What the cue is doing
90 min
Two hosts talk the lesson through. The voices are synthetic; the script was written from this lesson and checked against it, and asserts nothing the lesson does not.
- Explain what the context does in a habit that motivation does not, and say what two field experiments measured about it
- Predict, for a described case, whether a habitual behaviour will persist when the person's motive changes, and say what would break it
- Choose a cue for one behaviour of your own and test it against reliability and noticeability
Lesson 1 said a habit is an action triggered by a context. Lesson 2 counted how many behaviours meet a proxy for that. This lesson is about the context itself: what it actually does, how far it can override what you want, and how to choose one.
It is the first lesson in this course with a technique in it, and the technique is short. Most of the lesson is why it works, because a cue chosen without understanding what a cue is for is the commonest way habit attempts fail.
Popcorn
Neal, Wood, Wu and Kurlander ran two field experiments in 2011, and this course rates them the clearest demonstration in the subject.4 A field experiment is one run on real people in the place the behaviour normally happens, which buys realism and costs control.
Study 1. Ninety-eight students at a campus cinema, and sixty more in a meeting room. Everyone was given a box of popcorn and told they were rating movie trailers, and everybody was paid six dollars. Half of them got fresh popcorn. Half got stale.
The researchers had also measured, separately, how strong each person's habit of eating popcorn at the cinema was.
The result, in the authors' words: "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."1
Sit with that for a moment. Not that they preferred stale popcorn, and not that they couldn't taste it. Their hunger did not predict how much they ate. Their liking did not predict how much they ate. Stale popcorn and fresh popcorn came out the same.
So what would break it? The same people, the same popcorn, and something has to change to make them eat less of the stale. What would you change?
Show the answer
Most people reach for something about the person, and that is the wrong place: tell them it is stale, give them a reason to care, make them pay attention.
The two things that actually worked in these experiments were neither. One was moving them out of the cinema. In the meeting room, the same kind of habitual eaters ate much less stale popcorn than fresh, exactly like everybody else.
The other was stranger and is the one worth remembering. In the second experiment, participants at the cinema were told which hand to eat with, and half were given their non-dominant one. That alone was enough, which is the surprising part: habitual eaters using the wrong hand ate less stale than fresh popcorn, like people without the habit.1 This course has read Study 1's design and participants and not Study 2's, so how many people took part in the second experiment is not reported here.
Nothing about the popcorn changed. Nothing about their preferences changed. What changed was whether the response could run off the way it always had done.
What those two disruptions tell you
The authors summarise both conditions in one sentence. 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" the habitual response to run, which in Study 2 meant eating with the dominant hand.1
Two requirements, and both had to hold. The cue had to be present, and the response had to be performable in its usual form. Remove either and the behaviour came back under the person's control, which the study could see because they started eating less of the stale popcorn.
And notice who this is a finding about. The people whose eating stopped tracking their hunger and their liking were the ones with a strong cinema-popcorn habit. That is what the abstract singles out, and it is the reason the experiment shows anything: the same box of stale popcorn, in the same room, was eaten one way by people with the habit and another way by people without it.1
Why this is not a story about weak-willed people
This is worth saying plainly, because it is the reading most people arrive at and it gets the mechanism backwards.
The same people, out of the cinema, ate much less stale popcorn. Their character didn't change on the walk to the meeting room. What changed was the context, and their behaviour followed the context rather than following them.
That has a practical edge and it cuts both ways. If a behaviour is being driven by a context, then changing the context is a lever and trying harder mostly is not. And if you keep failing at something in a particular setting, the most useful question isn't what is wrong with you but what that setting is cueing.
A man who smokes outside his office every day at eleven takes a job working from home. Within a fortnight the urge has largely gone, and he is surprised, because he had assumed quitting would be a fight. What happened, and what has not happened?
Show the answer
What happened is that the cue went. The association was between a context and a response, and the context was an office doorway at eleven o'clock with the same colleagues in it. Working from home, he does not meet it, so nothing fires. That is not willpower and he shouldn't take credit for it.
What has not happened is that the association has gone. Nothing this course has read says an association decays because its cue stopped appearing. It says the response is activated on exposure to the cue, and he simply isn't being exposed.
Which predicts something specific and testable: go back to that doorway at eleven and the urge should return, in a way it does not in his kitchen. People who quit this way often describe exactly that, and it is why "I only smoke when I'm out with those friends" is a real report rather than an excuse.
