Implicit and Explicit Guides to Behavior: Habit and ...



Implicit and Explicit Guides to Behavior: Habit and Intention in Everyday Life

Wendy Wood and Jeffrey M. Quinn

Texas A&M University

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Implicit and Explicit Guides to Behavior: Habit and Intention in Everyday Life

People believe that much of their behavior is under their own control and that it reflects their intentions and plans. Everyday understanding of the mind-body problem is a pretty straightforward link between cognition, affect, and action (see Wegener, 2002). Thus, acting without thinking would seem to be the stuff of social gaffs and apologies.

Yet, absence of thought about actions may be a common occurrence in everyday life. Behavior can be guided through several processes, and these vary in the amount of attention they require (Heckhausen & Beckmann, 1990; Ouellette & Wood, 1998; Strack & Deutsch, 2002; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). With novel behavior or behavior in unfamiliar contexts, the uncertainties associated with performance require that people continuously attend to and evaluate new information as it is presented in order to respond appropriately. In contrast, frequently performed behaviors in stable contexts tend to run off in response to recurring psychological states and environmental cues in a process that occurs largely outside of people’s awareness (Ouellette & Wood, 1998; Wood, Quinn, & Kashy, 2002). Then, any intentions for the behaviors are likely to be implicit and individual behaviors are likely to be incorporated into sequences of multiple actions. Thus, given the appropriate circumstances, behavior can be initiated and performed with minimal, sporadic thought.

In the present article, we propose that the implicit processes guiding habit performance proceed separately from explicitly intentional action. To the extent that these are independent processes, habitual and intentional performance modes will each be affected by a unique set of factors (i.e., in addition to such common factors as a person’s skill set). In addition, the two modes can generate separate, conflicting guides to action, as evidenced by action slips and other unintended behaviors (Hay & Jacoby, 1996; Reason, 1979). These errors illustrate yet another feature of the habitual and intentional systems–although they proceed simultaneously, they also influence each other in the generation of behavior (see Smith & DeCoster, 2000; Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). Not only can habits interfere with the best laid plans, but also, given sufficient effort and opportunity, the intentional system can override well-practiced behavior.

How Habits Guide Behavior

We define habits as behavioral tendencies to repeat well-practiced acts given stable cues. Repetition of a behavior in stable circumstances promotes automaticity in the cognitive processing and motor performance associated with a response, as these come to be performed quickly, in parallel with other activities, and with the allocation of minimal focal attention (e.g., Posner & Snyder, 1975). Thus, habitualness is not an all-or-none quality–behaviors vary in the degree to which they are performed in a habitual manner. In addition, some components of behavior performance are likely to be more congenial to habituation than others. Yet, for ease of discussion in the present article, we simplify these points and contrast habits with nonhabits.

Repetition of behavior can yield automaticity when people are intending to achieve some goal or when the repetition is unintended and people are unaware of what they have learned (Squire et al., 1993; see Lippa & Goldstone, 2001, for incidental development of automatic associations). Habits that emerge from intentional repetition could be explicitly represented in memory as goal-action links (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000; Verplankan & Aarts, 1999). Yet, such explicit representations will not necessarily map onto implicit processes. If people are often not aware of the factors directing habits and the contexts that trigger them, then implicit representations of habits will often not correspond to explicit understanding of behavior.

Stable circumstances facilitate the propensity to perform repeated behaviors with minimal cognitive monitoring. Research on transfer of learning and on stimulus generalization have addressed the question of what makes features of stimuli and contexts interchangeable for learning and performance (e.g., Barnett & Ceci, 2002; Bouton, Nelson, & Rosas, 1999; Proctor & Dutta, 1993). For our purposes, contexts are stable to the extent that they present the same cues integral to performing the response and to the extent that they are similarly conducive to fulfilling an actor’s goals. As Barker and Schoggen (1978) noted in their analysis of the genotype of behavior settings, contexts may vary in superficial attributes but be stable in the features supporting performance. Unstable contexts are ones in which shifts in the supporting environment implicate alternate goals or challenge the smooth initiation, execution, and termination of practiced responses. Although our initial work on habits emphasized the environmental features supporting habit performance, in more recent work we have found that the circumstances supporting habits include social relations, especially the behavior of interaction partners. Thus, for college students, whether their roommates read a daily paper is a supporting cue for their own newspaper-reading habit, and whether they exercise with friends is a supporting cue for their own exercise habits (Wood, Tam, & Witt, 2003). It is also possible that internal conditions such as moods and drive states (e.g., hunger) combine with environmental cues to trigger habitual responses.

How do stable circumstances cue behavior? In classic learning theories, features of the environment directly cue well-practiced behavior through stimulus-response linkages (e.g., Hull, 1943; Spence, 1956). However, more recent models of cognitive processing outline how external events mobilize action by automatically triggering behavioral intentions and action sequences, which then can be implemented with minimal thought (e.g., Bargh & Ferguson, 2000; Heckhausen & Beckman, 1990). Intentions for habits likely differ from intentions for consciously-controlled behaviors. With repetition of behavior, intentions become relatively abstract, they specify broad goals, and they become incorporated into sequences of multiple actions (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987). Additionally, we suggest that, even for actions that initially may have been explicitly goal-directed, intentions become implicit with repetition. These implicit intentions represent behavioral dispositions to repeat well-learned actions given recurring circumstances. Thus, people may not experience any particular desire or plan to perform habits. Instead, habitual action sequences occur in a relatively automatic fashion, often outside of awareness.

