习惯研究的现状与展望

习惯是一种由某特定线索引发并指向某特定目标(包括外显目标与内隐目标)的自动化反应。它具有过去有行为的重复、环境线索的稳定与自动化的反应等特征。关于习惯的测量方式主要采取自我报告法（如自我报告过去行为频率、自我报告习惯频率、自我报告习惯索引等）和反应频率测量法。对习惯的形成的理论解释主要有环境促进、态度促进、目标促进等几种观点。未来研究应继续深入探讨习惯的本质、整合形成机制的相关理论及开发更可靠方便的测量工具。     

How do habits guide behavior? Perceived and actual triggers of habits in daily life

What are the psychological mechanisms that trigger habits in daily life? Two studies reveal that strong habits are influenced by context cues associated with past performance (e.g., locations) but are relatively unaffected by current goals. Specifically, performance contexts—but not goals—automatically triggered strongly habitual behaviors in memory (Experiment 1) and triggered overt habit performance (Experiment 2). Nonetheless, habits sometimes appear to be linked to goals because people self-perceive their habits to be guided by goals. Furthermore, habits of moderate strength are automatically influenced by goals, yielding a curvilinear, U-shaped relation between habit strength and actual goal influence. Thus, research that taps self-perceptions or moderately strong habits may find habits to be linked to goals.     

Impulse and Self-Control From a Dual-Systems Perspective

ABSTRACT— Though human beings embody a unique ability for planned behavior, they also often act impulsively. This insight may be important for the study of self-control situations in which people are torn between their long-term goals to restrain behavior and their immediate impulses that promise hedonic fulfillment. In the present article, we outline a dual-systems perspective of impulse and self-control and suggest a framework for the prediction of self-control outcomes. This framework combines three elements that, considered jointly, may enable a more precise prediction of self-control outcomes than they do when studied in isolation: impulsive precursors of behavior, reflective precursors, and situational or dispositional boundary conditions. The theoretical and practical utility of such an approach is demonstrated by drawing on recent evidence from several domains of self-control such as eating, drinking, and sexual behavior.     

A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface

The present model outlines the mechanisms underlying habitual control of responding and the ways in which habits interface with goals. Habits emerge from the gradual learning of associations between responses and the features of performance contexts that have historically covaried with them (e.g., physical settings, preceding actions). Once a habit is formed, perception of contexts triggers the associated response without a mediating goal. Nonetheless, habits interface with goals. Constraining this interface, habit associations accrue slowly and do not shift appreciably with current goal states or infrequent counterhabitual responses. Given these constraints, goals can (a) direct habits by motivating repetition that leads to habit formation and by promoting exposure to cues that trigger habits, (b) be inferred from habits, and (c) interact with habits in ways that preserve the learned habit associations. Finally, the authors outline the implications of the model for habit change, especially for the self-regulation of habit cuing.     

Habit and persistence

Voluntary behaviors (operants) can come in two varieties: Goal-directed actions, which are emitted based on the remembered value of the reinforcer, and habits, which are evoked by antecedent cues and performed without the reinforcer's value in active memory. The two are perhaps most clearly distinguished with the reinforcer-devaluation test: Goal-directed actions are suppressed when the reinforcer is separately devalued and responding is tested in extinction, and habitual behaviors are not. But what is the function of habit learning? Habits are often thought to be strong and unusually persistent. The present selective review examines this idea by asking whether habits identified by the reinforcer-devaluation test are more resistant to extinction, resistant to the effects of other contingency change, vulnerable to relapse, resistant to the weakening effects of context change, or permanently in place once they are learned. Surprisingly little evidence supports the idea that habits are permanent or more persistent. Habits are more context-specific than goal-directed actions are. Methods that make behavior persistent do not necessarily work by encouraging habit. The function of habit learning may not be to make a behavior strong or more persistent but to make it automatic and efficient in a particular context.     

Everyday temptations: an experience sampling study of desire, conflict, and self-control

How often and how strongly do people experience desires, to what extent do their desires conflict with other goals, and how often and successfully do people exercise self-control to resist their desires? To investigate desire and attempts to control desire in everyday life, we conducted a large-scale experience sampling study based on a conceptual framework integrating desire strength, conflict, resistance (use of self-control), and behavior enactment. A sample of 205 adults wore beepers for a week. They furnished 7,827 reports of desire episodes and completed personality measures of behavioral inhibition system/behavior activation system (BIS/BAS) sensitivity, trait self-control, perfectionism, and narcissistic entitlement. Results suggest that desires are frequent, variable in intensity, and largely unproblematic. Those urges that do conflict with other goals tend to elicit resistance, with uneven success. Desire strength, conflict, resistance, and self-regulatory success were moderated in multiple ways by personality variables as well as by situational and interpersonal factors such as alcohol consumption, the mere presence of others, and the presence of others who already had enacted the desire in question. Whereas personality generally had a stronger impact on the dimensions of desire that emerged early in its course (desire strength and conflict), situational factors showed relatively more influence on components later in the process (resistance and behavior enactment). In total, these findings offer a novel and detailed perspective on the nature of everyday desires and associated self-regulatory successes and failures.     

