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The technique that will allow us to change the habits we do not like (CHARLES DUHIGG) | Part B‘

The technique that will allow us to change the habits we do not like (CHARLES DUHIGG) | Part B‘

STEP THREE: ISOLATE THE CUE

About a decade ago, a psychologist at the University of Western
Ontario tried to answer a question that had bewildered social
scientists for years: Why do some eyewitnesses of crimes
misremember what they see, while other recall events accurately?
The recollections of eyewitnesses, of course, are incredibly
important. And yet studies indicate that eyewitnesses often
misremember what they observe. They insist that the thief was a man,
for instance, when she was wearing a skirt; or that the crime occurred
at dusk, even though police reports say it happened at 2:00 in the
afternoon. Other eyewitnesses, on the other hand, can remember the
crimes they’ve seen with near-perfect recall.

Dozens of studies have examined this phenomena, trying to
determine why some people are better eyewitnesses than others.
Researchers theorized that some people simply have better memories,
or that a crime that occurs in a familiar place is easier to recall. But
those theories didn’t test out—people with strong and weak memories,
or more and less familiarity with the scene of a crime, were equally
liable to misremember what took place.

The psychologist at the University of Western Ontario took a
different approach. She wondered if researchers were making a
mistake by focusing on what questioners and witnesses had said,
rather than how they were saying it. She suspected there were subtle
cues that were influencing the questioning process. But when she
watched videotape after videotape of witness interviews, looking for
these cues, she couldn’t see anything. There was so much activity in
each interview—all the facial expressions, the different ways the
questions were posed, the fluctuating emotions—that she couldn’t
detect any patterns.

So she came up with an idea: She made a list of a few elements she
would focus on—the questioners’ tone, the facial expressions of the
witness, and how close the witness and the questioner were sitting to
each other. Then she removed any information that would distract her
from those elements. She turned down the volume on the television so
instead of hearing words, all she could detect was the tone of the
questioner’s voice. She taped a sheet of paper over the questioner’s
face, so all she could see was the witnesses’ expressions. She held a
tape measure to the screen to measure their distance from each other.
And once she started studying these specific elements, patterns
leapt out. She saw that witnesses who misremembered facts usually
were questioned by cops who used a gentle, friendly tone. When
witnesses smiled more, or sat closer to the person asking the
questions, they were more likely to misremember.

In other words, when environmental cues said “we are friends”—a
gentle tone, a smiling face—the witnesses were more likely to
misremember what had occurred. Perhaps it was because,
subconsciously, those friendship cues triggered a habit to please the
questioner.

But the importance of this experiment is that those same tapes had
been watched by dozens of other researchers. Lots of smart people had
seen the same patterns, but no one had recognized them before.
Because there was too much information in each tape to see a subtle
cue.

Once the psychologist decided to focus on only three categories of
behavior, however, and eliminate the extraneous information, the
patterns leapt out.

Our lives are the same way. The reason why it is so hard to identify
the cues that trigger our habits is because there is too much
information bombarding us as our behaviors unfold. Ask yourself, do
you eat breakfast at a certain time each day because you are hungry?
Or because the clock says 7:30? Or because your kids have started
eating? Or because you’re dressed, and that’s when the breakfast habit
kicks in?

When you automatically turn your car left while driving to work,
what triggers that behavior? A street sign? A particular tree? The
knowledge that this is, in fact, the correct route? All of them together?
When you’re driving your kid to school and you find that you’ve
absentmindedly started taking the route to work—rather than to the
school—what caused the mistake? What was the cue that caused the
“drive to work” habit to kick in, rather than the “drive to school”
pattern?