Memory Systems and Habits

Research in cognitive psychology and the neurobiology of memory systems is consistent with our claim that separate habitual and intentional systems guide behavior. At a cognitive level, habits represent slow-learning systems in which contextual cues, sequences of motor performance, and behavioral goals are structured in associative memory by similarity of experiences and their repeated contiguity. These learned sequences are then automatically retrieved by a similarity-based pattern-completion mechanism (see Sloman, 1996; Smith & DeCoster, 2000). In connectionist network models, repeating past behavior to recurring circumstances is a “state of the network that conceptually ‘makes sense’ based on past learning” (see Lieberman et al., 2002, p. 208). With this form of cognitive processing, people are able to fluidly perform multiple sequences of actions without having their consciousness overrun with (even fleeting) intentional thoughts. Further reducing conscious guidance of action, specific motor systems and muscle movements are likely coded at lower levels of the nervous system rather than being under the control of a central executive (Colley, 1989). Such a distributed control of motor activities is congenial with ecological theories of action, in which properties of the environment relevant to action are perceived directly, so that the aspects of the environment that afford specific actions directly trigger those actions (e.g., Turvey & Carello, 1986).

In addition to their role in habitual behavior, associative systems characterize a variety of automatic processes that occur largely outside of awareness, such as primed responses (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000) and ideomotor action (Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001). These automatic associative systems can be contrasted with intentional systems based on explicit, rule-based processing of goals and values (see Lieberman, Gaunt, Gilbert, & Trope, 2002; Strack & Deutsch, 2002). As we explain in the next section of this article, when people reason from their intentions, desires, and plans, they direct action in a conceptually meaningful way. Such intentional reasoning could represent either deliberative, systematic processing or more spontaneous, heuristic analyses.

Support for the unique forms of cognitive processing associated with habitual behavior is provided by neuropsychological research on the particular memory systems associated with habitual responses. This research has examined patients with brain lesions that yield selective memory impairment or it has used functional neuroimaging techniques to examine activation of brain regions during performance of behavioral tasks (see reviews in Schacter, 1992, 1995). The findings suggest that noncognitive habit and skill memory are linked to a complex of nonhippocampal brain systems involving the basal ganglia and motor neocortex (Gabrieli, 1998; Squire, Knowlton, & Musen, 1993). These differ from the systems associated with priming and other forms of nonconscious memory and from the systems involved in declarative, conscious memory for facts and events. Thus, the memory systems involved in habitual responses appear to be separable at a neurological level from other modes of guiding behavior.

Neurological support also is available for our claim that habits are stored as larger action sequences rather than discrete acts. In Jog, Kubota, Connolly, Hillegaart, and Graybiel’s (1999) study of the sensorimotor striatum of rats during learning of a maze, neuronal responses after successful acquisition emphasized the beginning and the end of the learned procedure. These authors concluded that an action template was developed for the behavioral unit as a whole (i.e., the full maze), and this was triggered by specific contexts at the start and the end of the maze. Thus, habits tend to be integrated into action sequences that are cued as a unit by recurring circumstances.

Intentions and Habits Guide Behavior

Despite the strong evidence of the separate cognitive and neurological processes associated with habitual and nonhabitual behavior, the standard behavior prediction models in social psychology have focused on explicit, intentional guides to action (see Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). According to the best-known such model, the theory of planned behavior (and its precursor, the theory of reasoned action), behavior is a function of behavioral intentions; these intentions in turn reflect attitudes toward a behavior, perceptions of normative pressures, and perceptions of efficacy to perform a behavior (Ajzen, 1987, 1999; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1984). Research that has measured the relevant cognitions and then used these to predict behavior has provided strong support for such models (see meta-analytic reviews by Armitage & Conner, 2000; Randall & Wolff, 1994; Sheppard, Hartwick, & Warshaw, 1988). However, this evidence of predictive power does not necessarily speak to the cognitive and affective mechanisms through which behavior is generated.[i]

Predictive models, like laws, are “general summaries of the way things happen...and are deduced from observations of specific things happening...processes, on the other hand, are the intermediary events that explain why things happened as they did” (Gilbert, 1998, p. 103). Developing the theory of reasoned action to address process, Fazio (1990; Fazio & Olson, 2003) proposed that the theory holds primarily when people are highly motivated and have sufficient opportunity to deliberate about their intentions and behavior. When motivation and opportunity are limited and when attitudes are strong and automatically activated in memory, then people respond in a more spontaneous fashion and their attitudes and perceptions of social norms directly guide action. Although this depiction of spontaneous action is somewhat unclear about psychological mechanisms (e.g., how do the automatically-activated attitudes toward a target direct specific behaviors, see Eagly & Chaiken, 1993), the model is noteworthy for addressing the dynamics of intention-behavior processes.

To further extend predictive models to consider the dynamic impact of habits, Ouellette and Wood (1998) conducted a meta-analytic synthesis of the conditions under which behavior reflects conscious intentions versus habits. Specifically, habitual repetition should occur when a behavior has been performed with sufficient frequency in stable circumstances–as should be the case with behaviors such as drinking coffee and wearing sealtbelts. In contrast, intentions should be a guide primarily when a behavior is novel or performed in unstable circumstances–as with behaviors such as getting a flu shot or donating blood (see Triandis, 1977). The top panel of the path model in Figure 1 displays the findings for studies in the synthesis that examined behaviors that could be performed frequently in stable circumstances. As anticipated, people who had established habits for these behaviors simply repeated their past behavior and were minimally influenced by their stated intentions. The bottom panel in Figure 1 displays the findings for studies that examined behaviors that typically occur only a few times a year in a variety of contexts. With these behaviors, people were likely to carry out their intentions, and the frequency with which they had performed the action in the past had little effect. This overall pattern of findings suggests that when people have sufficient opportunity to form habits, behavior is not a function of conscious intentions.

Additional demonstration that habit and intention provide separate guides to behavior has been provided by research on the effects of habits within particular behavioral domains (e.g., Albarracin, Kumkale, & Johnson, 2002; Ferguson & Bibby, 2002; Ouellette & Wood, Study 2). For example, in a study of car use, Verplanken, Aarts, van Knippenberg, and Moonen (1998) found that people who used their cars frequently and thus had established a driving habit did not base their travel decisions on their intentions to drive–instead, they repeated their past behavior. In contrast, people who used their cars less often were guided by their intentions. Thus, habitual and explicit intentional processes appear to provide separate guides to behavior, and these guides interact in their effects such that intentions have minimal influence when habits have been formed.[ii]

Even though intention and habit provide separate guides to behavior, people’s judgments of these factors appear to be linked. For example, in both of the path models in Figure 1, intention is correlated with past behavior. This relation could reflect a tendency for people to practice to habituation intended behaviors as well as a tendency for people to infer their intentions from their past behavior (e.g., reasoning, “I did it in the past, I will probably do it in the future”). Inference of intention from past behavior should occur especially when people are uncertain of their intentions (see Bem, 1972), a circumstance that is likely when behavior is habitual and emerges from implicit processes. Thus, the relation between intention and frequency of past behavior plausibly reflects a variety of factors unrelated to the processes through which habits guide behavior.

