Good Habits – from Context to Rewards
EEric Singler: Hi and welcome to a new episode of B.E. Good!, brought to you by the BVA Nudge Unit, a global consultancy specializing in the application of behavioral science for successful behavior change.
Every month, we get to speak with a leader in the field of behavioral science in order to get to know more about them, their work and its application to emerging issues.
My name is Eric Singler, founder of the BVA Nudge Unit, and with me is my colleague Jenic Mantashian.
JJenic Mantashian: Hi Eric, it’s great to be back for another episode. I want to introduce our guest. Today we will be speaking with Wendy Wood. Wendy is a world leader in behavioral science who has devoted the last 30 years to understanding how habits work. She is currently the Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California and the author of the best-selling book Good Habits, Bad Habits, The Science of Making Positive Changes that stick which was published last year.
E I am very honored to welcome you today, as you are the world’s foremost expert in the field of habits, which is at the heart of behavioral change. I first had the opportunity to meet you in France at Sorbonne University, about 2 years ago, thanks to my friend, Professor Pierre Chandon. It was during your inaugural lecture as the first recipient of the INSEAD & Sorbonne University Visiting Chair in Behavioral Science.
For years, your research papers, and now your book, Good Habits, Bad Habits, have been a great source of knowledge and inspiration for us at the BVA Nudge Unit and for many people around the world.
So, we are very happy and honored to have the opportunity of an in-depth conversation with you! Welcome Wendy.
WWendy Wood: Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.
J Great. Wendy, we would love if you could start off by sharing with us a little bit of history on what led you to start working on habits.
W Well, I didn't actually start to work on habits. I was interested in how people change and it became really clear that people are very good at changing initially.
We can all make decisions to do something new, do something different, to alter our behavior, in fact, there are institutions devoted to that, right? There is the new year's resolutions that we all make. So people are good at this, but they're not so good at sticking with the change once they've made it. And that was fascinating to me.
That's been what I've been studying for the past 30 years as you said, trying to understand how it is that some people are able to stick with their decisions and the changes, but many of us aren't, and what it is that makes it difficult to change? That's how I got interested in habit, because habits are how people naturally change and stick with it. It's by forming new habits.
J And I think we'll talk a little bit more about some of these ideas in more depth, but perhaps the lead-in into that, could you share with us some experiments that you conducted that you feel were most insightful or perhaps are ones that you are most proud of? And along those lines, the accomplishments you are most proud of as a behavioral scientist? Wendy: Well, I think that one of the interesting studies, the most interesting studies that we've done on habits was very early on, demonstrating that habits are actually much more prevalent than we imagine.
So we're aware, most of us are aware of small habits; we have brushing our teeth, how we drive a car, typing, those sorts of things. But habits actually are much more pervasive than just those one-off behaviors, those small behaviors we engage in every day.
We did a study where we beeped people once an hour and asked them what they were thinking and what they were doing.
So they're not even thinking about the behavior. They don't have to, they've automated it, they've done it so often, it sort of runs off on its own and doesn't require much thought. And that's how we're defining habits, is automatic behavior that you repeat that doesn't require you to make decisions.
E Could you tell us more about why you decided to write this wonderful book, 'Good Habits, Bad Habits'?
W Thank you for asking that. One of the interesting things about habits is that they don't require thought and decision making, so they function mostly outside of our awareness.
We're not aware when we're acting on habit. And I wanted to give people information that they can't get really by observing their own behavior or observing other people's behavior. I wanted to provide some insights that would help people understand how to change. And they're not things that we just learn just out of daily life. Habits aren't like that. Habits don't have the same logic as much of the rest of what we do.
E Yes. That's very true. And fortunately for me in some dimensions; let's start if you want, with why we are so unsuccessful at adopting positive habits. For example, about healthy eating, smoking, cessation or exercising more.
W Oh, I'll challenge you on that because I think we all have lots of good habits. An awful lot of what we do every day, working, driving or taking the train, If you're in France, even interacting with other people, things that are working for us are habitual.
So I think an awful lot of our habits actually are good habits. It's the ones that aren't working for us though that we notice. And so that's probably why most people equate habit with something bad, and it's because we only notice our habits when they're getting in our way when we wish we didn't have them.
E I think one of the central assumption is what you have shared in your book; when you started in the field was that by changing people's attitudes, you could change their behavior and it seems it is not so simple. Could you tell us more about the concepts that you develop in your book of 'Second Self'?
W Yes. The Second Self is your habit-self. That's the Self that functions outside of awareness. That's the automaticity that allows us to engage in so many behaviors without thinking. So that's your second self.
