{"id":1321,"date":"2023-03-31T17:38:45","date_gmt":"2023-03-31T17:38:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/chapter\/psychology-in-real-life-habits\/"},"modified":"2024-04-17T15:03:41","modified_gmt":"2024-04-17T15:03:41","slug":"psychology-in-real-life-habits","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/chapter\/psychology-in-real-life-habits\/","title":{"raw":"Healthy Habits: Learn It 2\u2014Psych in Real Life: Habits","rendered":"Healthy Habits: Learn It 2\u2014Psych in Real Life: Habits"},"content":{"raw":"

Studying Habits by Changing Them<\/h2>\r\n

An important insight about habits is that they are activated by triggers in the environment. These triggers can be people or places, events or the time of day. The important idea is that we have learned to respond to something outside of us (i.e., the trigger) with a specific behavior (the habit). Let's look at a set of studies by Wendy Wood, David Neal, and their colleagues. This is just one of many studies of habits that these and other researchers have conducted, but it will give you an idea of how we can learn more about psychological processes by manipulating the details of a common event to see how people\u2019s behavior changes.<\/p>\r\n

The Popcorn Study<\/h3>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5248\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]\"Popcorn Figure 1<\/strong>. Are you a habitual popcorn eater?[\/caption]\r\n\r\n

Movie theater attendance is on the decline in the United States, but going to the movies is still popular. Of course, we go to the theater to see the movie, but for many people the experience is just not complete without the right refreshments: popcorn, candy, and soft drinks. You may be too health-conscious to buy these snacks, but most movie theaters depend on their concession stands to stay open.[footnote]According to research reported in Stanford Business, 20% of theater revenue comes from food sales, but a whopping 40% of profits come from food. They suggest that the high price of these snacks helps keep ticket prices down. https:\/\/www.gsb.stanford.edu\/insights\/why-does-movie-popcorn-cost-so-much<\/a>[\/footnote] Eating popcorn in a movie theater is a great example of a habit: a behavior that is triggered by a particular setting\u2014the movie theater.<\/p>\r\n

In 2011, David Neal, Wendy Wood, and some of their students published a study in which they used the movie theater-popcorn connection to study habitual behaviors.[footnote]David T. Neal, Wendy Wood, Mengju Wu, & David Kurlander (2011). The pull of the past: When do habits persist despite conflict with motives? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(11), 1428-1437.[\/footnote] They looked for evidence that movie theaters really do trigger eating popcorn. But checking out the validity of that claim was just the starting point for studying the popcorn habit.<\/p>\r\n

The Setup<\/h4>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5249\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]\"The Figure 2<\/strong>. Researchers set out to test whether students would eat more popcorn in a movie-theater room, like this one, or in a regular meeting room.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n

The experiments were conducted on the campus of the University of Southern California (USC). The campus has a cinema that regularly shows films that are popular among students.[footnote]This study was conducted in 2011. Habits change as social conventions change, so we can\u2019t guarantee that the USC cinema is still a popular attraction on campus.[\/footnote] They recruited students and assigned them to one of two conditions:<\/p>\r\n

    \r\n\t
  1. In the cinema condition, the students went into the theater before the regular movie started and they watched and rated movie trailers. The important thing to understand is that the setting looked, sounded, smelled, and felt like a movie theater (which, of course, it was).<\/li>\r\n\t
  2. Other students were recruited to come, at the same time of day, to a meeting room near the movie theater. These students were asked to listen to watch and rate music videos. The music videos had been pretested to assure that they were as interesting and engaging as the movie trailers that the cinema group watched. For this meeting room condition, the room was as comfortable as the theater and the task was as engaging as the one in the theater, but the location did not look or sound, smell or feel like a movie theater. It was a meeting room.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

    Next came the critical prop for this experiment: a full box of popcorn was given to each person, along with a cup of water. No one made a big deal about the popcorn, but (unknown to the participants) the main question was: how much popcorn would people eat?<\/p>\r\n

    Where do you think the participants ate more popcorn: in the cinema or in the meeting room? Move the bars below to give your estimate of the percentage of the box of popcorn (this is the percentage number on the Y-axis) that was eaten\u2014on the average\u2014by the participants in each location.