Is Past Behavior a Valid Measure of Habit?

The evidence that behavior is generated through multiple processes does not challenge models of explicit intention so much as complement them by suggesting that implicit processes also guide behavior. Yet, a recurring question from the perspective of prediction models is whether frequent behavior in stable contexts reflects habit or some other variable that might already be represented in predictive analyses (e.g., Ajzen, 2001).

Participant reports of past performance frequency have been the standard measure in research on naturally-occurring habits (e.g., Ronis, Yates, & Kirscht, 1989; Triandis, 1977). Similarly, manipulations of frequent performance in stable contexts have been the standard procedure to establish strong habits in the laboratory (e.g., Hay & Jacoby, 1996; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977). These two paradigms converge in suggesting that the processes guiding behavior are automatized with frequent practice, especially when the practice occurs in stable circumstances (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977; Wood, Quinn, & Kashy, 2002).[iii]

Furthermore, suggesting that performance frequency effects cannot easily be dismissed as proxies for other, nonmeasured variables, habits have been found to maintain their predictive impact in designs that control for a variety of additional factors (e.g., attitude accessibility, self-concept, perceived behavioral control; Ouellette & Wood, 1998). Additional reassurance is provided by the specific pattern of effects associated with habits. Although main effect findings that past behavior predicts future behavior might be especially vulnerable to explanation through nonhabitual factors, alternate explanations cannot easily be generated for the interaction pattern in which habits guide behavior practiced frequently in stable contexts whereas intentions guide other actions (see Figure 1, also Verplanken et al., 1998).

The accuracy of people’s reports of their past behavior is limited by their ability to assess such information. Research has successfully estimated habituation from people’s reports of the frequency of a variety of everyday actions (e.g., bike and car travel, exercise, reading a newspaper, eating junk food; Verplanken & Aarts, 1999; Wood, Tam & Witt, 2003). Yet, the extent to which people accurately attend to, remember, and report past behavior frequency depends on a number of factors, including their retrieval strategy. Specific instances of behavior may not be accessible in memory for people who perform behaviors routinely, and instead of relying on episodic recall they may generate estimates of frequency and context stability from their understanding of the rate at which they perform an act (e.g., reading the newspaper every morning would be extrapolated to seven times per week, Menon, Raghubir, & Schwarz, 1995). Because these retrospective reporting strategies can be influenced by a number of factors (e.g., questionnaire design, Schwarz, 1990), they are best paired with alternate measures that are less reliant on estimation and recall. Diary methods in which people provide contemporaneous reports of their activities can potentially assess frequency of behaviors that may otherwise escape recall. For example, event-contingent reporting requires people only to recognize and tally instances of performance, and thereby provides a measure of frequency that is not especially susceptible to biases associated with retrieval and estimation strategies.

Habits and Other Forms of Automaticity

We have argued that habits represent behavioral dispositions to respond that are triggered by repeated circumstances. It is unclear at present whether habitual automaticity in behavior is associated with automaticity in judgments about behavior. According to Verplanken and Aarts (1999), habits correspond to scripts, or cognitive structures that develop with repeated experience to represent people’s understanding of stereotyped sequences of action in well-known situations (see Schank & Abelson, 1977). In this view, habits are represented in memory as goal-behavior links that are automatically activated to guide performance. In line with the idea that habits are guided by automatically-accessed judgments, Ajzen (2001), suggested that even “familiar behaviors that have become automatic as a result of frequent performance...are..guided by spontaneous attitudes and intentions” (p. 109). Supporting these ideas, Aarts and his colleagues (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000; Aarts, Verplanken, & van Knippenberg, 1994, as cited in Verplanken & Aarts, 1999) demonstrated that, when a relevant goal is activated (e.g., going to the grocery store), people are faster at accessing attitudes and intentions for a behavior (e.g., to ride a bike) when they previously had developed a habit than when they had not. In this view, automaticity in habit performance is guided by automaticity in intentional reasoning.

Yet, there is reason to believe that habits will not always correspond with scripted or automatically-accessed judgments about behavior. As Abelson (1981) noted, “the difference between a script and a habit is that a script is a knowledge structure, not just a response program” (p. 722). Differences between explicit understandings and actual behavior emerge in part because habits can be generated outside of awareness, independent of explicit intentions (see Figure 1). Extrapolating from these findings, it seems likely that response times to report these intentions (see Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000) also will not be a reliable indicator of implicit, habitual behavior.

This idea that people’s reports of their intentions may not correspond to the implicit intentions or response dispositions that guide habits echoes the often-found dissociations between explicit and implicit cognitive constructs in research on stereotyping and other judgments (see Fazio & Olson, 2003). Despite that automaticity in reasoning about behavior may not always be in line with automaticity in behavior performance, automated reasoning processes are worth investigating in their own right. For example, one interesting question is how such judgments develop. Intentions likely become automatic when habits can be clearly labeled by self and others and when these labels are used frequently in everyday interaction–as with consistent travel model choices (e.g., Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000). Furthermore, such judgments can provide a guide to action based on spontaneous processes and use of heuristic rules that are explicit but not deliberative. These automatically-accessed intentions likely influence behavior in a manner similar to other automatic judgments (e.g., impulse-buying based on the judgment, “It makes me feel good,” Verplanken & Herabadi, 2001). Yet, given the empirical divergence between intentions and habitual behavior (Ouellette & Wood, 1998), such intentions are not necessarily implicated in the automatic performance of habits.

