Life on the Hamster Wheel

Book Review:

Charles Duhigg, "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business", Random House, 2014.

Previously I've written about the shopper research of Siemon Scamell-Katz, which paints an unflattering picture of humans in their modern habitat. For example, it seems that people don't look into the window before they enter a store, don't recall the name of the store they are in, don't find the products they are looking for even though those products are in the store, don't read signs, and remember almost none of the brand messages they are exposed to. Some people will say that a store is fantastic and that they've shopped through the whole store, while film footage shows them actually covering half the store and experiencing inconvenience. These post-hoc rationalizations occur because much of the time, people shop on "autopilot" -- and they tend to buy the same brands in the same stores. Scamell-Katz talks about behavioral scripts and habituation.

Today, I return to the topic by looking at one of the most famous books about habituation -- The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. How are habits formed, and can they be changed? The blurb on the back cover of The Power of Habit reads:

"The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, being more productive, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. As Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives."

That is setting some high expectations! But what do they mean with "this new science"? Well, in the Prologue, Mr. Duhigg writes that it is really only in the past decade or two that neurologists, psychologists, geneticists, sociologists and marketers have extensively studied and begun to understand the science of habit formation and change.

It turns out, many of our daily actions aren't well-considered decisions, but habits. Habits are involved in smoking, alcoholism, obesity, obsessive-compulsive disorders, snacking and overeating, nail-biting, gambling problems, anxiety and depression, procrastination, sex addiction, hoarding, self-mutilation, exercise, tooth brushing, driving, obsessive shopping and more. Interestingly, even in cases of addiction where there are biochemical issues, the physical dependency is relatively short-term (about four days in the case of nicotine) and the lingering urges are really behavioral habits.

I'll summarize the prologue and nine chapters of The Power of Habit below.

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So, what is the power of habits?

• An obese smoker with debts can become a sober, debt-free marathon runner in a relatively short period of time by overriding old habits with new ones. It begins with a conviction to change the one keystone habit, smoking.
• A man can suffer brain damage from viral encephalitis, leading to memory loss and emotional dysregulation... yet still be able to take a daily stroll around the block and find the jar of nuts in the kitchen. This is because the basal ganglia -- the primitive part of the brain responsible for automatic behaviors -- may have escaped injury.
• Claude C. Hopkins made Pepsodent toothpaste part of Americans' daily routine through an ad campaign that highlighted a cue (feeling a film on one's teeth), a routine (brushing) and a reward (a beautiful smile). But it was also the craving for the cool tingling sensation of the toothpaste that drove the habit.
• The American football coach Tony Dungy turned two losing teams into winners by teaching the players to react habitually rather than thinking too much. He changed their old habits by keeping the same cues and rewards, just replacing the routine. The strategy worked because his teams played faster; however, the players also had to believe in it for it to work.
• By focusing on worker safety, Alcoa CEO Paul O'Neill was able to lower injury rates but also improve efficiency and boost the company's stock price and profits. Disrupting the keystone habit of safety (e.g. firing managers who didn't report injuries) caused a chain reaction of small wins that also shifted other institutional habits.
• A son of heroin addicts can go from having issues with emotional self-regulation to being a Starbucks store manager who always arrives on time, thanks to Starbucks's training which emphasizes the habit of willpower (which can be strengthened). This allows Starbucks to have great customer service.
• A crisis like a wrong-site surgery in a hospital or a fire in a subway station can present an opportunity to change institutional habits -- for instance replacing unbalanced truces and assigning priority to one goal.
• Retailers like Target can use predictive analytics to send coupons for baby stuff to pregnant women, since pregnant shoppers have unique routines (e.g. suddenly buying lots of unscented lotions, vitamins, cotton balls etc.).
• The civil rights movement of the 1960s started because it was a social habit for the black community in Montgomery, Alabama, to be friends with Rosa Parks. Peer pressure helped it grow. And it endured because Martin Luther King helped create the habit of nonviolent activism, giving protesters a fresh sense of identity.
• Some folks gamble their way to bankruptcy while others murder their spouses while sleepwalking -- what they have in common are automatic behaviors, but where they differ is in the fact that gamblers are aware of their habits and can decide to change them.

