Habits: Why We Do What We Do

JUSTIN FOX: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Justin Fox. And I’m talking today with Charles Duhigg, a reporter for The New York Times and author of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. He’s also a graduate of Harvard Business School, for whatever that’s worth. Charles, welcome to IdeaCast.

CHARLES DUHIGG: Thank you so much for having me.

JUSTIN FOX: So what’s such a big deal about habits?

CHARLES DUHIGG: Well, habits are a big deal not only in our lives, because about 40% to 45% of what we do every day sort of feels like a decision, but it’s actually habit. But equally importantly, habits are a really big deal within companies. And we know this because in the last 10 or 15 years there’s been this real wealth of an explosion in research in looking at organizational routines or organizational habits and trying to understand how those influence how work gets done. And what we’ve learned is that a huge amount of whether a company succeeds or fails is based not on sort of the big strategy decisions that people make, but on the habits that emerge within the organization.

JUSTIN FOX: Going back to the individual level for a minute, the habits are formed in a different part of the brain than memories, right?

CHARLES DUHIGG: Or at least the unconscious thought. So this is what we know, what we’ve learned in the last decade, about how habits form neurologically. Every habit has three components.

There’s a cue, which is like a trigger for the behavior to start unfolding, A routine, which is the habit itself, the behavior, the automatic sort of doing what you do when you do a habit. And then at the end, there’s a reward. And the reward is how our neurology learns to encode this pattern for the future.

And most people, when they think about habits, they focus on the behavior or the routine. But what we’ve learned is that it’s the cue and the reward that really determine why a habit unfolds. And you’re exactly right.

What happens in our neurology is that most behavior when it starts originates in the prefrontal cortex, the area right behind our forehead. What we think of as thought, that’s where it occurs. It’s one of the most new, from an evolutionary perspective, parts of our brain.

But as a behavior becomes a habit, as it becomes automatic, it moves into the basal ganglia, which is one of the oldest structures in our brain and it’s near the center of our skull. And when things happen in the basal ganglia, it doesn’t feel like thought. That’s why a habit feels automatic, is because it’s happening in this part of your brain that for all intents and purposes, from what we think of as thinking, is completely exempt from that process.

JUSTIN FOX: So you talk in a book about how scientists figured this out. It was partly people who had brain injuries, right, or diseases?

CHARLES DUHIGG: That’s exactly right. Right. People who couldn’t remember anything. Because of a brain injury, they were completely amnesiacs, or for all intents and purposes couldn’t think the way that we think about cognition.

And yet they could still learn habits. They could still learn new behaviors. And that’s how we learned that it’s this part of the brain that doesn’t really feel like thought that controls our habits.

JUSTIN FOX: And that’s why it’s harder to change your habits, right, harder to get at them?

CHARLES DUHIGG: That’s exactly right, because making a conscious decision occurs in the prefrontal cortex. And to influence the basal ganglia, you have to target these cues and these rewards, these almost kind of animalistic reactions.

JUSTIN FOX: So you’ve got a bad habit. Yours was eating cookies?

CHARLES DUHIGG: Right. I used to eat a cookie every afternoon from the cafeteria at The New York Times.

JUSTIN FOX: And so how do you go about, then, breaking that?

CHARLES DUHIGG: Well, so what you have to do first of all is you have to diagnose the cue and the reward. And so every cue falls into usually one of five categories. It’s usually a time of day, a certain place, the presence of certain other people, a particular emotion, or kind of a set of behaviors that’s become ritualized.

So in my case, what I did is I literally wrote down those five things every single time the cookie urge hit me, because I was trying to figure out what the cue was. And what I figured out pretty quickly was that it always seemed to strike between about 3:15 and 3:45. It was a certain time of day that was my cue.

And then I had to figure out what the reward was, because the reward is actually the most important part. That’s the craving that creates the habit in the first place. And initially I thought that the reward was the cookies, because cookies taste good.

But when I was talking to the psychologists about this, they said, no. The thing you have to understand about rewards is they’re really complicated. A cookie is like a bundle of five or six different rewards.

So is the reward that I’m seeking relief to hunger, in which case an apple should work just as well? Or is it the burst of energy the sugar gives me, in which case a coffee should do the job? Or is it that I was craving a taste sensation, kind of that sweetness, in which case there’s been experiments that show just rubbing Splenda on your tongue will kind of help you with that urge.

