Habits as friend and foe to self-control: the dual roles of routinized behavior

2015-08-06Habits have traditionally earned a bad reputation, and perhaps rightly so, as people spend significant amounts of time, money, and effort attempting to change habits that are interfering with their ability to pursue important goals. On the other hand, many habits are actually useful in people's lives, productively contributing to their continued goal pursuit rather than interfering. This dissertation consists of three sets of studies investigating how a) performing habits may restore self-control that has been exerted on a previous task (Chapter 2), b) volitional inferences about habit causes are likely to undermine people's ability to change their unwanted habits (Chapter 3), and c) these inferences affect people's choices of self-control strategies for their own personal problem behaviors in the real world (Chapter 4). This work suggests the need for improved methods of operationalization and measurement of the self-control concept, and it demonstrates the complicated role habits can play as both friend and foe to self-control