And to get back to an earlier question that you had that I don't think I answered, which is why is it so hard to change habits and to form new ones? It's largely because of the environments that we live in.
Even the people that you're with can cue your habits and encourage you to repeat behaviors that you've done in the past.
So you can think of yourself as constrained by where you live and how you live. Constrained in many ways that are good that allow us to get up in the morning, make coffee, in the same way, each day. Most of us have similar sorts of things for breakfast every morning. We just do these things without thinking and it makes our life easier, simplifies, but it also constrains us and keeps us repeating the behaviors that we've repeated in the past.
E I think a lot of us consider knowledge and self-control as the main factors that help us create new positive habits. How do you explain that knowledge and self-control are not enough to make us successful at adopting positive change that sticks?
W Yeah, it'd be wonderful if we could just wear new behaviors. It's what we'd all like to do. But habit memories form very slowly. You have to repeat a behavior over and over for it actually to become a habit, and they change slowly.
So you might make a decision that you want to start exercising when you get up in the morning, but your old habit of going downstairs, making coffee, sitting on the couch, that will still be there, and you can exert willpower and you can make decisions to try to change your behavior, but that habit cuing will still be there. That habit memory that you formed from repeating the behavior over and over in the context in which you live. That's why it's so tough to change habits.
E So self-control is not enough and knowledge is not enough!
W It'd be great if it was, but no, it's not enough. There's a great demonstration of this, I think with the five a day, even the world health organization is recommending that we all eat five a day servings of fruits and vegetables. And when this was first introduced, it was a public health campaign in the US trying to convince people they should be eating more fruits and vegetables.
And it was very successful at changing people's attitudes. So people learned, yes, a healthy diet, more fruits and vegetables, but that unfortunately was not successful at changing their behavior.
What we eat is very habitual. Shopping is habitual. We tend to go down the same aisles in the grocery store each time, we tend to buy the same foods, we tend to prepare the same foods. We can change our understanding of what we should eat, but that's very different than changing the actual behavior.
And that five a day campaign, as good as it is, really hasn't had much impact on what people eat.
J Great. Wendy, I would love to hear more about how to employ solutions to create those new habits, those positive habits specifically. In your book, you mentioned three key factors, the context, repetition and rewards. So we've talked a little bit about context. Could you talk about it in terms of how we leverage it to actually create those positive habits?
W Yes. One of the experiences that I most enjoyed in writing the book was going up to the culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley. And I got to shadow their students for a week.
When they first started out in culinary school, and what you learn as a beginning chef is actually great advice for all of us. They learned something called mise en place, which means put everything in place.
So these are excited young people who are trying to learn to cook and they want to just jump in and start making things. Just like when we make a decision to change our behavior, we want to jump in and do it. But what they have to learn, and what we would do while learning is that you really need to put the effort into changing your context, changing the situation around you to make it easier.
So when chefs do mise en place, they chop everything, they put all the bowls out, make sure they have all the ingredients measured, before they even begin. And that's what we should be doing when we try to change our behavior.
We want to set up the context so that it's easy for us to do the thing that we're trying to learn. People are very sensitive to something that we call friction. Friction are forces that make it difficult for you to engage in a behavior.
One of my favorite examples of this is with cell phones. A data analytics company tracked cell phones for two months to see how far people were willing to travel or how far people typically traveled to a gym, a paid fitness center.
And what they found is that cell phones, the people holding them that traveled three and a half miles to a paid fitness center to a gym, they went five times a month. But if you had to travel five miles to a gym, you only went once a month.
So that small amount of distance doesn't seem like much, right? That's a mile and a half, shouldn't make that much difference in whether we go to the gym. We think going to the gym as a product of willpower. It's a product of our decisions, but instead the environments around us are very influential and can create friction through distance, making it more difficult for us to meet our goals.
And this is something businesses know. Wow, right? I mean Amazon got to be successful in part through their one-click ordering. Two clicks, you lose customers, one click, people buy stuff. It's that little bit of added friction in two clicks that make it more difficult for people to follow through.
We can use it in our own lives too, to try to make it easy for us to do the things that we want to do.
J Thank you Wendy. I love the insight on the distance, in terms of the gym, I think it explains a lot in terms of my lapse though, you know, membership at my gym, so I'm going to have to make some changes soon.
In terms of repetition, you had talked about it a little bit in more big terms. Is there a magical number we should aim to reach in order to create a habit?
