University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90086, USA.
Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2011 Nov;37(11):1428-37. doi: 10.1177/0146167211419863. Epub 2011 Aug 22.
To identify the factors that disrupt and maintain habit performance, two field experiments tested the conditions under which people eat out of habit, leading them to resist motivational influences. Habitual popcorn eaters at a cinema were minimally influenced by their hunger or how much they liked the food, and they ate equal amounts of stale and fresh popcorn. Yet, mechanisms of automaticity influenced habit performance: Participants ate out of habit, regardless of freshness, only when currently in the context associated with past performance (i.e., a cinema; Study 1) and only when eating in a way that allowed them to automatically execute the response cued by that context (i.e., eating with their dominant hand; Study 2). Across all conditions, participants with weaker cinema-popcorn-eating habits ate because of motivations such as liking for the popcorn. The findings reveal how habits resist conflicting motives and provide insight into promising mechanisms of habit change.
为了识别破坏和维持习惯表现的因素，两项现场实验测试了人们出于习惯而外出就餐的条件，使他们能够抵制动机的影响。电影院里习惯性吃爆米花的人很少受到饥饿或对食物喜好程度的影响，他们吃等量的陈旧和新鲜爆米花。然而，自动性机制影响了习惯表现：参与者出于习惯而进食，无论新鲜度如何，仅在当前处于与过去表现相关的环境中（即电影院；研究 1），并且仅在以允许他们自动执行由该环境提示的反应的方式进食时（即，用惯用手吃；研究 2）。在所有条件下，电影院爆米花食用习惯较弱的参与者因为喜欢爆米花等动机而进食。研究结果揭示了习惯如何抵制相互冲突的动机，并提供了有关习惯改变的有希望的机制的深入了解。
