454,368 research outputs found

    Breaking the prejudice habit: Mechanisms, timecourse, and longevity

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    The prejudice habit-breaking intervention (Devine et al., 2012) and its offshoots (e.g., Carnes et al., 2012) have shown promise in effecting long-term change in key outcomes related to intergroup bias, including increases in awareness, concern about discrimination, and, in one study, long-term decreases in implicit bias. This intervention is based on the premise that unintentional bias is like a habit that can be broken with sufficient motivation, awareness, and effort. We conducted replication of the original habit-breaking intervention experiment in a sample more than three times the size of the original (N = 292). We also measured all outcomes every other day for 14 days and measured potential mechanisms for the intervention’s effects. Consistent with previous results, the habit-breaking intervention produced a change in concern that endured two weeks post-intervention. These effects were associated with increased sensitivity to the biases of others and an increased tendency to label biases as wrong. Contrasting with the original work, both control and intervention participants decreased in implicit bias, and the effects of the habit-breaking intervention on awareness declined in the second week of the study. In a subsample recruited two years later, intervention participants were more likely than control participants to object on a public online forum to an essay endorsing racial stereotyping. Our results suggest that the habit-breaking intervention produces enduring changes in peoples’ knowledge of and beliefs about race-related issues, and we argue that these changes are even more important for promoting long-term behavioral change than are changes in implicit bias

    Habit formation: implications for the wealth distribution

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    In this paper we study the role of habit formation in shaping the wealth distribution in an otherwise standard heterogeneous agents model economy with idiosyncratic uncertainty. We compare the inplications for precautionary savings and for wealth concentration between economies that only differ in the role played by habit formation. Once preferences are properly adjusted so that the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substituion is the same in all model economies studied, we find that habit formation brings a hefty increase in precautionary savings and very mild reductions in the coefficient of variation and in the Gini index of wealth. We also find that the reductions in these measures of inequality also hold when we adjust our economy so that aggregate savings are the same as in the economy without habit formation. These findings hold for both persistent and non persistent habits although for the former the quantitative size of the effects is much larger. We conclude that habit formation, while being a mechanism that increases the amount of precautionary savings generated in a model, does not change the implications for wealth inequality that arise from standard models

    Neuroimaging of Habit-based vs. Goal-directed behavior in Instrumental Learning

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    Addiction has been proposed to result from an overreliance on the habit-based and goal-directed controllers of behavior; however, few data exist to simultaneously support both behavioral and neuoranatomical aspects of this theory in humans. Here, we clarify the locations of the homologous structures controlling behavior in the human brain to those studied in animal models. The study included two parts. 1) The first part established in a behavioral experiment that the devaluation video in the present paradigm was able to influence instrumental behavior. Using a 3-session instrumental learning task to examine behavior, we examined 78 participants, aged 18-35. A significant difference in the change in response rate immediately before and after devaluation was found between the 2 groups viewing worms in devaluation compared to the group not viewing worms. There was a significant difference in change in liking immediately before and after devaluation between the three conditions, as well as in the change in liking, hunger, and response rate between the paired and empty bowl unpaired conditions. There was a significant correlation between snack liking pre-session 3 and response rate in session 3, as well as between pre-extinction snack liking and response rate in the start of extinction. 2) The second part of the study used the same 3-session training paradigm over 3-days, with fMRI on the third day to measure neural activity during this same instrumental learning task. Although the results are preliminary (N=10), these show that the comparable regions of the human brain are involved in goal-directed and habit-based control of behavior, with a perfect negative Spearman correlation of mean vmPFC activity at the end of training and the change in responding from immediately before to immediately after devaluation. Three of the 10 subjects were addicted smokers, which is insufficient data to determine whether they were less sensitive to reward devaluation and whether they relied more heavily on brain structures associated with habit-based controllers of behavior. However, understanding the relationship between habit-based and goal-directed controllers of behavior and their role in addiction and clarifying the human brain structures responsible for these systems can lead to the development of therapies for addiction

    The Establishment of Child Health Cadre as Prevention for Foodborne Disease at Primary Schools

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    Personal health, including health on school-age children comes from food intake. But often, these foods can cause health problems, such as foodborne diseases. A quasi-experimental study was conducted to monitor the Clean and Healthy Lifestyle (CHL) of children at school through the establishment and evaluation of child health cadres. Phases of activities are the selection of child health cadres (10 children), training and determination of the child that will be monitored (40 children), preliminary assessment on the monitored CHL, two-month monitoring and final assessment. Monitored CHL are the CHL associated with foodborne diseases such as clean nails, snacks habit, habit of bringing lunch, and hand-washing habit in schools. Descriptive analysis showed that there were differences between the CHL school children before and after the monitoring conducted by child health cadres, however the results of the Chi-Square Test indicated that only the habit of bringing lunch that yield a significant change (p=0.01). Evaluation of the routine activity showed that the average cadre activity on monitoring is 75.7% and the average of completeness monitoring books is 91.9%. The activities of child health cadres can be applied on an ongoing basis with the school health program activities that have been established in schools

    HABIT FORMATION: INPLICATIONS FOR THE WEALTH DISTRIBUTION

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    In this paper we study the role of habit formation in shaping the wealth distribution in an otherwise standard heterogeneous agents model economy with idiosyncratic uncertainty. We compare the inplications for precautionary savings and for wealth concentration between economies that only differ in the role played by habit formation. Once preferences are properly adjusted so that the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substituion is the same in all model economies studied, we find that habit formation brings a hefty increase in precautionary savings and very mild reductions in the coefficient of variation and in the Gini index of wealth. We also find that the reductions in these measures of inequality also hold when we adjust our economy so that aggregate savings are the same as in the economy without habit formation. These findings hold for both persistent and non persistent habits although for the former the quantitative size of the effects is much larger. We conclude that habit formation, while being a mechanism that increases the amount of precautionary savings generated in a model, does not change the implications for wealth inequality that arise from standard models.

