How does habit form? Guidelines for tracking real-world habit formation

Figures & data

Table 1. Essential and desirable criteria for investigating habit formation, and moderators of the relationship between repetition and habit formation

Domain	Criteria	Essential or desirable
Design	D1. Habit formation studies must focus on the strengthening of one or more specific cue-behaviour associations	Essential
	D2. Habit formation studies must be conducted in settings in which there is reason to expect habit to meaningfully strengthen	Essential
	D3. Analyses of potential moderators of habit formation must adopt designs sensitive to the temporal nature of relationships between repetition, habit development, and potential moderators	Essential (for investigating moderators)
	D4. Habit formation studies should use longitudinal designs	Desirable
Measurement	M1. Habit formation studies must attempt to measure habit	Essential
	M2. Habit formation studies must not infer habit from behavioural frequency alone	Essential
	M3. Habit formation studies must measure habit in relation to a behaviour of interest	Essential
	M4. Habit formation studies should use habit measures relating to behaviour at an appropriate level of specificity	Desirable
	M5. Habit formation studies should use context-specific habit measures	Desirable
	M6. Habit formation studies should measure habit over multiple timepoints	Desirable
Analysis and Interpretation	AI1. Habit formation studies must acknowledge habit strength as a continuum	Essential
	AI2. Habit formation tracking studies should not infer effects of repetition from measures of time	Desirable
	AI3. Habit formation tracking studies must not assume that habit develops linearly	Essential
	AI4. Habit formation tracking studies must involve analyses that account for individual differences in the growth trajectory	Essential

Data availability statement

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.