the power of habit

charles duhigg

I read another chapter of the power of habit today. I think I’m almost done and I don’t know what satisfaction there is for me in things right now. I’m not feeling particularly hopeful about much of anything. Does hope have to be the same as motivation and happiness? Only available in the shortest of bursts, something to crave in every other moment.

Anyway, whatever. This chapter of the power of habit was about corporations in crisis. I guess it’s a good time to read that chapter, considering that our whole country is in crisis. We will continue to be in crisis, and how companies respond to that is going to affect which companies come out, and which don’t.

The chapter lead with an example of a hospital in New Jersey who had weird power display rules. The surgeons were god and the nurses were scum. Never question a surgeon, even when they go against protocol. That was this hospital. 

More than that, though, it was about this idea of a corporate truce. About how organizational habits offer a basic promise: If you follow the established patterns and abide by the truce, then rivalries won’t destroy the company, the profits will roll in, and, eventually, everyone will get rich.

These truces create blinders and set paths for everyone to follow, and sometimes they can lead to disaster because people stay in their lanes rather than do the right thing. 

Another story the chapter focused on was the 1987 King’s Cross subway fire in London. How people knew it was coming and responded sluggishly, and lazily. People died because of that. It’s about how large organizations are really good at getting people to stay in their jurisdictions, but that it probably shouldn’t be that way.

Now that I’m done with the Upstream book I’m trying to make headway on finishing the power of habit. I just finished up the seventh chapter, on how our habits help inform others on what we want before we even know what we want.

The main story in the chapter surrounds Target, and how a statistician was not only able to hone in on all the things that make it likely someone will buy more of their personal spend on target the next time they come to the store.

New parents are kind of the golden egg when it comes to loyal customers. Not only does any significant life event make a consumer susceptible to changing a brand of something they’ve used for years, but it also, in the specific case of new parents, makes very tired consumers. And tired consumers want ease over all. 

Other tricks marketers have learned about consumers is that if you place all the produce at the entrance of a store, people will cart the healthy stuff, pat themselves on the back for being good, and be more likely to reward themselves with all the junk the rest of the store is filled with.

The chapter is really about familiarity, and how even with a song experts agree will be popular when the public doesn’t, or the YMCA trying to discover what keeps member retention up.

Target is included here for its statistical genius, just not in a way that’s super obvious. Target could predict when a woman was pregnant, what trimester she’s in, and even when she’ll have her baby, all by the way she spends. She and her future baby represent about 37b in market share if they can capitalize on it right. They wanted to go upstream from how other companies like Disney and P&G were targeting new mothers sending gift baskets to maternity wards. 

Target caught them early. The trick was to dress their targeted coupon campaign up in a way that both seemed familiar and didn’t show Target’s hand of knowing its customers were with child. 

So Target added lawnmower coupons next to diapers when they were sent to pregnant women. The radio stations who needed to get an unfamiliar song popular just sandwiched it in between two hits. The army when the US had a shortage of beef in WWII due to shipping it all to the troops had to dress organ meat up as the “new steak” for it to get adopted.  The YMCA needed to cash in on the social experience members wanted more than the shiny equipment. 

We like what’s familiar. This is why the radio song was central to this chapter. The same places we interpret sound are where we also recognize patterns and their importance. The brain needs to know what sounds it needs to pay attention to and which it can ignore, which is why we like things that naturally sound familiar. 

The food shortage example is in here because the Committee for Food Habits designed a way to introduce the new in a familiar way. I like it because it also showcases why none of the other food initiatives in our country have failed. We haven’t followed the habits of making things familiar. It was the only campaign to ever have a lasting effect on the American diet.

Just read another great chapter in the power of habit. This section focuses on the habits of societies and how they come to influence the people in them through things that grow familiar, and also how to affect that change intentionally. The chapter surrounds the case of Rosa Parks, who, Duhigg argues, was by far not the first black woman to be arrested on a bus in the ‘50s for not giving her seat up to a white passenger. She was, however, the catalyst because unlike her predecessors, she had an extensive network of social groups with whom she was a member. 

The first part of societal habit that makes movements like this take root are things that give people a sense of identity and a fresh outlook, the first of which is the power of weak ties.