Throughout the book, the author applies the "habit loop" framework and illustrates the examples. The habit loop has three steps:

1. Cue: a trigger for the habit, for example a location, time, emotional state, other people, or the immediately preceding action.
2. Routine: the actual behavior (whether physical, mental or emotional), such as eating a chocolate chip cookie every day, drinking, smoking, procrastination, checking email, and so on.
3. Reward: something that helps your brain remember the pattern, for instance a temporary distraction from work, a feeling of relaxation, seeing your weight drop, feeling full of energy, a fresh scent... basically anything that satisfies a craving.

As the cue and reward become intertwined, the brain develops a sense of anticipation which leads to the loop becoming automatic over time. Thus, the craving is what really drives the loop.

At this point you might be reminded of something called the behaviorist school of psychology, which says that behaviors are learned responses to stimuli, whether reflexive (classical conditioning) or instrumental (operant conditioning). You could argue, for instance, that the "high" feeling resulting from winning money at a slot machine positively reinforces the behavior of gambling, and that by associating the reward with the flashing lights and free cocktails in the casino, just entering a casino may trigger a sense of anticipation. Thus, operant and classical conditioning may both fit comfortably into the habit loop model, yet Charles Duhigg never mentions them!

In any case, the habit loop framework tells us that we can analyze a habit in terms of cue, routine, and reward -- and that by identifying these we can also try to change them. For example, you could experiment with modified behaviors that have different rewards to pin down which reward is really behind your craving. Then, you can write down a list of potential cues whenever the craving hits (e.g. where are you, what time is it, what's your emotional state, who else is around, and what action preceded the urge?). Spot the pattern. Finally, based on your data, you can write down a plan for cultivating an alternative habit. Why an alternative habit? Because according to the "Golden Rule of habit change" in Chapter 3, you cannot extinguish a habit; you can only replace an old routine with a new routine, keeping the same cue and reward. Duhigg provides a number of examples:

Alcoholics Anonymous provides an emotional release through group gatherings.

To interrupt boredom at work, you can go chat with a colleague instead of snacking.

A quick bout of exercise or even a coffee can provide the stimulation of nicotine.

Of course, changing a habit is not always easy and you may still benefit from the help of a therapist or social worker. Moreover, Duhigg wants to emphasize that one requires determination, experimentation, patience, planning for relapses, and encouragement from friends in order to change a habit. But it is possible, according to the author, to change any habit -- and given the enormous impact of habits on our lives, this should be a powerful tool for being in control of one's life. So I want to give credit to Charles Duhigg for an inspirational message and good intentions. Yet I still think that the habit loop could be an even more powerful framework if it incorporated the principles of conditioning; for example, in some cases you may also be able to influence the reward (e.g. making it more or less pleasant) or even the environment in which cues are present. Psychotherapists have used these theories in exposure therapy and aversion therapy among others. My point is simply that the repertoire of options available to people who want to change their habits may be larger than Duhigg lets on with the "Golden Rule of habit change".

To be fair, Duhigg mentions Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in an end note on page 317 and outlines the process of learning, monitoring, cultivating a competing response, rethinking situations, and gradual exposure to triggering situations. In the Appendix he also mentions implementation intentions, which are known at the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) under the name "trigger-action plans". These are plans that follow an "if cue then routine" format, for instance: "At 3:30 PM every day I will walk to a friend's desk and talk for 10 minutes". Nonetheless, you have to read the Appendix and Notes sections of The Power of Habit just to see them mentioned.

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Perhaps the more original part of Duhigg's book is where he talks about the habits of societies and successful organizations. If you're used to thinking in terms of individual psychology, the idea of a collective habit might seem a bit strange at first. But it just refers to behaviors that most people in the group tend to repeat without much conscious thought. For example, soldiers in the U.S. military are trained to follow a number of routines during combat. Bureaucrats in the government will automatically build hospitals (even if unnecessary) when they get new funds, so that politicians can get re-elected. Companies like Starbucks train their baristas to deal with angry customers using methods such as LATTE ("listen, acknowledge, take action, thank, explain").

These organizational routines share commonalities with individual habits. For example, in both cases you can tackle a keystone habit to trigger a series of snowballing "small wins". At the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), the new safety plan helped to shift other aspects of the company -- workers got more autonomy, the metal products had higher quality, and so on. On an individual level, when people start exercising they often also adopt healthier eating patterns or smoke less. Michael Phelps learned the habit of visualizing the perfect race in order to create the right mindset, which helped his swimming routines fall into place. He even rehearsed the scenario of water leaking into his goggles, so that when it actually happened at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he stayed calm and set a world record anyway.