Habitual response dispositions also can be contrasted with other forms of environmentally-cued responses, especially implementation intentions. Such intentions facilitate goal attainment by specifying “the when, where, and how of goal-directed responses” (Brandstätter, Lengfelder, & Gollwitzer, 2001, p. 947; see also Gollwitzer, 1999). People form implementation intentions by planning to link performance of a desired act with contextual features that signify an opportunity for performance (i.e., “when x occurs, I will perform behavior y”). Like habits, such plans of action elicit immediate and efficient responses when people encounter relevant environmental cues. However, in the case of implementation intentions, some intentional inference is required. People may consciously monitor the environment for the target event or the event’s occurrence may automatically trigger the previously-formed intentions (McDaniel & Einstein, 2000). In contrast, habits seem to proceed largely outside of awareness and are not initiated by recognition of an intention (Ouellette & Wood, 1998).

Habits also can be differentiated from primed responses that occur automatically in reaction to accessible goals and constructs (e.g., a trait, a group stereotype). As an example of such primed responses, activation of stereotypes of the elderly has been found to induce behavior consistent with that stereotype, including walking slowly and exhibiting poor memory (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Dijksterhuis, Bargh, & Miedema, 2000). Similarly, “hot” emotional reactions can emerge in a priming-like process in which exposure to appetitive or aversive stimuli automatically triggers impulsive approach or avoidance (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999; Chen & Bargh, 1999). Like habits, these results of priming involve minimal awareness, intention, and control. However, unlike habits, in which contextual cues elicit an immediate specific behavior to which they have become linked through repeated practice, priming effects can occur with a single exposure to relevant stimuli, and they encompass a variety of behaviors relevant to the target construct (e.g., walking speed, memory performance). In addition, priming sometimes has relatively long-term behavioral effects that continue independent of the initial context (e.g., if primed goals are not satisfied, Bargh & Chartrand, 1999).

In sum, the mechanisms guiding habits are the repeated circumstances and cues that directly and automatically trigger well-practiced action sequences (Ouellette & Wood, 1998). Relevant psychological processes, such as attitudes toward behavior, goals, and intentions, that may initially intervene between contextual cues and behavior become implicit through repeated performance. Research on automaticity of judgments about behavior, on implementation intentions, and on priming effects all provide important insight into the many facets of automaticity, but these alternate processes do not map directly onto the mechanisms guiding habits.[iv]

Extent of Thought about Habits and Nonhabits

The differences between explicit intentional and implicit habitual processes should be apparent in people’s everyday experiences of their behavior. Given that the processes guiding habits occur largely outside of awareness, people should not typically have to think about their behavior during habit performance. They should be freed-up to consider other issues such as past experiences or future plans. To test this idea, Wood, Quinn, and Kashy (2002) conducted two diary investigations in which college students reported once per hour on what they were thinking, what they were doing, and how they were feeling. The reported behaviors that were performed almost daily and usually in the same context were considered to be habits, whereas those performed less often or in varying contexts were not considered to be habits.

Suggesting that habits are guided by implicit processes outside of awareness, participants’ thoughts tended not to correspond with their behaviors during habit performance. Specifically, participants’ thoughts wandered from their behavior when performing habits almost 60% of the time. In contrast, participants’ thoughts when performing nonhabits typically concerned their behavior and were focused elsewhere only about 35% of the time. Assuming that thought about behavior-irrelevant factors is an indicator of the limited, sporadic conscious processing guiding actions, habit performance appears to have been guided by relatively automatic processing. Yet, the finding that participants thought about habitual behavior about 40% of the time suggests that the habitual mode of behavior regulation is best characterized by minimal or sporadic cognitive monitoring, and not by the complete absence of thought.[v] This thought about habitual behavior also is consistent with the idea that habitual and more explicit guides to behavior operate simultaneously; even though habits emerge from a process largely outside of awareness, ongoing explicit thinking may at times orient to habitual behavior.

Automaticity in habit performance in these diary studies was not only apparent with simple acts that could be performed with minimal thought (e.g., typing, cooking), but also was evident with complex acts that required on-line monitoring in order to tailor responses to ongoing input (e.g., studying, conversing with others). That is, complex acts were performed with less behavior-relevant thought, and presumably greater automaticity, given frequent practice in stable contexts. It may be that with practice people form expectations about the general shape and content of this input and develop standard patterns of response that reduce the amount of thought required. This is perhaps illustrated in the stereotypic interaction between long-married couples at breakfast, in which a conversation can be maintained despite the inattention of one partner who has learned to respond appropriately to pauses while reading the newspaper.

To assess whether these findings regarding thought about behavior hold up across age, Quinn and Wood (2003) collected data from a community sample that ranged in age from 17 to 79 years old. Once again, participants tended to think about their behavior when they performed nonhabits, and to think about issues unrelated to their actions during habit performance. Furthermore, the diary reports indicated that the greater thought about nonhabitual behavior did not vary with participants’ age. Also, countering the stereotype that older people tend to have structured, repetitive lifestyles, the overall percentage of habitual behaviors was relatively constant across age groups. For all participants, about 47% of behaviors were habitual in the sense that they were performed almost every day and usually in the same context. However, age did have one clear effect: Older people tended to think about what they were doing with greater frequency than younger participants. Because older participants also indicated that their behavior was more important than did younger participants, we speculate that age-related increases in thought about behavior reflect the increases in responsibility and interpersonal interdependence that occurred within the age ranges in our sample.

