their lives—but breaking old patterns isn’t easy.
Wendy Wood, PhD, a professor emerita of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, studies habits. Her work suggests much of human behavior is driven by automatic routines shaped by context rather than conscious intention (Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 67, 2016opens in new window).
Instead of trying to muster up motivation, Wood encourages redesigning one’s environment to cue healthier, more productive habits—something psychologists and organizations can help with and something everyone can pay attention to while making goals for the new year. The Monitor spoke to Wood about how behavior change happens and the role psychology can play.
How do you help people and organizations apply the science of habits in everyday life?
I help them understand what habits are and how they work. There’s a lot of popular literature about habits that doesn’t correspond to science. Habits don’t develop through motivation. They’re behaviors that develop over time through repeated experience that yields a reward—like when the car turns on any time you stick your key in the ignition. The habit memories that develop from repetition are not conscious. That means you can have strong habits but not be aware of them, which is different from strong emotions and beliefs.
A good example of this lack of awareness is typing. Most of us are good at typing on a keyboard. But if I ask you to list the keys on the second row, you probably would have some difficulty—even though you can use them effectively. Your conscious understanding of what you’re doing differs from your habitual behavioral response.
Along with my research on habits, I regularly give talks to business leaders about how to support habit changes in their organizations. I explain how to listen to employees about what gets in their way of aligning with the organization’s mission. This feedback makes it easier to make changes and new habits—which boils down to making the old habits harder and rewarding new behaviors that help the company meet its goals.
How can psychologists draw on habit science in their own clinical work and in their personal lives?
Psychologists play an important role in supporting change. A lot of what troubles us in daily life is our inability to control unwanted habits. So many behaviors—patterns of social interaction or health and financial behaviors—are the result of repetition. If we repeat behaviors that work in the short run but cause problems longer term, then we need to figure out how to change those.
If habits form from rewards, why do we have habits that don’t work? Because our goals change. If you’re hungry at work and don’t have time to grab lunch, you may buy a donut from the vending machine. It meets your immediate need and fulfills a short-term goal. The next day, the same thing happens, and you start to develop a habit. But the behavior may not align with your long-term goal of health. These “bad” habits form when goals shift, or long-term goals are different from short-term goals.
These unwanted habits can be hard to override, and they won’t change with motivation alone. Few people can keep up the motivation to keep fighting old habit memories. Instead, habits change by changing context. Psychologists can help patients identify the contexts [in which] they’re most likely to engage in the troubling behavior and work together to change the context.
What do you wish more people understood about the limits of motivation compared with the power of context and environment?
Motivation, thought, and decision-making are important for single decisions, such as trying to decide where to put your child in preschool or which retirement program to sign up for at work. They are also important if contexts change. If you move to a new location, you have a window of opportunity to make new decisions that can form new habits. So, you may find a gym that’s close by and start working out there, or start taking your kids to a nearby library to encourage reading.
You don’t have to move to create a context change. The goal is to make a new, desired behavior easier and the unwanted one relatively more difficult. That could be as simple as finding a gym close to where you live or keeping your gym shoes by the door if you want to work out more. If you don’t want to eat cookies every night, change the context by not bringing them into your home. This advice sounds too simple, I know. We are used to thinking of ourselves as being in control and changing behavior with decision-making and willpower. But habit memories form slowly and they decay slowly. So, it’s not easy to control them through sheer force of will.
What new research in habit formation excites you most?
Most of my research right now is on habits in social media use. The way social media sites are structured leads us to form habits that aren’t always beneficial and can lead to harmful behavior, including misinformation and outrage. I have been working with former students Gizem Ceylan and Ian Anderson to figure out how social media sites could be restructured to generate more truthful, fact-based information and less hate-based reactions.
Currently, people are incentivized to post potentially untruthful content because sensational, novel posts are rewarded with likes and followers. Gizem and I are exploring swapping the “like” button with a “truth” button that asks people to evaluate how truthful the information is. That could cause people to change their posting habits because it shifts the reward.
Social media has become such an important part of people’s lives. Until social media sites change, people are responsible for modifying their own habits, which, as I explained, isn’t easy. Across the board, the best way to change a habit is to make it more difficult. So, you could leave your phone outside your room at night, or set your display to gray scale to reduce the reward of looking at it. We’d love to think we can control our own behaviors with motivation alone, but habits just aren’t amenable to that kind of change.