One of the keystone habits that Duhigg focuses on is willpower, which has been linked to all kinds of positive outcomes including higher grades, lower drug use, and better finances. In a way, this makes perfect sense -- after all, whatever goal you're trying to accomplish, having lots of self-discipline and self-control (and overcoming akrasia) can help you achieve it. However, Duhigg cites researchers who talk about willpower as a "muscle"; a limited resource that can be strengthened through training. But the research on this ego depletion theory has a mixed empirical track-record. Plus it is a bit awkward how Duhigg shoehorns the topic of individual willpower into a chapter meant to be about organizations. Of course, his point is that when you train employees to decide ahead of time how to react to an inflection point (stressful cue), and you give them a sense of agency, then they'll bring more self-discipline to the job and perform better. From a Human Resources perspective, positive employee habits are clearly important; but still, it feels like Duhigg could have mentioned this in a paragraph toward the beginning or end of the book, rather than devote a whole chapter to Starbucks.

Likewise, on a societal level, the habits of individuals (e.g. gossip, reciprocity, submitting to expectations etc.) can add up to big social or political change. In the criminal justice system, habits are relevant to the question of free will, and therefore punishment. Duhigg comes out in favor of free will, writing that "your habits are what you choose them to be" (p. 273). Nonetheless, the final chapter focuses on the stories of two individuals, a sleepwalker and a gambler. The author avoids tougher questions, such as the interplay of socioeconomic status and the justice system.

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There are a number of interesting tidbits sprinkled in here and there in The Power of Habit. For example, during World War II the U.S. government shipped much beef and pork overseas to the front lines, leaving those meats scarce back home. So, the government wanted to persuade Americans to eat organ meats (such as liver and kidney), which they did by instructing housewives to slip offal into familiar dishes like meatloaf or pie. Similarly, in 2003 the song "Hey Ya!" by OutKast became a hit despite sounding unfamiliar, because radio DJs sandwiched it between two existing favorites, such that it became part of an established listening habit. This idea of "dressing something new in old clothes" (p. 204) reminds me of the MAYA principle -- "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable" -- which is ostensibly used in product design. Interestingly, Charles Duhigg suggests that Celine Dion's music is something DJs need to quietly slip in, akin to 1940s butchers calling intestine "the new steak". Behold this wonderful quote from Chapter 7:

"In survey after survey, male listeners said they hated Celine Dion and couldn't stand her songs. But whenever a Dion tune came on the radio, men stayed tuned in. Within the Los Angeles market, stations that regularly played Dion at the end of each hour -- when the number of listeners was measured -- could reliably boost their audience by as much as 3 percent, a huge figure in the radio world. Male listeners may have thought they disliked Dion, but when her songs played, they stayed glued." (p. 201)

This is yet another example of people doing one thing and saying another, just like Scamell-Katz's shoppers who claim to have looked at the window display before entering the store (even though they didn't), or Ariely and Kreisler's story of JCPenney customers who presumably wanted fair pricing (even though they bought more when JCPenney offered "discounts" on artificially high prices), or Sutherland's observation that people find it "soulless" to choose candidates based on mathematical models (even though such models can lead to better decisions than intuition alone). It seems that human hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Overall, there is a good chance you will learn something new by reading The Power of Habit. Unfortunately, the gems are buried in pages of anecdotal stories and case studies. This is actually a common approach used by journalists and writers -- Maria Konnikova interleaves the scientific literature with real-life stories in The Confidence Game; and the Heath brothers do it too in Decisive. Those books I reviewed as repetitive, confusingly structured, and at some points common-sense. To some degree I would extend these criticisms to The Power of Habit as well. But like those other books, Charles Duhigg's book is also well-researched and generally entertaining. The "habit loop" is also a practically useful concept, similar to the Heath brothers' "WRAP process". However, I would rate The Power of Habit slightly lower than Decisive, because Duhigg simply repeats the same habit loop idea throughout the book, whereas Chip and Dan Heath dedicate chapters to zooming in on a specific part of the process, and hence cover more fruitful ground.

Perhaps the greatest value of a book like The Power of Habit lies in its ability to inspire people to take action; to consciously address their financial habits, productivity habits, decision-making habits, and/or interpersonal habits. But that is the hard part.