Consistency of Thought about Habits and Nonhabits

The relatively automatic performance of habits has implications for people’s reasoning about habitual behavior and for the structuring of relevant information in memory. When people do not use intentional logic to guide behavior, they do not think about the cognitive antecedents of intention, including attitudes toward the behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, in ways that organize these factors into a coherent guide. Inconsistencies are especially likely for habits that develop as side-effects of other behaviors (see Lippa & Goldstone, 2001), because unintended behaviors are not likely to be initiated with a coherent train of thought. These inconsistencies could indicate that intentions and their determinants are vacuous (Rosenberg, 1968) in the sense that people lack such dispositions, are uncertain about their judgments, and respond in an unreliable fashion. Alternatively, these dispositions may exist but be inconsistent because, in the absence of intentional thought, each component changes individually as each is affected differently by experiences in the past and in the immediate context. In this case, the components are meaningful but are not systematically organized in terms of their implications for intentions. Regardless of the exact nature of the inconsistency, the end result is that, for example, people with habits in a given domain might report that they are not very favorable toward a behavior despite their recognition that they often performed the behavior in the past and are likely to do so in the future.

Inconsistencies in the explicit cognitive reasoning components associated with habitual behavior have been reported in both meta-analytic and primary research on condom use (Albarracin, Kumkale, & Johnson, 2002; Trafimow, 2000). That is, for people who use condoms habitually, intentions appear not to be highly intercorrelated with attitudes and subjective norms, whereas for people who use condoms in a nonhabitual manner, intentions are more closely correlated with these other factors. Similar patterns have been found with a variety of everyday behaviors, such as reading the newspaper and watching TV (Wood, Tam, & Witt, 2003). That is, in multiple regression equations predicting intentions to perform these behaviors, the relevant attitudes, subjective norms, and perceptions of behavioral control often accounted for smaller amounts of the variability in intentions for habitual than nonhabitual behavior. Thus, across a variety of domains, habits appear to be associated with weakly-integrated patterns of intentional reasoning.

The lack of coherence should render intentions for habitual acts vulnerable to influence pressures from a number of sources. Intentions based on vacuous or highly variable cognitive judgments should not be well-grounded and should be susceptible to transitory, contextual influences when the responses are assessed. Such a result would be congenial with research on attitude structure that has considered the evaluative consistency relation between attitudes, beliefs, and affect (Chaiken, Pomerantz, & Giner-Sorolla, 1995). Attitudes inconsistently grounded in beliefs or affect appear weak in the sense that they are less resistant to persuasion and less stable across time than more consistent attitudes. Suggesting that this reasoning can be applied to intentions, people’s reports of their intentions, attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived control for habitual responses has been found to vary with the order in which these factors are assessed, whereas order has less impact for nonhabitual behavior (Wood & Ji, 2003). Thus, the lack of coherence in the cognitive components of intentions for habitual behavior appears to render such intentions susceptible to contextual influences. In general, it may be that weak intentions are characterized by an inconsistent cognitive structure, and this is one source of their limited durability and impact (see Petty & Krosnik, 1995).

Research on the evaluative consistency of attitude structures has indicated that inconsistency can emerge from cognitive, affective, or behavioral sources (Chaiken, Pomerantz, & Giner-Sorolla, 1995). Although evaluative inconsistencies in the determinants of intentions appear to reflect the cognitive system as a whole (Wood et al., 2003), more fine-grained investigation in the future might reveal more specific patterns in which people’s intentions are inconsistent with some determinants but not others. For example, given that attitudes toward a behavior are generally stronger determinants of intentions than subjective norms (Trafimow & Finlay, 1996), it seems plausible that differences in structure and reasoning between habitual and nonhabitual behaviors would be most apparent in the attitude-intention relation.

In general, the lack of coherence among the explicit cognitive reasoning components of action provides compelling evidence that habits are not guided by such thought. If habits were guided by thought about intentions and its cognitive antecedents, then their frequent performance should provide many opportunities to develop a coherent cognitive structure with respect to action. Instead, however, people’s intentional reasoning about habits is not well-integrated. This lack of coherence is understandable given that habits are guided by implicit systems that do not implicate conscious intentional processes.

Habits and Intentions Separately Guide Behavior: Evidence from Action Errors

One implication of the dissociation between habitual and explicitly intentional behavior is that the two modes can generate separate guides to action. These two guides correspond when people intend to do what comes habitually. The differences between the systems become evident when they conflict, as occurs when habits intrude on intentional action in the form of “action slips” (Hay & Jacoby, 1996; Heckhausen & Beckmann, 1990; Reason, 1979).

Habit intrusions represent well-practiced action sequences that belong to some activity other than the one intended. According to Reason’s (1979, 1984; Reason & Lucas, 1984) diary research, action slips in everyday life occur largely when people are distracted or preoccupied by something other than their immediate behavior. Furthermore, the intruding actions tend to be ones that share locations, movements, and objects with the intended action, and to be ones that people have engaged in recently and frequently–so that the environment cues well-practiced yet unintended behaviors. These deviations between action and intention are difficult to explain without postulating multiple systems to guide action (e.g., Heckhausen & Beckmann, 1990). Reason (1984) proposed such a model in which action slips emerge from the relatively independent actions of a cognitive store of learned action sequences and an intentional system that identifies goals and ways of achieving them–coinciding with the current contents of consciousness.

Studies of habit-induced errors in memory performance in laboratory settings also have provided support for the idea that habit and conscious recollection can contribute independently to performance (e.g., Caldwell & Masson, 2001; Hay & Jacoby, 1996; Jacoby, Yonelinas, & Jennings, 1997; Yonelinas & Jacoby, 1995). For example, Jacoby and colleagues established habits through the repeated pairing of stimulus words and then in a memory task directed participants to give habit-inconsistent responses to word-pair fragments. Errors in this paradigm represent failures to override the habitual pairings. Jacoby and colleagues used participants’ error rates to derive estimates of the degree of cognitive control in responding (i.e., by comparing error rates on habit-inconsistent trials with those on trials on which participants tried to respond habitually). Because estimates of cognitive control varied independently of estimates of habitual tendencies to respond, controlled recollection and habitual tendencies appeared to function separately.

In general, studies of action slips highlight the potentially conflicting outcomes of intentional and habitual processes and thereby support the premise that these represent separate systems guiding behavior. Yet, this research also provides some initial insight into the way these systems interact. Specifically, habitual errors tend to occur when conscious control is reduced because people are preoccupied or distracted. Furthermore, the specific habitual errors that occur may be foreshadowed by intended actions, in that the errors tend to correspond in movements and objects with intended actions.