And it is the honest answer to how you break a habit, as far as this course can give one. The literature on breaking is much thinner than the literature on forming, and what there is points at the context rather than at resolve. A course that handed you a method here would be inventing one.
Choosing a cue
Now the technique. Time Management lesson 4 gave you most of it already, and this course is adding one thing, so it's worth being precise about the join.
That lesson taught the if-then plan: name a situation, attach a response, and test the situation with the question would I notice this if I were tired and in a bad mood? Its reason was about getting the behaviour to start at all, on a day you cannot be relied on to decide.
This course adds why that works and what it therefore requires. The cue is not a reminder. It is one half of an association that gets built by repeated cue-and-response pairings rather than by elapsed time,3 and the building only happens when the two things keep occurring together. So a cue has to clear two bars rather than one.
It has to be noticeable. That is lesson 4's bar, and the test is unchanged.
And it has to be reliable, which is this course's inference from the mechanism rather than a finding anybody has reported.4 It has to be a context you actually meet, at a rate that lets the association form. A cue you encounter twice a month isn't a bad reminder; it is a context that'll take years to build anything.
Gardner, Lally and Wardle put the practical version of this in a sheet meant for patients: "Be consistent: choose a time and place that you encounter every day of the week."2
Worked: two cues for the same behaviour
Mira wants to do ten minutes of stretching. She is constructed, and so is everything about her week.4
First attempt: "When I feel stiff in the morning, then I will stretch for ten minutes."
Apply the two bars. Noticeable? No. Feeling stiff is a state she has to check for, and on a rushed morning she does not run the check. Reliable? Also no, in a way that is easy to miss: stiffness varies, so the pairing happens on some mornings and not others, and the association is being built from an intermittent signal.
Second attempt: "When I have finished brushing my teeth at night, then I will stretch for ten minutes."
Noticeable? Yes. Finishing at the sink is an event, in a place, with an obvious end. Reliable? Yes. She does it every night, at roughly the same time, in the same room.
Notice what didn't change between the two. Not the behaviour, not how much she wants it, not how long it takes. The whole repair was in the cue, which is the same shape as the repair Time Management lesson 4 made, arriving here with a reason behind it.
Worked: a good cue and a failure anyway
The second case is the one people need and the books skip.
Tom picks a genuinely good cue. "When I sit down on the train in the morning, then I will do fifteen minutes of the course reading." He is constructed too.4 The cue is an event, it happens every weekday, and he cannot miss it.
Three weeks later he has done it twice.
The cue isn't the problem, and it is worth checking that properly before concluding anything. It fired: he sat down on the train fifteen times. What failed is the other half.
His train is standing-room-only three days in four, and the reading is a textbook he has to hold open with both hands.
So the pairing is wrong rather than either half of it. A cue can arrive faithfully at a moment when the response is impossible, and the association never gets a chance to build because the two things never actually co-occur. The repair is not a better cue and not more resolve; it is a response that fits the moment the cue arrives, or a different moment.
The general form, and it is the course's own reading:4 when a plan in the right form fails, check in this order. Did the cue occur? Could the response be performed when it did? And only then, the question lesson 7 is about, which is whether you want the thing at all.
Four things people get wrong about cues
"A cue is a reminder." A reminder tells you to decide something. A cue, once the association is built, is what removes the decision. In the early weeks it'll feel like the first and the point of the repetition is to make it the second.
"The best cue is a time of day." A clock time is a weak context on its own, because your relationship to eleven o'clock varies. An event inside the day is usually stronger: after you lock the front door, after the last meeting, when the kettle clicks off.
"A strong enough want beats the context." The popcorn experiments are the answer. Hunger and liking did not predict what habitual eaters did, in the context, when the response could run.
"Habits are triggered by feelings." In this literature the cue is a context. Feelings vary, they aren't observable events, and a plan hung on one is hung on the thing that goes first in a bad week. Time Management lesson 4 warned about exactly this, and this lesson is the reason behind the warning.
Practice
Take 25 minutes to write, then a week to count.
Pick one behaviour you want to be automatic. Small. Ten minutes at most, and something you could do today if the moment arrived.
Write it against two different candidate cues, both in the form "when X, then Y". Make them genuinely different: not two times of day, but two different events in your week.
For each, answer three questions in writing.