To identify a cue amid the noise, we can use the same system as the
psychologist: Identify categories of behaviors ahead of time to
scrutinize in order to see patterns. Luckily, science offers some help in
this regard. Experiments have shown that almost all habitual cues fit
into one of five categories:

Location
Time
Emotional state
Other people
Immediately preceding action

So if you’re trying to figure out the cue for the “going to the cafeteria
and buying a chocolate chip cookie” habit, you write down five things
the moment the urge hits (these are my actual notes from when I was
trying to diagnose my habit):

Where are you? (sitting at my desk)
What time is it? (3:36 P.M.)
What’s your emotional state? (bored)
Who else is around? (no one)
What action preceded the urge? (answered an email)
The next day:
Where are you? (walking back from the copier)
What time is it? (3:18 P.M.)
What’s your emotional state? (happy)
Who else is around? (Jim from Sports)
What action preceded the urge? (made a photocopy)
The third day:
Where are you? (conference room)
What time is it? (3:41 P.M.)
What’s your emotional state? (tired, excited about the project I’m
working on)
Who else is around? (editors who are coming to this meeting)
What action preceded the urge? (I sat down because the meeting is
about to start)
Three days in, it was pretty clear which cue was triggering my cookie
habit—I felt an urge to get a snack at a certain time of day. I had
already figured out, in step two, that it wasn’t hunger driving my
behavior. The reward I was seeking was a temporary distraction—the
kind that comes from gossiping with a friend. And the habit, I now
knew, was triggered between 3:00 and 4:00.

STEP FOUR: HAVE A PLAN
Once you’ve figured out your habit loop—you’ve identified the reward
driving your behavior, the cue triggering it, and the routine itself—you
can begin to shift the behavior. You can change to a better routine by
planning for the cue and choosing a behavior that delivers the reward
you are craving. What you need is a plan.

In the prologue, we learned that a habit is a choice that we
deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about, but
continue doing, often every day.

Put another way, a habit is a formula our brain automatically
follows: When I see CUE, I will do ROUTINE in order to get a
REWARD.

To re-engineer that formula, we need to begin making choices again.
And the easiest way to do this, according to study after study, is to
have a plan. Within psychology, these plans are known as
“implementation intentions.”

Take, for instance, my cookie-in-the-afternoon habit. By using this
framework, I learned that my cue was roughly 3:30 in the afternoon. I
knew that my routine was to go to the cafeteria, buy a cookie, and chat
with friends. And, through experimentation, I had learned that it
wasn’t really the cookie I craved—rather, it was a moment of
distraction and the opportunity to socialize.

So I wrote a plan:
At 3:30, every day, I will walk to a friend’s desk and talk for 10
minutes.
To make sure I remembered to do this, I set the alarm on my watch
for 3:30.

It didn’t work immediately. There were some days I was too busy
and ignored the alarm, and then fell off the wagon. Other times it
seemed like too much work to find a friend willing to chat—it was
easier to get a cookie, and so I gave in to the urge. But on those days
that I abided by my plan—when my alarm went off, I forced myself to
walk to a friend’s desk and chat for ten minutes—I found that I ended
the workday feeling better. I hadn’t gone to the cafeteria, I hadn’t
eaten a cookie, and I felt fine. Eventually, it got to be automatic: when
the alarm rang, I found a friend and ended the day feeling a small, but
real, sense of accomplishment. After a few weeks, I hardly thought
about the routine anymore. And when I couldn’t find anyone to chat
with, I went to the cafeteria and bought tea and drank it with friends.
That all happened about six months ago. I don’t have my watch
anymore—I lost it at some point. But at about 3:30 every day, I
absentmindedly stand up, look around the newsroom for someone to
talk to, spend ten minutes gossiping about the news, and then go back
to my desk. It occurs almost without me thinking about it. It has
become a habit.

Obviously, changing some habits can be more difficult. But this
framework is a place to start. Sometimes change takes a long time.
Sometimes it requires repeated experiments and failures. But once you
understand how a habit operates—once you diagnose the cue, the
routine and the reward—you gain power over it.

 

 

Part A’ : https://www.lecturesbureau.gr/1/the-technique-that-will-allow-us-to-change-the-habits-we-do-not-like-part-a-2818a/?lang=en

 

 

The power of habit

CHARLES DUHIGG



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