Do you have any habits? How did you form them? Do you think you could deliberately form a bad habit?
I think the success rate for most attempts at self-initiated personal change is poor, (think New Years resolutions, quitting smoking), although the expected value from trying is often still good. Despite this, the habit model seems to describe most people quite well: The levers you can pull are less powerful than the levers you can’t (or won’t).
I’ve had good luck with the very behaviorist “habit formation is learning a cue-behavior-outcome relationship” model of thinking about habits. Is there a cue (to deploy the learned response)? Is there an outcome that reinforces the behavior?
I’ve had some habits stick and not stick, and the ones that stuck had “more going for them” than just being repeated every day.
As far as I can tell, no, I have no habits. There are even some human-standard habits (notably “when hungry, eat”) that I definitely do not have. The closest I get is default behavior when bored (which could be summarized as simple ‘Internet.‘, but I think actually cashes out closer to ‘relentlessly seek out new things’, for which Internet is usually the easiest method.)
EDIT: In that model of habit-forming, the discrepancy is probably in the ‘outcome’ step. I think I might disassociate sufficiently from my autonomic responses to stimuli that they don’t meaningfully affect habit formation.
Do you have any habits? How did you form them? Do you think you could deliberately form a bad habit?
I think the success rate for most attempts at self-initiated personal change is poor, (think New Years resolutions, quitting smoking), although the expected value from trying is often still good. Despite this, the habit model seems to describe most people quite well: The levers you can pull are less powerful than the levers you can’t (or won’t).
I’ve had good luck with the very behaviorist “habit formation is learning a cue-behavior-outcome relationship” model of thinking about habits. Is there a cue (to deploy the learned response)? Is there an outcome that reinforces the behavior?
I’ve had some habits stick and not stick, and the ones that stuck had “more going for them” than just being repeated every day.
As far as I can tell, no, I have no habits. There are even some human-standard habits (notably “when hungry, eat”) that I definitely do not have. The closest I get is default behavior when bored (which could be summarized as simple ‘Internet.‘, but I think actually cashes out closer to ‘relentlessly seek out new things’, for which Internet is usually the easiest method.)
EDIT: In that model of habit-forming, the discrepancy is probably in the ‘outcome’ step. I think I might disassociate sufficiently from my autonomic responses to stimuli that they don’t meaningfully affect habit formation.