Habit

Habit, an act acquired by experience and performed regularly and automatically. Habits include mannerisms, such as moving the hands when talking; satisfying psychological cravings such as smoking or overeating; and even characteristic reading preferences, such as a regular diet of horror novels or Shakespearean tragedies. Psychologists are interested in habits because of their function as a basic element of learning and as problems to be treated when they prove disruptive to a person's well-being.

Psychoanalysts consider habits as expressions of erotic and aggressive impulses. Repressed, these impulses find an outlet through the counter-productive, repetitive behaviour that comprises habits. In contrast, American psychologist and learning theorist Clark Hull defined habit with great precision in terms of the laws of conditioning and reinforcement. A majority of contemporary psychologists view habits as learned or conditioned behaviour over which one has little voluntary control. Some theorists even consider more complex but commonly practised human activities, such as playing football or speaking French, as composed of “habit hierarchies”.

Habits may begin as reactions to a major event, such as a bodily injury, and then continue on other occasions that reproduce certain cues or stimuli from the original event. A habit is influenced not only by elements that produce the behaviour but also by rewards or punishments that follow it. An action that is lavishly rewarded as soon as it is performed is well on its way to becoming a habit. Once a habit is firmly entrenched, it can be sustained by cues different from those that originally created it, and it need not be rewarded so regularly or well. Indeed, the habit may become its own reward.

Psychologists can effectively assist people in breaking such habits as hair and eyebrow pulling, fingernail biting, shoulder jerking, scratching, overeating, smoking, drinking, and exhibitionism. With children, self-destructive habits such as head banging can be eliminated by behaviour modification or counterconditioning techniques. These involve increasing one's awareness of the act, interrupting its performance so that it no longer seems such a natural thing to do, and reinforcing another act as a competitor. Recognizing the social benefits of breaking an undesirable habit makes doing so easier. In the serious mental defect known as obsessive-compulsive disorder, people feel compelled to repeat actions such as washing hands or switching off lights and appliances.