Habits and Intentions Separately Guide Behavior: Evidence of the Separate Determinants of Action

Especially conclusive evidence of the separate systems guiding behavior is provided by empirical demonstrations that unique factors influence each system. That is, a characteristic set of factors appears to influence the potency of habits, and another set influences the potency of intentions. Jointly, these factors determine the extent to which each system influences behavior.

Determinants of controlled, intentional processes. The strength of controlled, intentional processes depends largely on people’s ability and motivation to develop and implement intentions (Fazio, 1990; Lieberman et al., 2002). The research we have considered in this article so far suggests that in daily life, people’s motivation and ability is typically not sufficient to override most habitual, automatic responses. That is, the typical form of the interaction between habitual and intentional guides to action has been a pattern in which intentions have a minimal effect when habits are present to guide behavior (see Figure 1, also Verplanken et al., 1998). The circumscribed effect of controlled, intentional guides to action is understandable given that motivational control appears to be a limited resource and to be easily depleted by small acts of self-regulation (Baumeister, Muraven, & Tice, 2000). Additionally, the ability to control practiced behavior patterns can be limited by lack of knowledge about behavior–as illustrated by the initial step for participants in many behavior modification programs of gathering information about a problematic behavior (e.g., keeping a food diary to identify eating habits). Given that such limits on motivation and ability minimally impact habitual responding, everyday habits will often run-off uninterrupted, even when they conflict with explicit intentions.

Experimental evidence that controlled but not habitual responding is limited when ability is reduced comes from Jacoby and colleagues’ work that we mentioned in the prior section on action errors (see summary in Kelley & Jacoby, 2000). In this research, intentional recollection but not habits proved to be impaired by (a) aging and associated reductions in cognitive ability, (b) distractions that divided people’s attention from their response, and (c) time limits that reduced the opportunity to respond. Thus, a variety of cognitive deficits impair intentional but not habitual responding.

In addition to being uniquely vulnerable to fluctuations in ability and motivation, the intentional system is likely to yield more fluid dispositions than the habitual one. This is because changes in intention do not derive from such slow-moving factors as repetition in stable contexts (see Smith & DeCoster, 2000), but instead arise from shifts in the outcome of logical reasoning from attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived control, as well as from spontaneous influences. A vivid demonstration of the responsiveness of intentions but not habits to new information was provided by Ferguson and Bibby’s (2002) investigation of the determinants of blood donation. Donors with little experience, whose behavior was intentionally guided, became discouraged from future donation when their fellow donors fainted. Presumably, their intentions became less favorable with this powerful demonstration of negative consequences. However, participants who had donated with sufficient frequency in the past to establish a habit continued to donate, undeterred by the plight of fellow donors. Presumably, exposure to such negative outcomes did not influence habitual guides to action.

In general, then, intentions are influenced by a unique set of factors that appear to have minimal effects on habits. Specifically, the effects of intentions are impaired by limits on people’s ability and motivation to develop and implement them. Furthermore, intentions are likely to shift more rapidly than habits and to change as a function of new information and new ways of thinking about behavior.

Determinants of habitual processes. A separation between habitual and intentional systems is also suggested by the unique set of factors that influence performance of habits. Our definition of habits as repeated behavior in stable contexts identifies the two factors that should most strongly determine strength of responding. Indeed, in laboratory settings, greater repetition has been found to yield stronger habitual responses to memory tasks (Kelley & Jacoby, 2000). Recurring circumstances also should be uniquely influential for habits. When supporting cues change so that people can no longer mindlessly repeat past actions, automatic habitual performance is interrupted. In contrast, changes in supporting cues should minimally affect acts guided by intentions (i.e., except when motivation or opportunity are affected).

To test the idea that changes in context uniquely influence habits, Wood, Tam, and Witt (2003) examined the newspaper-reading and exercising behavior of college students transferring to a new university. These students were of interest because transferring between schools can disrupt the context supporting such everyday behaviors. Several weeks before the transfer and several weeks after, students reported on their habits, intentions, and aspects of the performance context. As expected, when the transfer brought about changes in context, students’ habits were disrupted. Then, they apparently were forced to think about their behavior and they were guided by their intentions. For example, for reading the newspaper, an important supporting context was whether students’ roommate(s) read a paper. A change in the roommates’ behavior–either a shift to a roommate who read a daily paper or a shift to one who did not, appeared to disrupt the smooth performance of reading habits. Then, students’ behavior no longer followed the habit they had established at their former school, and instead their behavior came in line with their intentions to read the paper. In contrast, participants with a newspaper-reading habit at their old school whose roommates’ behavior was stable across the transfer continued to read the paper in spite of their explicit intentions. Finally, for students without an established habit, behavior closely followed from intentions regardless of their roommates’ behavior. Thus, the overall pattern of findings revealed that disruptions in environmental support for behavior blocked the automatic performance of habits but did not affect the extent to which intentions influenced behavior.

Changes in the contextual cues supporting habits presumably impede efficient repetition and focus people on their intentions during behavior performance. This interaction between habits and intentions in guiding behavior emerges when habits can no longer run off automatically. It does not emerge when people are simply instructed to think about their intentions. For example, habits are relatively unaffected when people are instructed to think about their actions in ways that form implementation intentions (Wood et al., 2003). In general, the failure for thought about habits to influence behavior supports the idea that intentional and habitual processes separately guide behavior. Although thinking about intentions has little impact in contexts in which habits can run off automatically, changes in the context supporting habits force people to consciously guide their actions and brings behavior under intentional control. Thus, stability of contextual cues along with extent of repetition appear to be the central factors determining the strength of habits.