    How Can We Change Our Habits If We Don’t Talk About Them?

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    For the late nineteenth century pragmatists, habits were of great interest. Habits, and the habit of changing habits, they believed, reflected if not defined human rationality, leadingWilliam James to describe habit as “the enormous fly-wheel of society.” What the pragmatists did not adequately address (at least for us) is the role of power relations in the process of changing habits. In this article we discuss our experience of attempting to engage critique and reflection on habitual practices in music teacher education, offering the reader an article within an article. That is, we reflect on our failure to publish a critical article in a widely read practitioner journal by sharing the original manuscript and its reviews, with the hope that our experience might shed additional light on social reproduction and efforts aimed at change

    The Influence of Consumer Habits in the Customer Journey: How the Habit Loop Can Change the Game

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    The role of consumer habit can be an undervalued predictor of purchase behavior. Habit literature gleans from psychology that the simple influence of a habit in relation to purchase behavior can be an ingrained act. Facets of habit literature recognize the driving influence of habits in consumer decision making, but there remains a disconnect between habit perpetuation and a marketer’s ability to influence it. What is often overlooked is the automatic response involved in the customer’s decision-making process. While there is intense focus in marketing curricula on consumer behavioral marketing, the extent of habit’s impact on consumer purchase decisions can be underestimated. Habits can influence automatically and can be perpetuated through a loop of cue-to-routine-to-reward and is followed throughout the customer’s path to purchase. The question for a marketer becomes: At what point in the customer journey would a habit be most vulnerable to change? Determining the best indicator of habit as a predictor of purchase or a gateway to change could be a valuable tool to marketers; it could change the marketing game. The purpose of this paper is to examine this cue-routine-reward loop in consumer purchase decisions to determine opportunities for habit change or perpetuation. For an examination of the role of habits on consumer behavior, I use Duhigg’s (2012) habit loop framework of cue-routine-reward to weave in habit literature and offer propositions on how to influence consumer decision making. Each area of this habit loop reflects actions taking place across the customer journey as proposed by Lemon and Verhoef (2016) from pre-purchase, purchase, to post-purchase. As habit formation and its impact on consumer decision making could influence each of these phases, this paper represents a fusion of the habit loop and the customer journey. The purpose of this examination is to observe when and where a habit can be predicted, reinforced, replicated, disrupted or replaced. While a consumer’s self-reported strength of habit may exert influence on ensuing behavior, I examine the moderating role of habit strength in the relationship between context cues and routine at the pre-purchase and purchase stage. Accordingly, I offer the following propositions: Proposition 1: Habit strength moderates the relationship between context cues at the pre-purchase stage and routine at the purchase stage. Proposition 2: The routine stage of the purchasing behavior activity is subject to habit disruption. Proposition 3: Reward programs lead to habit perpetuation at the post-purchase stage

    Delivering Endogenous Inertia in Prices and Output

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    This paper presents a DGE model in which aggregate price level inertia is generated endogenously by the optimizing behaviour of price setting ?rms. All the usual sources of inertia are absent here ie., all fi?rms are simultaneously free to change their price once every period and face no adjustment costs in doing so. Despite this, the model generates persistent movements in aggregate output and in?ation in response to a nominal shock. Two modi?cations of a standard one-quarter pre-set price model deliver these results: learning-by-doing and habit formation in leisure.Endogenous price stickiness, Business Cycles, Inflation, Nominal rigidities, Learning-by-doing, Habit formation, Propagation mechanisms, Persistence.

    Is Habit a Powerful Policy Instrument to Induce Prosocial Behavioral Change?

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    Recent literature suggests the power of interventions to change habits. In a dense slum in Nairobi, we adopt best practices from the habit literature to encourage toilet use instead of alternatives that damage community health. Offering subsidies increased toilet usage, effects continue for one month after discounts end, but erode thereafter. Treatments designed to induce habit formation (marketing, time-limited discounts encouraging repetition, discounts for longer periods, targeting `habitual types’) generated no greater persistence. We see some persistent behavior change due to learning about the new toilet option. It appears difficult to induce pro-social behavior without private benefits through habit change

    Habit formation in context: Context‐specific and context‐free measures for tracking fruit consumption habit formation and behaviour

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    Objectives: Interventions promoting habitual fruit consumption have the potential to bring about long-term behaviour change. Assessing the effectiveness of such interventions requires adequate habit and behaviour measures. Habits are based on learned context-behaviour associations, so measures that incorporate context should be more sensitive to expected habit and behaviour changes than context-free measures. This study compared context-specific and context-free measures of fruit consumption habit and behaviour following a 3-week habit formation intervention. / Design: Prospective online study (n = 58). / Methods: Behaviour frequency was assessed across five timepoints, retrospectively (Time 1 [T1], T5) or via daily diary data (uploaded weekly at T2, T3 and T4). Habit strength was assessed before (T1) and immediately after the intervention (T4), and again 2 weeks later (T5). Analyses of variance were run, with time and context specificity as within-subject factors, and habit and behaviour frequency as dependent measures. / Results: An interaction between time and context specificity was found in both analyses (habit: F(2,114) = 12.848, p < .001, part.η2 = .184; behaviour: F(2,114) = 6.714, p = .002, part.η2 = .105). Expected habit formation patterns 5 weeks post-baseline were only detected by the context-specific habit measure. Likewise, increased behaviour frequency was only found when the target context was specified (p's < .001). / Conclusions: Assessments of purposeful dietary habit and behaviour change attempts should incorporate context-specific measurement
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