Reading focus
Syllabus: How Does Experience Change Behavior?
Follow outcome revaluation and the comparison of training schedules, then reconsider what an account based on past consequences must explain.
Why you’re reading it. Distinguish evidence for action guided by an outcome’s current value from evidence for habitual control.
A question to consider. The workshop stops needing a previously useful step, but the volunteer keeps doing it. What must you check before concluding that the action has become a habit?
Why this reading
Dickinson turns the distinction between acting for an outcome and responding habitually into an experimental question. Changing an outcome’s value provides evidence that repetition alone cannot supply.
Before you read
Outcome devaluation makes a previously valued consequence less attractive. Testing without delivering that consequence helps distinguish responding based on earlier knowledge from fresh learning during the test. Here, habit has a narrower meaning than simply doing something often or quickly.
Read for
- Identify the controls showing that the outcome actually lost value.
- Compare responding after different training histories and reinforcement schedules.
- Examine why Dickinson questions repetition alone as the explanation of habitual control.
Consider afterwards
- If someone continues a routine after its usual benefit disappears, what would you need to establish before calling the routine habitual?
Editorial context
The evidence is primarily from laboratory rats. The operational distinction is useful, but it does not license classifying every repeated human action as a habit. Wood and Rünger’s later review extends the discussion to human habit research.