Purchase and Consumption Habits: Not Necessarily What You Intend

Purchase and consumption behaviors in daily life often are repetitive and performed in customary places, leading consumers to develop habits. When habits have formed, environmental cues can activate the practiced responses in the absence of conscious decision making. This research tested these ideas using a longitudinal design. We predicted that regardless of their explicit intentions, consumers would repeat habits to purchase fast food, watch TV news, and take the bus. The results yielded the anticipated pattern in which participants repeated habitual behaviors even if they reported intentions to do otherwise. Intentions only guided behavior in the absence of strong habits. This study ruled out a number of artifactual accounts for these findings including that they arise from the level of abstraction at which intentions are identified, the certainty with which participants held intentions, a restriction of range in the measures, and the strategy participants used to estimate frequency of past performance.     

Goal priming,public transportation habit and travel mode selection: The moderating role of trait mindfulness

Habits in travel mode occur in a stable context and create strong links between travel goals and travel modes in memory. As a consequence, priming a travel goal (i.e., going to a place) in memory increases the accessibility of the associated travel mode among habitual users of this transportation mode. We posit that individual differences in attention to present moment and experience (dispositional mindfulness construct; Brown & Ryan, 2003) could moderate the interaction between travel goal priming and habit strength. In this study, habitual vs. non-habitual users of a subway line were nonconsciously primed with travel goals that were strongly associated with the use of a subway line. In the second part of the study, participants chose, among four travel modes, the one(s) that allowed reaching a specific place. Priming and habit strength contributed non-additively to decision times, but among low-mindfulness participants only. Among non-habitual users, priming speeded decisions at high levels of mindfulness, but slowed decisions at low levels of mindfulness. From a fundamental and applied point of view, discussion focuses on processes crossing habits, non-deliberated responses to environmental cues, and mindfulness.     

Habits as knowledge structures: automaticity in goal-directed behavior

This study tested the idea of habits as a form of goal-directed automatic behavior. Expanding on the idea that habits are mentally represented as associations between goals and actions, it was proposed that goals are capable of activating the habitual action. More specific, when habits are established (e.g., frequent cycling to the university), the very activation of the goal to act (e.g., having to attend lectures at the university) automatically evokes the habitual response (e.g., bicycle). Indeed, it was tested and confirmed that, when behavior is habitual, behavioral responses are activated automatically. In addition, the results of 3 experiments indicated that (a) the automaticity in habits is conditional on the presence of an active goal (cf. goal-dependent automaticity; J. A. Bargh, 1989), supporting the idea that habits are mentally represented as goal-action links, and (b) the formation of implementation intentions (i.e., the creation of a strong mental link between a goal and action) may simulate goal-directed automaticity in habits.     

Too tired to tell the truth: Self-control resource depletion and dishonesty

The opportunity to profit from dishonesty evokes a motivational conflict between the temptation to cheat for selfish gain and the desire to act in a socially appropriate manner. Honesty may depend on self-control given that self-control is the capacity that enables people to override antisocial selfish responses in favor of socially desirable responses. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that dishonesty would increase when people’s self-control resources were depleted by an initial act of self-control. Depleted participants misrepresented their performance for monetary gain to a greater extent than did non-depleted participants (Experiment 1). Perhaps more troubling, depleted participants were more likely than non-depleted participants to expose themselves to the temptation to cheat, thereby aggravating the effects of depletion on cheating (Experiment 2). Results indicate that dishonesty increases when people’s capacity to exert self-control is impaired, and that people may be particularly vulnerable to this effect because they do not predict it.     

Personal responsibility and control over our bodies: when expectation exceeds reality

Good health has become more than a means to personal goals such as greater attractiveness and increased longevity. It symbolizes self-control, hard work, ambition, and success in life. Inherent in this symbolism is the concept that the individual controls behavior, which in turn controls health. Although control over one's life plays an important role in both physical and mental health, the concept of personal control also infers responsibility. Positive attributes are accorded to people who are healthy, but those who fall ill, or those with less than the perfect body, are blamed and are thought to be self-indulgent, lazy, or even irresponsible and immoral. There is a tendency to overstate the impact of personal behavior on health. However, biological realities shape the degree to which health is under the control of the individual. The positive effects of behavior change must be balanced with the limits imposed by biology.     

动机在特质自我控制与主观幸福感关系中的作用与影响

本研究基于调节定向理论,以476名有效被试的测量数据,从动机的作用与影响来解释特质自我控制与主观幸福感关系的争议。结果发现：尽管（1）特质自我控制与主观幸福感正相关;但（2）两者间,促进动机有部分中介作用,预防动机无显著中介作用;故（3）高自我控制者也未必有更高的主观幸福感。因此,动机是特质自我控制与主观幸福感间的重要中介因素,不同动机导向的作用是造成特质自我控制与主观幸福感关系争议的重要原因。     

Counteractive self-control in overcoming temptation

How do anticipated short-term costs affect the likelihood of engaging in an activity that has long-term benefits. Five studies investigated the factors that determine (a) how anticipated short-term costs elicit self-control efforts and (b) how self-control efforts eventually diminish the influence of short-term costs on behavior. The studies manipulated short-term costs (e.g., painful medical procedures) and assessed a variety of self-control strategies (e.g., self-imposed penalties for failure to undergo a test). The results show that short-term costs elicit self-control strategies for self rather than others, before rather than after behavior. when long-term benefits are important rather than unimportant and when the costs are moderate rather than extremely small or large. The results also show that the self-control efforts help people act according to their long-term interests.     

