By force of habit: On the formation and maintenance of goal-directed habits

Abstract

The aim of this thesis was to examine how goal-directed habits are formed and established. Specifically, the focus was on the cognitive mechanism underlying habits and the role of habits in guiding goal-directed behavior. In daily life we perform all kinds of behaviors to attain specific goals in absence of conscious awareness. People are able to perform rather complex behaviors (e.g., getting to work, socializing with friends) in the absence of explicit intent as a result of frequently engaging in them. In Chapter two, three studies examined the cognitive processes underlying the formation of goal-directed habits in a multiple means context. Habits are formed through the repeated retrieval and selection of a specific means for goal attainment. Repeated retrieval of target means upon goal activation was expected to result in inhibition of competing means for the same goal to prevent these latter means from interfering. In all studies, participants studied goal-means combinations and subsequently practiced the retrieval of certain means to attain the goals in a retrieval-paradigm. It was found that competing means were inhibited after repeated retrieval of the target means. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that inhibition occurred in the absence of explicit intent or instructions to suppress the competing means. In Chapter three, two studies examined whether the formation of intentions to pursue a goal in a non-habitual manner causes inhibited access to habitual means to attain that goal. An idiosyncratic approach was used to assess personalized goal-means relations. The results indicated that the formation of an intention to use non-habitual means inhibited the representations of the habitual means in order to prevent habitual intrusion. However, the intention to use habitual means did not cause inhibited access to non-habitual means. In Chapter four, the role of habit and intention in the prediction of future behavior was examined by analyzing that past behavior frequency moderates the intention-behavior relationship to the extent that the context in which the behavior was performed is stable. In two correlational studies it was found that intentions guided future behavior when habits were weak (low frequency or unstable context), while this was not the case when habits were strong (high frequency and stable context). A third exploratory study suggested that, if habitual goal-directed behavior is automatically activated by the context, mental accessibility of the behavior moderates the intention-behavior relation in a similar way. To summarize, the research in this thesis emphasizes the importance of two factors underlying habits that so far have almost not been considered: the influence of inhibitory processes and the role of context stability. The implications of these findings as well as the possible ways to influence habits and the possible difficulties are discussed in the final chapter of this thesis.