What to do about "habits"

My friend Karla rang me and asked if I knew of any research about "habits". I had a look (Google Scholar "psychology, habit") and discovered that the psychology of habit is seriously under-researched.

(Except for one article that argued that habit was "goal-directed automaticity".)

So I thought about it, and I think that habit might consist of at least 5 different entities. Interesting thing is, when you consider each entity separately you get some ideas about how to overcome what can seem to be ingrained habits.

1) Pay-off. Some habits are maintained because they "work". So, for instance, someone habitually accepts plastic bags at the supermarket, because that delivers ease and convenience.

Solution: make the practice less convenient, and it's alternative more convenient.

2) Obliviousness. Some habits are maintained because we aren't paying attention. For instance, I habitually ignore roadside speeding signs because I just don't see them (really!) The human brain only has so much attention to spread around, and we might be just habitually paying attention to other things (like our thoughts). [Google "salience"].

Solution: prompt people to pay attention to the matter.

3) Sunk costs (or 'loss aversion'). We may have invested a lot of money, time or prestige in a particular practice. Because humans naturally overestimate losses compared to potential gains, we often defend our investments to the point of stupidity. [Google "Loss Aversion"]

Solution: encourage people to consider the 'big picture' or 'long view' where the the long-term gain is worth the short-term loss.

4) Denial or resistance. Where fear of the unfamiliar causes us to avoid information about it, and resist pressure to change our behaviour.
[Google "Cognitive Dissonance" and "Psychological Reactance"]

Solution: increase the familiarity of the new practice.

5) Social identity. Where someone's social identity is wrapped up in a practice, change can threaten their identity and relationships, so naturally they actively maintain that practice (a case of denial, really).

Solution: connect the new practice to people's values.

How calculating eco-footprints undermines good behaviour

I always felt a little uncomfortable about the idea of calculating my own ecological footprint...now I know why:

In an experiment with 212 undergraduates, Psychologists Amara Brook and Jennifer Crocker found that for those "not heavily invested in the environment", negative feedback about their ecological footprint undermined their environmental behaviour.

"Rather than changing their ways to protect the environment, the results of this study suggest that these [people] may give up on their efforts to protect the environment", they wrote.

However for those "more invested on the environment", calculating their ecological footprint promoted more sustainable behaviour.

This research was reported in USA Today, but doesn't seem to have been formally published yet because I can't find it on Google Scholar.

However if you're keen you could email Amara directly on atbrook@scu.edu and maybe she'd send you a copy.

It's easy to guess at the mechanism at work: a straightforward (and, when you think about it, fairly predictable) case of DENIAL (aka Cognitive Dissonance).

Incidentally, while I was tracking down info on Amara Brook I stumbled across a "Conservation Psychology" website with an amazingly detailed collection of resources, including a huge number of scholarly articles on the subject: http://www.conservationpsychology.org/resources/articles/

The USA Today article also reported some interesting research, by Elizabeth Nisbett and John Zelenski at the Carleton University in Ottawa, that found that people tend to systematically underestimate how much happier they'll feel from spending 15 minutes outside, and overestimate how happy they are being inside.

The sweet balm of denial

A friend of mine, a self-employed engineer who freely admits to being more than a million dollars in debt, recently told me that the start of Global Financial Crisis thrust him into a period of gloom. Doom-laden headline after headline ground down his optimism and zest. Then, after a few months of depression, he made a terrific decision. He chose to ignore the news. To be specific, he stopped watching TV news. He just blanked it out.

The effect was dramatic. His spirits lifted. He got on with his life. He found that new business kept coming in. His work got done. His mortgage got paid. He discovered that the GFC was something he could safely ignore.

It seems that a lot of Australians may have made similar choices, for the Australian economy has weathered the GFC far better than any economy in the world. According to the Reserve Bank, consumer confidence dropped less than in the other major economies; businesses retrenched fewer workers; and business investment remained surprisingly high.

Instead of slashing their wrists, Australians may have just stopped paying attention to the news and got on their lives.

