Breaking Bad Habits

The experimenters weren’t quite done. They had demonstrated that a habit cued by the right context can lead to behaviors that no one would consciously choose: like eating bad popcorn. However, they also wanted to know if interfering with the situation could reduce the power of the habit.

In a second study, the experimenters went back to the cinema. There was no meeting room condition. This time they wanted the cinema to trigger the popcorn habit, but they asked if changing some essential part of the habitual behavior would reduce its power.

Which hand do you use to hold the box of popcorn? Which hand do you use to grab a kernel or two and bring to your mouth? Many people report being very particular, saying they always hold the popcorn with the left hand and eat with the right, with no exceptions. 

For this study, the experimenters put a handle on the popcorn box and instructed half of the subjects to hold the box with their usual hand, and the other half to hold it with the other hand—the one they usually don’t use.^[1]

The theory here is simple: If we change something about the habit, then we reduce its power. In turn, we become more aware of what we are doing—more guided by our conscious goals and less by our automatic sequences of behavior. Is that what happened?

Results

As with the first study, the experimenters divided the subjects into those with weak, medium, and strong movie-popcorn habits. The participants ate less popcorn in this experiment than in the first one,^[2] but the pattern of results was still interesting. Here is what happened when participants used their usual hands for holding the box and eating.

Notice that these results are very similar to the results of the first experiment, except that habit strength had a stronger influence on amount of popcorn consumed. Most importantly, at low habit strength, students ate less stale popcorn than fresh. At stronger habit strengths, the quality of the popcorn didn’t matter. They just ate a lot of it.

But what happens in the cinema, with all of its cues for eating popcorn, when an important part of the habit is altered? Make your prediction by moving the bars in the figure below. Remember that the opposite hand condition is supposed to reduce the power of the habit. It just doesn’t feel the same.

Click here to see the results.

At the weak habit level, the participants are not eating much popcorn at all. As habit strength increases, the desire to eat popcorn presumably also increases, but notice that the quality of the popcorn is increasingly important (look at the differences between the brown and yellow bars). The habit is not eliminated, but conscious evaluation of the popcorn is now having a greater influence on behavior.

The second study is important for a practical reason. It suggests that the strength of a habit can be influenced by minor changes to our routine. Habits can be weakened and they can be eliminated. And that leads us to our final topic.

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