David Neal

Duke University | DU · Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

People automatically repeat behaviors that were frequently rewarded in the past in a given context. Such repetition is commonly attributed to habit, or associations in memory between a context and a response. Once habits form, contexts directly activate the response in mind. An opposing view is that habitual behaviors depend on goals. However, we s...

Incentives have dual effects in consumer settings: The benefits on deliberate consumer purchase and performance are well known. But the detrimental effects on habit performance are less recognized. In the present research, we traced these dual outcomes to consumers’ lay theories about action control when incentivized. An initial study demonstrated...

Consumers’ existing habits are a key driver of resistance to new product use. In an initial survey to identify this role of habit, consumers reported on products that they had purchased intending to use. They also reported whether or not they actually used them. For one-quarter of the products they failed to use, consumers slipped back into old hab...

Interventions to change health behaviors have had limited success to date at establishing enduring healthy lifestyle habits. Despite successfully increasing people's knowledge and favorable intentions to adopt healthy behaviors, interventions typically induce only short-term behavior changes. Thus, most weight loss is temporary, and stepped-up exer...

Strategies are needed to ensure that the U.S. Government meets its goals for improving the health of the nation (e.g., Healthy People 2020). To date, progress toward these goals has been undermined by a set of discernible challenges: People lack sufficient motivation, they frequently fail to translate healthy intentions into action, their efforts a...

Across 5 studies, we tested whether habits can improve (as well as derail) goal pursuit when people have limited willpower. Habits are repeated responses automatically triggered by cues in the performance context. Because the impetus for responding is outsourced to contextual cues, habit performance does not depend on the finite self-control resour...

What are the psychological mechanisms that trigger habits in daily life? Two studies reveal that strong habits are influenced by context cues associated with past performance (e.g., locations) but are relatively unaffected by current goals. Specifically, performance contexts—but not goals—automatically triggered strongly habitual behaviors in memor...

How do we recognize the emotions other people are feeling? One source of information may be facial feedback signals generated when we automatically mimic the expressions displayed on others' faces. Supporting this “embodied emotion perception,” dampening (Experiment 1) and amplifying (Experiment 2) facial feedback signals, respectively, impaired an...

To identify the factors that disrupt and maintain habit performance, two field experiments tested the conditions under which people eat out of habit, leading them to resist motivational influences. Habitual popcorn eaters at a cinema were minimally influenced by their hunger or how much they liked the food, and they ate equal amounts of stale and f...

What strategies can people use to control unwanted habits? Past work has focused on controlling other kinds of automatic impulses, especially temptations. The nature of habit cuing calls for certain self-control strategies. Because the slow-to-change memory trace of habits is not amenable to change or reinterpretation, successful habit control invo...

Consumers sometimes act like creatures of habit, automatically repeating past behavior with little regard to current goals and valued outcomes. To explain this phenomenon, we show that habits are a specific form of automaticity in which responses are directly cued by the contexts (e.g., locations, preceding actions) that consistently covaried with...

In the last decade, there has been a tremendous surge of research on the mechanisms of human action. This volume brings together this new knowledge in a single, concise source, covering most if not all of the basic questions regarding human action: what are the mechanisms by which action plans are acquired, mentally represented, activated, selected...

Redish et al. trace vulnerabilities in habit and planning systems almost exclusively to pharmacological effects of addictive substances on underlying brain systems. As we discuss, however, these systems also can be disrupted by purely psychological factors inherent in normal decision-making and everyday behavior. A truly unified model must integrat...

The present model outlines the mechanisms underlying habitual control of responding and the ways in which habits interface with goals. Habits emerge from the gradual learning of associations between responses and the features of performance contexts that have historically covaried with them (e.g., physical settings, preceding actions). Once a habit...

Habits are response dispositions that are activated automatically by the context cues that co-occurred with responses during past performance. Experience-sampling diary studies indicate that much of everyday action is characterized by habitual repetition. We consider various mechanisms that could underlie the habitual control of action, and we conc...

Abstract Across four studies, we compared people’s inferences about the causes of their habits with the actual mechanisms,that guide habit performance. Suggesting that people believe that the actions they perform frequently are diagnostic oftheir motivating dispositions, habit strength for various behaviors was consistentlyassociated with stronger...