W Well, any time you repeat a behavior, you're adding to that habit memory, right? So you're strengthening the habit memory, you're strengthening the habit, but actually forming a strong habit that you can perform automatically, that takes more repetitions than most of us are aware of.
A colleague of mine asked people to start doing one new health behavior repeatedly each day. These were things like having a glass of water in the middle of the day, or going for a walk before dinner. A simple health behavior. And what she found is that it takes about two months of daily repetition for behaviors like that to really become automatic. So you're doing them without thinking.
It takes a bit longer than we might think for that habit memory to actually build up so that you're on autopilot and it just becomes part of your second self. It becomes just what you do.
J Great. Well, I think good things are worth waiting for. I think I could do two months.
In terms of the third factor, you had mentioned reward. Why are rewards so important to either creating or making habits persist?
W Well, rewards are important for a number of reasons, but one is that we're just more likely to repeat behaviors that we enjoy than behaviors we don't. It's a great study, it's not my research, it's a great study done on new year's resolutions in which people took their new year's resolutions and rated them first for how life-changing and important they would be, and then second for how enjoyable and fun they would be.
The reason why we make new year's resolutions is because, we want to change our life. So you'd think people would stick with resolutions that were life-changing. That wasn't true. It was the resolutions that were more fun, that were more enjoyable, that were more rewarding that people stuck with, because we're just much more likely to repeat behaviors if they feel good to us.
There's another reason as well, which is that when you get a reward, that spurs the release of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter in our brain, and dopamine is a chemical that helps our brains form habit associations.
So it helps us connect the context we're in and what we did in order to get that reward, so that the next time we're in this context, that action comes to mind. You can think of habits as sort of a mental shortcut.
What should I do now that's most likely to get the same reward as I got in the past? And that's why rewards are so important for habit formation.
J So with the example of fun being an intrinsic reward, can you talk a little bit about the external versus internal and when to select which one in order to be successful?
W Yes. There's an awful lot of research on incentives, but often incentives, money, recognition, other sorts of things are given after a behavior.
So we save money and we see our retirement accounts increase, or in my own case, my health insurance gives me a discount at the end of the month if I don't smoke.
Those kinds of rewards that are given after the behavior don't help us to build habits. Instead, you want a reward that's immediate, an intrinsic reward, ones that are part of an experience are typically immediate like that, but extrinsic rewards can be as well.
So I used to be a runner, I'm not anymore. So I work out on an elliptical, which is as similar as I can get to running. An elliptical is the most boring experience in the world. It's just awful.
So what I do is I add shows, TV shows that I watch that make it more fun and I actually end up looking forward to it because I only watch those shows when I'm on the elliptical, and it's sort of part of that experience.
So rewards need to be immediate. They need to be part of the experience for habits to form simply because you want that dopamine release right when you're doing the action, and that's what's going to help create the habit that will make it automatic and make it easier for you to do it again in the future. And that's why you need immediate rewards. It's the neuroscience of habit formation.
J Sure, absolutely. So at the end of the day, what would be your primary advice for someone who would like to adopt a new habit?
W If a behavior is not rewarding to you, you're not likely to repeat it often enough to make it a habit. And if it's difficult, if there's a lot of friction, it takes time, it's at a distance, then you're also not likely to repeat it. You want to simplify it and make it easy.
E Thanks again, Wendy. Very helpful, I'm sure. At BVA Nudge Unit, we are also very interested in creating positive habits within organization in the workplace. What is your perspective on the application of your work in the workplace?
W In organizational context, people are always struggling with the challenge of exploiting what works and what has worked in the past, and then actually developing and exploring new options that allow them to adapt in the future.
And that exploit explore tension is really a tension between having the right habits that you can exploit, that give you the structure that you need and yet still staying open enough to change that you can adapt when needed.
I have, this is a sort of an analogy in the lab that we've been working on to this exploit, explore, trade off. The study, that is the analogy is a study on creativity. And what we found is that people are more creative when they have the right work habits.
So if they have practice a certain structure that allows them to approach a problem without worrying about other things, other approaches they could take, instead they go in, they have the right approach and they just adapt it, they're much more creative.
Every writer knows this, that if you're going to produce an awful lot of material, you need good habits, good writing habits in order to provide the foundation for that creative experience. And it's the same in pretty much any organization. You need the structure to exploit so that you can then effectively explore.
E Thanks. Thinking more generally about behavioral science in the workplace, where do you see the biggest untapped opportunities in terms of applying behavioral science for good in the private sector?
W I think that the electronics and tech communities have generally done a really nice job of adapting habits.
