5 Habit: From Overt Action to Mental Events

Abstract

Abstract In this chapter, the author makes the case both for the ubiquity of habitual behaviors and for their non-conscious nature. The author discusses a meta-analysis suggesting that past behavior is the dominant predictor of frequently performed behaviors, though intention is the dominant predictor of infrequent behaviors. This discussion helps to delineate some of the boundary conditions for different mediators of behavior covered in this section of this book. The author observes that habitual behaviors tend to be externally cued, formally recognizing that habit cannot be equated solely with past behavioral frequency, as the processes underlying that frequency also matter. Finally, the author discusses relationships among motivation, goals and habits, suggesting that higher-level aspects of behaviors (e.g., goals) can become habitual even when lower-level aspects (execution of the behavior) are not.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.