Habits and the Self

The idea that separate systems guide behavior has implications for a variety of psychological processes. These multiple systems should be apparent not only in the unique features of each system (e.g., the extent to which people think about behavior, the characteristic factors that influence each system), but also in the self-regulatory functions of habits and intentional behavior. Given the ease of with which they can be performed, habits should generally place few demands on self-regulation. Intentional control of behavior should typically require greater self-regulatory resources. In addition, the separate systems are likely to influence how people interpret their actions, especially the inferences they draw about the self and emotional responding. Specifically, the characteristic features of habit performance may limit the extent to which habits are interpreted as relevant to the self. Given that habits are guided by minimal thought without explicit intentions, people may not incorporate habitual behavior into their self-concepts or respond with much emotional intensity to habitual acts. Intentional acts may generally be judged as more self-relevant.

Self-regulation. The efficiency that emerges from acting without thinking has important self-regulatory benefits. Research has demonstrated that decision-making about even a single behavior can impair people’s ability to direct subsequent actions (Baumeister et al., 1998; Baumeister et al., 2000). It is interesting to note that this cognitive efficiency also can be understood in economic terms, as saving decision costs. In this view, habits enable people to avoid costs of individual choice and responsibility, including gathering and processing information and weighing outlay against input (Lindbladh & Lyttkens, 2002).

Evidence that the efficiency of habit performance yields self-control benefits emerged in Wood, Quinn, and Kashy’s (2002) diary study of everyday behavior. Their participants reported reduced stress and feelings of being overwhelmed and out of control when engaged in habitual compared with nonhabitual behaviors. The specific pattern was one in which the deliberation associated with a single nonhabitual behavior increased feelings of stress, but performing multiple nonhabits simultaneously did not lead to further increments in stress levels. Thus, the benefits of habits were not limited to those times when especially high demands were placed on people’s behavior, as when they were deliberating about multiple behaviors simultaneously.

Given the self-regulatory benefits of automating behavior, it is perhaps no surprise that people perform about half of their behaviors in everyday life without thinking about them (Quinn & Wood, 2003; Wood, Quinn, & Kashy, 2002). Although this estimate is considerably lower than prior speculations that around ninety-five percent of daily acts are performed automatically (see Bargh & Chartrand, 1999), even our lower estimate renders a picture of people as relatively detached from their ongoing activity–at least half of the time.

The benefits of habitual behavior for conserving decision-making resources should be especially evident when people are working to achieve effort-intensive goals. When people have to deliberate about particular behaviors, they should be less able to allocate thought and effort to achieve other long-term goals. In support of this prediction, Witt and Wood (2003) found that people engaged in a 14-week exercise program to improve their physical fitness were more likely to achieve their fitness goals by the end of the program if they reported that their other top goals and strivings during that period required minimal thought to accomplish. These findings provide support for self-control as a limited resource (Baumeister et al., 2000) and suggest that thought should be strategically applied to goal achievement. By limiting everyday demands on deliberative processes, people can facilitate their success at challenging activities in chosen domains. In general, structuring life around a core of habits can be beneficial to goal pursuit because it provides the self-regulatory resources to “branch out” and accomplish additional effortful goals.

Emotion. The mode of behavior performance also has implications for people’s emotional experiences. Specifically, Wood et al.’s (2002) diary assessments of everyday behavior revealed that habits were associated with less intense emotions than nonhabits. This pattern, apparent with both positive and negative emotions, was anticipated by Frijda’s (1988) laws of emotion, in which “continued pleasures wear off; continued hardships lose their poignancy” (p. 353). From this perspective, people adapt psychologically and physiologically to the emotion-inducing aspects of repeated actions in repeated contexts in a way that reduces emotional intensity. In addition, the lesser intensity emotions associated with habits can be explained by Mandler’s (1975) theory of mind and emotion. In this view, emotions arise when the interruption of one’s plans and organized behavior sequences generates arousal (i.e., of the autonomic nervous system) and initiates an interpretation of the interruption that implicates particular emotions. Because infrequently performed behaviors and behaviors in unstable contexts are plausibly more likely than habitual behaviors to encounter difficulties and interference, nonhabitual behaviors are more likely to be associated with emotions. Finally, from the perspective of Carver and Scheier’s (1998, 1999) cybernetic model of self-regulation, emotions emerge from discrepancies between people’s behavior or related outcomes and their goals and self-standards. Specifically, emotions emerge from changes in the rate at which behaviors and outcomes are meeting or failing to meet self-goals. Although Carver and Scheier offer few speculations about the factors that might lead people to recognize such discrepancies and thus to experience emotion, it seems plausible that people will attend more to discrepancies when deliberating about behavior than when acting habitually. In sum, a variety of theoretical perspectives can account for people’s less intense emotions when engaged in habitual than nonhabitual behavior.

One implication of the limited emotional responses associated with habitual behavior is that, when people do experience emotions during habit performance, the emotions are likely to be linked to their thoughts rather than their behavior (Wood et al., 2002). Because habits require minimal explicit thought, people are able to entertain unrelated concerns, and the intruding thoughts may themselves be highly emotionally charged. Thus, when performing behaviors habitually, people report that their emotions sometimes are associated with their actions and sometimes with their unrelated thoughts. In contrast, the emotions associated with nonhabitual behaviors emerge primarily from action.

This general pattern in which habit-related emotions are low in intensity and elicited by thoughts as well as behavior could have implications for broader lifestyle patterns. We speculate that people whose lives are structured by large proportions of habitual behavior can find that their emotional experiences become dull and subdued over time. Much like Thurber’s (1942) character, Walter Mitty, they may find that their own ruminations and fantasies are the primary source of their emotions rather than their immediate behavioral experiences.

Understanding of the self. In contrast to the marked role of habits in self-regulation and emotion, habitual behavior likely has few implications for people’s self-concepts. Given the low intensity emotions and lack of explicit intentional thought associated with habits, people are unlikely to believe that habits reflect their values, desires, or preferences. To the extent that people do not consciously guide habits, these behaviors may be viewed as imposed by situational factors rather than the self (see Wegner & Wenzlaff, 1996). These ideas were supported by Wood et al.’s (2002) diary reports of everyday behavior. In general, participants judged their habits as relatively uninformative about the self and relatively unimportant to attaining personal goals. Furthermore, the causal mechanisms responsible for habits were not readily apparent to participants–habits were rated as less likely than nonhabits to arise from internal causes or from external causes such as the situation or the circumstance. The one exception to this overall pattern was that people experienced less pride and worse feelings about the self when they engaged in habitual than nonhabitual behavior. Thus, habitual behaviors proved to be, at best, unrelated to participants’ self-concepts and at worst, associated with negative aspects of the self.

