Cohn Simon, Lynch Rebecca
Faculty of Public Health and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK.
Sociol Health Illn. 2017 Nov;39(8):1398-1411. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12597. Epub 2017 Jul 21.
In line with the concept of 'nudging' people to change their behaviour, there has been increased attention on habit as a focus for psychologically-based health interventions. It is hoped that behaviours initiated by interventions not only become so regular that they are normalised into people's everyday lives, but that through repetition they may eventually become fixed and habitual. In this paper we draw on people's accounts of participating in a trial designed to encourage greater physical activity, and attend to the ways they describe their engagement with interventions within wider narratives of their everyday lives. In contrast to the idea that habit refers to automatic behaviour cued by external stimuli and governed by unconscious cognitive processes, our study describes how people identify many diverse elements that are felt to have equal significance in achieving a routine. Paradoxically, the sense of stability derives not from exact repetition, but from the ability for an assemblage of elements to be configured slightly differently each time. We consequently argue that attending to the diverse range of contextual elements bracketed off from interventions designed to be tested in trials, and the idea that continuity might emerge from variation, demands a reconceptualisation of the concept of habit adopted within many areas of current health psychology.
与“推动”人们改变行为的理念相一致，习惯作为基于心理的健康干预重点受到了更多关注。人们希望干预引发的行为不仅变得如此规律以至于融入人们的日常生活，而且通过重复它们最终可能会固定下来并成为习惯。在本文中，我们借鉴了人们参与一项旨在鼓励更多身体活动的试验的描述，并关注他们在更广泛的日常生活叙述中描述与干预互动的方式。与习惯指由外部刺激引发并由无意识认知过程支配的自动行为这一观点不同，我们的研究描述了人们如何识别在形成日常行为中具有同等重要性的许多不同元素。矛盾的是，稳定性并非源于精确的重复，而是源于每次对元素组合进行略微不同配置的能力。因此，我们认为，关注与旨在在试验中进行测试的干预措施相分离的各种背景元素，以及连续性可能从变化中产生的观点，需要对当前健康心理学许多领域所采用的习惯概念进行重新概念化。