I had to do all these different experiments trying to figure out, so what reward am I actually craving? And one day I had a cookie. One day I had a coffee. One day I went for a walk outside to see if it was just a break from work.

And what I figured out was that whenever I went up to the cafeteria to get a cookie, I would see my colleagues. And that’s when I would socialize during the day. And that’s the reward that I was craving, was socialization. The cookie was just kind of an excuse for that.

And once I’d figured out the cue and the reward, I could create a new habit. Now every day at about 3:30, I stand up and I look for someone to go gossip with for 10 minutes. And I walk over to their desk. We gossip. I come back to my desk and the cookie urge is totally gone.

JUSTIN FOX: Now, I would imagine that the goal of a lot of advertising and marketing is to create new habits, to make you want the cookie or the toothpaste or whatever. I mean, the first example you give is the sort of beginning of toothpaste as a major consumer product in the US. How did that work?

CHARLES DUHIGG: So what’s interesting about creating habits is that there’s a lot of people who sort of intuitively understood what we call the habit loop, this cue, routine, and reward framework. And one of them was this guy named Claude C. Hopkins, who is totally forgotten today, but about 100 years ago was like the most famous adman in America. And back at that point, nobody brushed their teeth. It was actually something that just sort of the upper classes did, almost to show off that they had money every so often.

And Hopkins had a friend who had found this new toothpaste named Pepsodent. So Hopkins said, look, if you give me a stake in the company, I’ll help sell Pepsodent. And so he had intuited that you need this cue and this reward.

And so the cue was that film that you feel on your teeth if you haven’t brushed in about a day. People for eons had had that film. And no one had ever minded it. But Hopkins put up all these ads that say, if you feel that film, then that’s a bad thing. You need to get rid of the film.

And he thought the reward was a beautiful smile, giving people whiter teeth. Turns out that he was right about the cue, and wrong about the reward. It takes so long for toothpaste to make your teeth whiter that that’s a terrible reward, because it would take months for anyone to see it.

But the guy who had invented Pepsodent had actually added into it these chemicals and these oils to make it taste like mint. And a secondary impact of that was that they were irritants that would make people’s gums and tongue tingle. And what Hopkins didn’t really understand at first, but eventually realized was people became addicted, in a sense, to that tingling sensation.

They started to equate that tingling with cleanliness. And it happens so quickly– when you brush, it happens right away– that that became a reward in and of itself. And so when people would walk out the door to work or they would lay down in bed at night and they didn’t feel that tingling, they would feel like their mouth was unclean.

And so they craved brushing. And within five years of Hopkins starting to advertise Pepsodent, like half of America was brushing its teeth every day. And historians say it’s because of Pepsodent.

JUSTIN FOX: We’re still doing it today.

CHARLES DUHIGG: And in fact when you brush today and you get tingling, that’s not because of anything in the toothpaste that makes your mouth cleaner. It’s because they add chemicals to make that tingling occur, because people expect it.

JUSTIN FOX: From individuals to organizations, as you talked about at the beginning. So routines within organizations, are they sort of parallel to the way habits work in individuals that are like down in the basal ganglia of the organization where people don’t really notice them?

CHARLES DUHIGG: Yes. A little bit. So it’s a little different. I mean, what we know about organizational routines or habits that occur among hundreds or thousands of people is that very often the habit loop differs a little bit from person to person. And yet the entire organization seems to move in the same direction.

And so what researchers have done is they’ve said, basically the same framework seems to apply within a company. There seems to be this cue that triggers a kind of automatic behavior. And then people just do things automatically. And then there’s a reward, which is usually financial or promotions or something like that.

One of my favorite examples of this is Paul O’Neill who took over Alcoa before he became Treasury Secretary. In fact, the reason he became Treasury Secretary is because he was this kind of amazing CEO of Alcoa, the largest aluminum company in the world at the time. And Paul O’Neill said that when he took over what he did was he focused on creating a new habit around worker safety within the company. And it was very deliberately designed around this habit loop.

He would choose a cue, which is that any time anyone got injured, the unit vice president had to write a report within 24 hours explaining why it happened and how they were going to prevent it. So the cue was an injury. And the routine was writing this report. And the reward was that the only people who got promoted were the people who took worker safety seriously. So I don’t know if it was happening in people’s basal ganglia or sort of what the neurology of that is. But we do know that this framework helps explain why automatic behaviors emerge within companies.