People’s negative spin on habitual behavior can be understood as part of the dissociation between the implicit intentions that guide habits and people’s explicit intentions and goals. This dissociation is easy to understand when habits were not originally intended and emerged, for example, as side-effects of other intended actions; then explicit intentions may never have been formed for that behavior. Yet, even when habits were initially intended, implicit behavioral dispositions may differ from explicit intentions, because explicit reasoning processes are more sensitive to shifts in goal structures, capabilities, and available opportunities (Smith & DeCoster, 2000). This reasoning bears some resemblance to Wilson, Lindsey, and Schooler’s (2000) analysis of dual attitudes, in which people access and rely on implicit attitudes except when motivated and able to override these with their explicit attitudes.

In daily life, the disconnection between habitual behavior and the self has a number of implications. For example, if people do not see themselves as especially responsible for their habits, they may not believe that they have sufficient efficacy to change such acts. Also, goals achieved through routinized activity may not be a strong source of pride. Thus, for example, healthy lifestyle decisions that become routinized as part of one’s daily behavior may not yield a sense of personal accomplishment because the behavior does not appear to be volitional.

Conclusion and Summary of Functions of Habituating Behavior

In the present article we have argued that behavior can be guided through relatively separate habitual and intentional processes. For frequently performed behaviors in stable contexts, behavioral intentions become implicit and recurring environmental cues can activate practiced behavior routines in a process that occurs largely outside of people’s awareness. Thus, habitual behavior can be initiated and performed without intention.

Our evidence that the implicit processes guiding habit performance can proceed separately from explicitly intentional action was drawn from several sources. First, research in cognitive psychology and the neurobiology of memory systems has identified automatic, habitual systems that appear to be relatively independent of conscious, controlled processes. Additionally, behavior prediction studies have found that habits and intentions are separate predictors of future behavior and that intentions generally have minimal impact when habits have been formed. Furthermore, studies of action slips have demonstrated that habitual and intentional performance modes can generate separate, conflicting guides to action. In addition, separate sets of factors appear to influence each performance system, with motivation and ability influencing the more fluid intentional system and practice and stable contextual cues influencing habit performance. These various sources of evidence identify a habitual system that functions separately but interacts with intentional guides to behavior.

The unique features of the habitual performance mode provide a highly textured picture of the benefits and costs associated with habits. Their cognitive economy and performance efficiency potentially frees people to engage in other thoughtful activities, including ruminating about past events and planning for future ones. Also, habit performance is not likely to deplete self-regulatory resources in the same way as deliberative behavior and this may allow people to conserve regulatory strength. Yet, these potential benefits co-occur with clear disadvantages of automating behavior.

The disadvantages to habituating behavior that we considered in this article include (a) the subdued emotions associated with behavior–habits have an insulating quality that reduces the immediacy of emotional experience, (b) the minimal pride in habits, (c) the perception that habits are not self-relevant and not useful in attaining personal goals, and (d) the functions of a slow-changing system that may not be sufficiently responsive to fluctuations in the relevant stimuli (e.g., Fazio, Ledbetter, & Towles-Schwen, 2000; Verplanken & Aarts’s, 1999, habitual mind-sets). In general, these varying benefits and costs of automating behavior highlight the importance of strategically using habits in daily life to accomplish tasks efficiently with minimal stress and yet still enact desired behaviors and maintain a sense of personal involvement and emotional engagement in ongoing experience.

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Author Notes

Preparation of this article was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Award 1R01MH619000-01 to Wendy Wood. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Wendy Wood or Jeffrey Quinn, Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas77843. E-mail: w-wood@tamu.edu or jeffq@tamu.edu.

Footnotes

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[i]. There is also reason to question the logic of the predictive form of intentional models. In a philosophically-oriented critique, Greve (2001) argued that the theory of planned behavior fails to explain how cognitive states generate behavior and in addition provides a tautological definition of actions and intentions (i.e., because actions are logically dependent on intentions in the model, intentions cannot be an independent cause of actions). Greve (2001) concluded that the theory of planned behavior identifies the contents of consciousness (e.g., beliefs, desires, values, norms) on which intentions are based, and thus is more appropriately labeled the “theory of planning of behavior” (p. 445).

[ii]. In contrast to these findings, Lieberman et al. (2002) propose that when controlled and associative processing conflict, the resolution is often a compromise. It may be that compromise solutions are more difficult to achieve with behavioral responses than with the attributional reasoning judgments that were the focus of Lieberman et al.’s discussion.

[iii]. The importance of recurring circumstances was apparent in our reanalysis of the thought protocols provided by participants in Wood, Quinn, and Kashy’s (2002) diary research. Among participants reporting that they performed an action frequently, those who also reported that they performed the act in the same context almost every time indicated thinking about their behavior less (i.e., 44% thought about their behavior) than participants who reported that they performed the act in varying contexts (51% thought about their behavior).

[iv]. In addition, the construct of mindlessness differs from habit. As Langer (1989a, 1989b) cautioned, although both involve relatively effortless, invariant behavior, habits are more closely linked to behavioral response. In contrast, mindlessness reflects a general mental state of the organism as a whole (Langer, 1989b).

[v]. To ensure that the differential thought was not artifactual and emerged because, for example, habitual behaviors were less interesting or easier to perform than nonhabitual ones, Wood et al. (2002) selected a few behaviors (e.g., driving a car) and compared habitual and nonhabitual performance within these behavioral domains. These within-domain findings revealed that, like the results reported in the text, greater thought was directed to nonhabitual than habitual acts.

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