This concept works because we surround ourselves with people similar to us, and when they are injured or insulted, unlike how we’d respond to strangers’ transgressions, we feel a strong urge to come to their rescue. The power of weak ties is a form of peer pressure which makes something hard to avoid joining when the right moment is sparked. Our acquaintances arguably have more power than our close friends in this regard because whereas our close friends likely don’t tell us new things as we’re already embedded in their lives, weak ties produce insights we may not have come across otherwise. Like a job. They give us access to social networks where we don’t otherwise belong. 

The pressure there is that if you don’t respond to a call of an acquaintance, the subtle consequences can reverberate farther and affect your reputation. It’s a great accountability factor, because once your community knows you committed to something, it’s almost impossible to withdraw. 

Outside of Parks and King, the chapter highlights Rick Warren, baptist preacher from Texas who planted a small church in SoCal and went on to become one of the most influential religious figures in history. He has a congregation of 20k spread over 9 locations every week, and he achieved this feat through. He said you needed to convert groups, not individuals, and he said the only to get people to take responsibility for their faith is to teach them habits of faith. Once that happens people will self-feed, not because you brought them to Christ, but because it’s who they now are. 

He started by decentralizing faith, having people meet in small groups at home with one faith champion leading bible studies. People loved the small group sense of community they couldn’t get out of a large congregation. The problem was, people did their bible study fast so they could get to gossiping about life.

Warren turned this around by designing a curriculum of faith to instruct the hour, a maturity covalent card with three pillars.

- Daily quiet time for reflection and prayer.

- Tithing 10% of your income

- Membership in a small group

You essentially convert participants into self-directing leaders.

Reading this makes me wish I’d read it before writing my thesis. I wish I had read a lot of books before writing my thesis. Like the righteous mind. Something Jonathan Haidt has said that would have supplemented my literature review on habit would have been how the power of weak ties maps onto Gluacon’s philosophy that we are only good to the extent that we are being watched.

Peer pressure is the pinnacle of Glaucon’s reasoning. People commit and cannot withdraw without strong social consequences. It’s the pressure of knowing your goodness is being watched that helps bridge the dissonance to continue to do good. Damnit...

I’ll start this session with a review of the lasts chapter of the power of habit. I just finally finished it! Jeez that feels good. 

Not only that, but I was able to write about it. I was able to make it happen. I don’t succeed much in life, but when I do, it’s because I make it happen. The chapter was about the neurology of habit, and about a woman named Angie Bachmann who fell prey to a solicitous casino knowing she was vulnerable. She was a housewife with a blackjack problem. 

The neurology of habit explained in this chapter should maybe be the sociology of habit, because in it Duhigg describes those with sleep terrors time and time again being acquired for crimes committed while asleep. 

Sleep terrors are the angsty version of sleepwalking. When we move in and out of states of rest, our brain stem typically paralyzes our limbs and nervous systems. That’s why we can dream without moving. We can make the transition in and out of this state multiple times without really knowing. It’s called switching, and those who sleep walk suffer from what neurologists call switching errors. Even still, sleepwalker usually don’t cause harm to themselves out of an innate instinct to avoid peril. 

Sleepwalking is like having the lights on with no one home. Our senses and motor functions are completely in tact but without having any sort of memory to judge decisions against. Everything they do happens as a result of automation, since habit happens without the need to think. 

The sociological part of this chapter comes into play when assessing that over 150 murderers and rapists have been acquitted due to sleepwalking, when offenders are not in control because they are acting upon habit, but gamblers who are addicted and acting on neurological impulses and urges are to blame for their actions. 

Casinos engage in what’s called Pavlovian Marketing, where beyond solicitation, dealers will engage with members to see how much money they make and thereby discover what it is they have to spend. 

The mind of a gambler interprets near misses as wins, whereas non addicted gamblers interpret near misses as what they are: losses. The brain rewards addicts the same way for almost getting something as it does for getting something, so it reinforces the loop. 

Gaming companies know this and have redesigned slots to produce more instances of near misses. 

The book ends with what we should do with this, coming back to the famed psychologist William James, author of the first round of the Principles of Psychology.

He says: “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

He says: “Once we decide who we’re going to be, we grow to the way in which we’ve been exercised.”