Defining and measuring the habit impulse: response to commentaries

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Poonam Gardner Sood and Gaby Judah for invaluable comments on an early draft of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This may, of course, not be habitual for all readers. Additionally, it might be argued that, even among those who automatically look at or answer the phone when it rings, the response is directed towards the goal of wanting to know or talk to whoever is calling; i.e., a goal-dependent, and so non-habitual, response (e.g., Wood & Neal, 2007). However, the impulse to reach for the phone can be activated even where the consequences of doing so are devalued (Smith & Graybiel, 2014). For example, the phone that rings while one is driving may automatically generate the habit impulse (Bayer & Campbell, 2012), despite the goal of answering it being devalued by the safety risks posed by answering while driving. Such goal-independent impulse activation is a hallmark of the habit process (Labrecque & Wood, 2015).

2. One SRHI item, which is excluded from the SRBAI, appears to relate to the experience of blocking the habit impulse (‘Behaviour X is something that makes me feel weird if I do not do it’), though validation work has shown that participants struggle to comprehend the meaning of ‘feeling weird’ (Gardner et al., 2012; Gardner & Tang, 2014).