JUSTIN FOX: And how did that end up helping Alcoa, beyond just making it safer?

CHARLES DUHIGG: Well, this is what’s really, really interesting is that in both people’s lives as well as within companies, there are these things known as keystone habits. Some habits seem to have a disproportionate influence. When a keystone habit starts changing, it seems to set off a chain reaction that changes other habits.

And in a lot of people’s lives a keystone habit is exercise. When they start exercising, they start using their credit cards less. They start procrastinating less. They do their dishes earlier. Something about exercise makes other habits more malleable.

And the same thing is true within organizations. And this is what O’Neill knew– and he actually knew this from working in the government for a number of years– was that if you could start one keystone habit shifting, that it would set off this chain reaction. And that’s what happened inside Alcoa, is that when habits around worker safety started to become more malleable, all of a sudden the culture of the company started to change.

For years, Alcoa had been riven with internal strife. Two years before he arrived there was this huge strike where all the 15,000 workers walked off the line. They would dress up dummies in the parking lot like managers and set them on fire. It was just a terrible situation.

And then O’Neill comes in and he says, OK, our number one priority is changing worker safety habits. And what he’s really saying to the company is, we are going to start valuing every single employee. Every single person who works here matters to us. And it completely changed the dynamic of the relationship between employees and management.

JUSTIN FOX: Did O’Neill have that in mind when he started with this?

CHARLES DUHIGG: Yes. He did. Very specifically he did. And he talks very eloquently about this.

I mean, the other thing that’s interesting is it’s not just the company culture. It’s also that when you’d ask him, so how do you actually make a factory safer? What he says is, well, the way you make it safer is you have to analyze how work gets done. You look at people’s work habits and you analyze, where do accidents occur? When is it going off the rails?

And it turns out that the way to make a work safer is to do it right every single time. And of course, if you do it right every single time, if you create the right procedures, then not only is it safer, it’s also more efficient. It’s better quality aluminum that you’re producing.

So O’Neill actually said, I want to make workers more safe. I want to change worker safety habits. And everyone could sign on to that. What he was actually saying was, I want to make every single factory more efficient and more productive and producing a higher quality product, because that’s how we make things safer. But if he had come in and he had ordered greater efficiency, everyone would have rebelled, all the workers at least. But you come in and you say, I want to make everything safer, that’s something everyone can sign onto.

JUSTIN FOX: And it seems like– and maybe I think you actually say this at one point– that well run organizations, effective managers are the ones that understand that habits are out there and that’s how you change something is to tweak the habits.

CHARLES DUHIGG: That’s exactly right. And I heard this at HBS. And since becoming a business reporter I’ve heard this a number of times. When you talk to good CEOs, great CEOs, what they talk about are habits. Lou Gerstner at IBM, Jack Welch at GE, sometimes they talk about these big strategy decisions. But 5% of your job as a CEO is making the big strategy choice. 95% is managing small choices, managing what your culture is going to be like, managing how you structure the rewards and the incentives that determine how people kind of automatically behave.

Good managers understand the importance of habits and they think about it. Bad managers pretend like organizational habits don’t exist. And so when habits emerge, they end up being distortive or toxic.

JUSTIN FOX: And at an individual level, is that pretty much to be effective is to understand the way in which habits drive what you do?

CHARLES DUHIGG: Absolutely. One of the things that we’ve learned is that there’s this group of people who are referred to as quantum changers within psychology. The basic question is, why do some people, when they’re 35 or 40, suddenly lose 60 pounds and start running marathons, or after a lifetime of debt, why do they suddenly change how they spend and go on to be able to save lots of money?

And when psychologists have looked at quantum changers, what they found is these are people who suddenly became very deliberate about their habits. There’s something almost magical about understanding how habits work, because studies show that once you understand, once you think about the structure of a habit, it becomes easier to change that habit. And once you change that habit, you start making these small, incremental adjustments to your day that over a year or over a decade can add up to a huge difference.

JUSTIN FOX: Charles, thanks again for talking with us. That was Charles Duhigg. His new book is The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. And this was the HBR IdeaCast. For more, go to hbr.org.