Denial is a well studied psychological phenomenon (just Google “cognitive dissonance”). As psychologists understand it, denial is all about protecting the self or identity. When someone is presented with information that challenges their identity they experience mental discomfort or dissonance. There are two ways to reduce that discomfort. They can either change their behaviour or they can avoid that information in future. Since avoidance is almost always easier and less risky than change, most people choose avoidance. Or, as J.K. Galbraith put it, “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

Denial gets bad rap. Being “in denial” is supposed to be an example of mental feebleness. But there is a potent connection between denial and economic prosperity.

Behavioural economists George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, in their book Animal Spirits, How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism, make a great point about confidence. Confidence, they wrote, is the key “animal spirit” in an economy: “When people have confidence they go out and buy; when they are unconfident they withdraw, and they sell.”

Confidence, they pointed out, is not just a certainty that good times will keep rolling. The word comes from the Latin fido, meaning “I trust”. But trust is not a positive form of mental activity. It’s actually a form of mental inactivity. It consists of not thinking about consequences, of hoping for the best, and assuming that someone has done the risk management. Trust is a low energy mental state and it’s easy to see why that’s so. If we worried about everything in life, we’d go mad. We’d be paralysed with doubt because of all the agonisingly complicated uncertainties surrounding every decision. Lack of trust, that is, the active mental state of mulling over consequences and worrying about details, is something that inhibits economic activity. Trust, that is, not thinking much about the consequences, is therefore much more than bliss, it’s one of the root causes of national prosperity.

Denial is nothing less that the choice to return to a state of trustful ignorance. Being in denial, far from evidence of feebleness, is therefore a fantastic strength. Think about it. Without denial would there ever have been a successful rebellion or revolution in history? No. It would all be too confronting. Worrying about the ranks of muskets and cannon lined up against them would have terrified all those potential revolutionaries into helplessness. And there would never have been a paradigm-challenging idea: no renaissance, no heliocentric theory, no electricity, no penicillin, no stapler. Without denial of the near certainty of failure, all the revolutionaries who made our world would have stayed at home. True, denial can sometimes be a weakness. But very often it’s a great strength.

Now you have to wonder, since Australians have retained their economic confidence far better than Europeans and Americans, what makes us such superior denialists? Americans in particular seem to have gone into a blind panic. I’m just speculating now, but one explanation might have to do with our native self-doubt. Without swollen egos, there’s less far to fall. Stick a pin in Americans’ party balloon and the result is mass hysteria. Deflate our party balloon, and, deep down, we're just not that surprised.

Another explanation may have to do with how sensible we are. Denial, you see, is always easier when it's backed by some evidence. Australians, like practically everyone else in the world, would have been startled into alertness by the sudden collapse of the US economy. Most of us aren't idiots, so before slipping back into the sweet balm of semi-consciousness we would have looked around for some evidence that it was safe to do so. We saw: a government confidently and aggressively responding, local institutions not collapsing and NO ONE ELSE PANICKING. There's a well-established principle in the social sciences called 'social proof' which can be expressed as 'if the people around me aren’t acting like there's a problem, there's no problem'. Thanks to a few comforting real life observations, Australian's seem to have decided that it was safe to lapse back into trust and get on with their lives. What became a contagion of panic in the US and Europe became a contagion of denial here, and we're all the better for it.

Yes, denial: our saving grace; our life boat in a storm; our national treasure. Let’s give it the respect it deserves.

-------------------------

This piece is not just frivolous. Denial is something change agents struggle with every day. Denial has it’s own logic: it’s driven by the fear of not being able to manage the unfamiliar. Trying to “drag people out of their comfort zones” is a recipe for failure simply because the human capacity for denial is infinite. A solution is to focus on increasing people’s confidence or self-efficacy (in other words, EXANDING their comfort zones), an approach which minimises the fear that drives denial!

* Malcolm Edey, Assistant Governor, Reserve Bank of Australia, The Economic Landscape in 2009, www.rba.gov.au/Speeches/2009/sp_ag_040309.pdf