Challenges in the conceptualization of trait self-control as a psychological construct

Self-control is widely believed to be a valuable characteristic that contributes to leading a healthy, happy, and successful life through the effective pursuit of long-term goals. Yet, despite a prolific literature spanning decades, essential questions about the conceptual nature of trait self-control remain unanswered. Substantially different perspectives on the theoretical nature of (trait) self-control coexist side by side. We briefly review prominent views informing what trait self-control as a psychological construct is. On this basis, we identify four conceptual challenges that we think the field should address moving forward: (a) integrating theoretical notions, (b) addressing variability in individual goals, (c) acknowledging variability in dominant responses, and (d) anchoring trait self-control in a nomological network. We highlight why addressing these challenges is crucial for gaining a deeper understanding of trait self-control. We also suggest how theoretical conceptualizations of trait self-control might do so and the implications this would bear for measurement and interventions.     

Depletion,moral identity,and unethical behavior: Why people behave unethically after self-control exertion

Self-control enables people to resist short-term temptations in the service of long-term goals. Previous exertion of self-control leads to a state of ego depletion. Three studies demonstrated that ego depletion leads to a high level of unethical behavior. These studies also hypothesized and confirmed that depleted individuals behave unethically because of low moral identity. Study 1 found that depleted participants were more likely to over-report their performance than non-depleted participants. Study 2 revealed that depletion reduced people’s moral identity, which in turn increased their propensity to engage in unethical behavior. Study 3 proved that priming moral identity eliminated the effect of depletion on cheating. Findings suggest that reduced moral identity accounts for the effect of self-control depletion on unethical behavior.     

Being active and impulsive: The role of goals for action and inaction in self-control

Although self-control often requires behavioral inaction (i.e., not eating a piece of cake), the process of inhibiting impulsive behavior is commonly characterized as cognitively active (i.e., actively exerting self-control). Two experiments examined whether motivation for action or inaction facilitates self-control behavior in the presence of tempting stimuli. Experiment 1 used a delay discounting task to assess the ability to delay gratification with respect to money. Experiment 2 used a Go/No-Go task to assess the ability to inhibit a dominant but incorrect motor response to the words ??condom?? and ??sex??. The results demonstrate that goals for inaction promote self-control, whereas goals for action promote impulsive behavior. These findings are discussed in light of recent evidence suggesting that goals for action and inaction modulate physiological resources that promote behavioral execution.     

Going forward by drawing from the past: personal strivings, personally meaningful memories, and personality traits

The present research explored the idea that what people strive for in their daily lives is meaningfully linked to their autobiographical memories and stable personality characteristics. Study 1 showed that (a) personal strivings (both self-reported and content coded) are related to the emotional and motivational content of self-defining memories, (b) personal strivings are related to self-esteem and narcissism, and (c) the relation between personal strivings and personality is partially mediated by memory content. Study 2 extended these findings to a longitudinal context and showed that personal strivings and memory content reciprocally influence each other over time. Together, the findings suggest that when people consider how to move forward in their lives, they draw on their past experiences to establish goals for the future and that the way this process plays out is shaped by people's stable personality characteristics.     

善良人格与网络利他行为的关系：有调节的中介模型

为探讨善良人格与网络利他行为的关系及其内在心理机制，研究采用实验法，将192名被试随机分配到不同风险情境中，并完成善良人格问卷、自我控制问卷和网络利他行为任务。结果表明：（1）善良人格正向预测网络利他行为；（2）自我控制在善良人格与网络利他之间起中介作用；（3）情境风险在善良人格与网络利他行为之间的直接路径以及自我控制中介效应的后半路径起调节作用。因此，善良人格对网络利他行为的影响是有调节的中介作用，该结果具有一定的理论和现实价值。     

Resisting,recognizing, and returning: A three‐component model and review of persistence in episodic goals

According to prior work, persistent goal pursuit is a continuous process where persisting is a matter of resisting the urge to give up. In everyday goals, however, persistence is often episodic, and its causes are more complex. People pause and resume pursuit many times. Whether people persist reflects more than will power and motivation, it also reflects the other goals they pursue, their resources, and the attentional demands of daily life. People can fail to persist not just because they gave up, but also because they failed to act. We propose a general model of persistence that accommodates the complexity of episodic goals. We argue that persistent goal pursuit is a function of three processes: resisting the urge to give up, recognizing opportunities for pursuit, and returning to pursuit. The broad factors that help and hurt persistence can be organized within these components. These components can also explain the mechanisms of four effective strategies for persistence: removing distractions, using reminders, using implementation intentions, and forming habits. The recognizing‐resisting‐returning model integrates and improves on extant theories of persistence and goal pursuit and is consistent with empirical work from laboratory and naturalistic settings.