Habits
The Basic Idea
Imagine someone asked you to describe how to walk. This would likely be a perplexing question, and might even be hard to answer, despite the fact that it is something you do on a daily basis. That’s because it’s something that you do without thinking. Habits are automatic, hard-to-break, and they form a pattern of behavior that responds to certain stimuli.1 Habits usually require a cue, repetition, and either a reward or punishment in order to be formed.
An activity like walking is an example of a habit. Walking might be more aligned with muscle memory, a physical kind of habit, but every day, we engage in dozens of habits both physically and mentally. Not only are our physical movements conditioned by habits, but the mental processes that we engage in eventually lead to habit-formation as well. This means that habits also influence our decision-making processes. When we are faced with a decision, we select a possible option based on the values that we associate with each. One way that we may decide an option is of value is if it is habitual. Since habits make up so much of our daily behavior, it is important that we understand them.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
– Will Durant, an American philosopher, in his book The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers2
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