- Would I notice this if I were tired and in a bad mood? One word.
- How many times will this occur in the next seven days? A number, from the week you actually have rather than the week you would like.
- When it occurs, can the response be performed? Think about Tom. Where will you be, what will be in your hands, who else will be there.
Then predict, in writing, which of the two will fire more often. Then run both for a week and count the actual number of times each cue occurred and each response happened.
Two numbers per cue, and the gap between them is the finding. A cue that occurred seven times and produced the behaviour once has told you something quite different from a cue that occurred twice.
Take 20 minutes, and this one works on a habit you would rather not have.
Take the behaviour you found in lesson 1's second exercise, the one you never chose. You wrote its cue down then.
Now answer three questions.
- What in that context could actually be different? Not your resolve. The room, the object, the order of events, where something is kept, whether something is within reach.
- Which of those could you change this week? Some will be impossible, and saying so is part of the exercise.
- Change one, and count. How many times did the behaviour happen in the seven days before, and in the seven days after?
This is the nearest thing to a method for breaking a habit that this course will give you, and its evidence is indirect: it comes from two experiments about eating popcorn in a cinema, in which the only things that changed behaviour were a change of room and a change of hand. Treat your result as a measurement of one week of your own life, which is what it is.
Connections
Back. Lesson 1 defined the habit as an association between a context and a response; this lesson is what the context half does, measured. Lesson 2's exercise asked you to mark which of your behaviours met the diary criterion, and the ones you marked yes are the ones with cues worth finding. From earlier Core courses: Time Management lesson 4 taught the if-then plan and the tired-and-in-a-bad-mood test, and this lesson supplies the reason and adds the reliability bar. Logic and Argument lesson 5 is what lets you read a field experiment on 98 people as evidence about a mechanism rather than a fact about everybody.
Forward. Lesson 4 is how long the association takes to build, which is the question this lesson leaves open, and it contains the second of this course's three travelling numbers. Lessons 5 and 6 are about what happens when there is no habit and a decision has to be made after all. Lesson 7 comes back to whether the behaviour was worth automating.
Go deeper
- The Pull of the Past: When Do Habits Persist Despite Conflict With Motives? (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2011), posted by one of its authors. This course has read the abstract and Study 1's design and participants. Worth it for the second experiment in particular: the reasoning that led somebody to think of testing the non-dominant hand is the most instructive thing in the paper, and it is in the text before the results.
- Making health habitual (British Journal of General Practice, 2012), read in full by this course. Three pages. Its Box 1 is a sheet a doctor can hand to a patient, and the line this lesson quotes from it is the whole of the cue advice a health service thinks is worth giving.
Sources
- David T. Neal, Wendy Wood, Mengju Wu and David Kurlander, "The Pull of the Past: When Do Habits Persist Despite Conflict With Motives?", Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 37(11), 2011, pages 1428 to 1437. Read in part: the abstract and Study 1's design and participants; Study 2's design and sample were not opened, and the body says so. Supports: the quoted finding about habitual popcorn eaters; the quoted sentence giving both conditions under which they ate out of habit; the quoted finding about weaker-habit participants eating from motivation; the fresh and stale manipulation; and the two designs. Scope: Study 1, 98 participants at a campus cinema and 60 in a meeting room, all paid $6, rating movie trailers. Study 2's sample size is not claimed.
- Benjamin Gardner, Phillippa Lally and Jane Wardle, "Making health habitual", British Journal of General Practice 62(605), 2012, pages 664 to 666. Read in full. Supports the quoted advice to choose a time and place encountered every day of the week.
- Benjamin Gardner, Amanda L. Rebar and Phillippa Lally, "How does habit form?", Cogent Psychology 9:1, 2022. Read in substantial part. Supports the standing point, relied on here, that habits form through repeated cue-and-response pairings rather than through elapsed time.
- Mira and Tom are constructed, and so is every detail attached to them; the lesson says so where each appears. No source read for this course describes an individual's habit attempt. The order of checks for a failing plan is also the course's own reasoning, labelled where it is given, and no study read here tests it. And the reliability bar added to Time Management's noticeability test is this course's own inference from the requirement that an association is built by repeated co-occurrence.
Check your understanding
This lesson has a 6-question quiz. Pass it and the questions come back on a schedule in Review, so what you learned stays learned. Your progress is saved in your browser; no account needed.