Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Consequences Shape Action?
Compare the review’s account of goal–habit interaction with Dickinson’s experimental criteria. Notice how evidence changes when the measure is a self-report, a daily routine, or an outcome-devaluation test.
Why you’re reading it. Broaden the laboratory framework without assuming that every form of repetition demonstrates the same control process.
A question to consider. A commuter follows a familiar route despite a changed destination. How would you distinguish a context-triggered response from a still-valued goal, incomplete knowledge, or a failure to attend to the new information?
Why this reading
Habit research spans laboratory tasks and everyday routines. This review proposes an account of how context cues, repetition, and deliberate goals interact, giving readers a framework to compare evidence collected with different measures.
Before you read
Automaticity describes features such as efficient or minimally deliberative responding; it does not by itself identify a habit. In this account, recurring contexts cue learned responses whose expression can become less dependent on current goals. Outcome-devaluation tasks, self-reports, and observed repetition provide different kinds of evidence.
Read for
- Separate the role of goals in initially repeating an action from their role in its later performance.
- Compare the evidence from experiments, daily-life observations, and behavior-prediction studies instead of treating all habit measures as equivalent.
- Examine the proposed interaction of habitual and deliberate control, including when a cue activates a response that is nevertheless inhibited.
Consider afterwards
- Someone takes the same route every day and says it feels automatic. What change in circumstances would help distinguish persistent goal-directed choice from control by familiar context cues?
Editorial context
This is an integrative theoretical review, not a pooled estimate of a single effect or a settled catalogue of habit mechanisms. de Wit and colleagues (2018) subsequently challenged the ease of inducing human habits through overtraining. Kruglanski and Szumowska (2020) offer a theoretical alternative emphasizing goals. Evaluate the particular behavioral criterion and comparison at issue; familiar repetition, an automatic response, and devaluation insensitivity need not establish identical mechanisms.