I mentioned Amazon earlier. Cell phones have been devised to be quite addictive. We are all very focused on our phones. Even though we only get rewarded every once in a while by something interesting, we're still continually checking them.
So those kinds of insights I think can be adapted more generally. In health context, for transportation, transit, the environment, I think that we can adapt an awful lot of these insights to actually work for us, once we understand what they are, friction and rewards. And we can think in terms of how those are developed, applications and consumer settings and then apply that to our own lives and to our own health and wellbeing.
E What advice would you give to businesses and practitioners within these companies to help them infuse behavioral science thinking and learning within their organization?
W Oh. I think the best consumer is a habitual consumer. So you want to create the right habits in your particular business so that people stick with you. There is a lot of research showing that it's more expensive to attract new customers than it is to retain your existing customer base.
So habits I think are critical to any business success simply because you want people to come back, you want to figure out how to meet their needs in a way that will keep them, there would be rewarding and keep them coming back to your products and services.
E Now we're looking to the future, the Behavioral Scientists publication as recently asked behavioral science community to write articles about the future of behavioral economics. What is your vision of the future of our field?
W Well, I think that as I said before, we already know an awful lot about human behavior. We know what people are responding to with friction and rewards, and figuring out how to use that to promote wellbeing and health is the new frontier, I think for behavioral science
Changing behavior is not that hard, we've learned; it's just that we're not necessarily doing it right.
J Great. So, Wendy, speaking of health, we are at the beginning of April, 2020 with the world facing an unprecedented crisis with the coronavirus pandemic. We can't miss the opportunity to ask you the world's expert on habits: what is your recommendation to help governments to be successful at encouraging the adoption of the new habits, specifically as it relates to encouraging self-quarantine and the adoption of other relevant new behaviors?
W Yes, these are very tough behaviors, quarantine in particular for people. The hygiene habits are easier to figure out how to adopt, and they're actually something that we're going to need to be doing from here on in.
This is probably not the only experience of a new virus that we're going to have in our lifetime, and so getting habits of washing your hands, using hand sanitizer, coughing into your elbow, all of those things that we're told about constantly, those are things that we shouldn't just be doing now, we should be doing into the future. They need to become our habits.
You hope that self-quarantine isn't something that we're going to have to learn in the long run. This is something that people will do thoughtfully, deliberately for a while because we have to. I'm not looking for a day when that becomes a habit. No.
J Yes, I completely agree. From an individual perspective, what new habits do you recommend we implement at home in order to keep us happy?
W While we're self-quarantining?
J Yes.
W One of the challenges with gyms closed and all of us sitting around more is it's challenging to get enough exercise. So setting aside part of your day where that's what you do and that becomes your habit is something that I think we could all benefit from.
It's going to be hard to begin with because most of us aren't in the context where we typically workout or get exercise; there's not the cues that we're used to, so you have to be patient with yourself to start off with. It's not going to feel normal, easy, automatic, even if you're a regular exerciser outside of this quarantine, but it's something that if you repeat the behavior in the same way over and over, it will start to feel more automatic and it will become more habitual.
J Well, it's interesting. I think now is the time to start building those habits because we don't have the context and we have a lot of time on our hands. So, if our listeners haven't read your book yet, I mean this is the perfect time to really do some of their own experiments and really see what works with them in terms of habit change and habit formation.
W It is. It's an opportunity. People who have been very successful at making major life changes often do so when some disruption happens in their lives; they move, they start a new job, now we're getting quarantined. It's hard to make it into a positive experience, but as you say, it could be an opportunity to rethink some of the decisions you've made and some of the habits that you have and try some new things that could work for you even better.
There's a great study on what happened when the London underground was shut for a strike, for several days. Only some stations were shut.. So the riders had to figure out how to get around in new ways.
Although it was chaos and no fun for most people, 5% of the riders ended up finding routes that were faster and that worked better for them and that they stuck with after the strike had ended.
So there's some evidence that this can be used to your advantage, or at least some of us can.
J So some good news as we wrap up right now. So thank you so much again Wendy for joining us today. As a final word, can you share with us any exciting new projects that we should be on the lookout for and perhaps where our listeners can find out more about you and your work?
W Yes, they could go to www.goodhabitsbadhabits.com. That's the website for the book. There's a number of questionnaires that people can fill out to find out how much they know about their habits and what they could learn from the book. So I recommend that people do that if they're interested. I'm also on Twitter, I'm on Instagram, and I'm very happy to connect with people who emailed me also from my university website.
J Great. Thank you so much.
