Sustainability and Habits with Bas Verplanken
Behaven — Hi Bas. We are delighted to have you with us today. To start, could you tell us what your area of expertise is?
Bas Verplanken — Hi and thanks for welcoming me. I'm a social psychologist. The broadest way to describe my interest is: why do people behave as they do? I specialise in the relationship between thinking and doing and in particular in habits.
Habitual behaviour is something that wasn't on the map for a while. There has been a big area in the thirties and forties where behaviourist psychology looked at how behaviour was shaped and how it came about. After that, researchers and practitioners were taken away by models that suggest that we do things because we are motivated to do them. We have a view on what outcomes we may get by making certain choices. Our attitudes, and sometimes our values are in play, which all lead to intention or motivation to act. The idea that behaviour comes from our willpower has been the preference model in social consumer psychology.
Then we tried to analyse what happens when you do things repetitively. Are these models still valid? Are you still thinking about the pros and cons and relying on your attitudes to do things that you did many times before? The answer is probably not.
That’s where the focus on habit comes in. That field has developed in a very interesting way. You can boil it down to two very simple messages: On the one hand, we rely on our attitudes and we act out of willpower. On the other hand, when we are in a habitual frame, the environment where we perform the behaviour is actually driving it. It is the cues that trigger our behaviours. At eight o'clock every morning, you jump into your car to go work, you pass the shop, and you grab a nice piece of cake. You may have all kinds of attitudes about it, but the reality is: if you do that often, it is the environment that triggers it.
There is a shift in the control of behavior from internal willpower to the external environment which has many implications, not in the least for how you change behaviour. And if you want people to do things differently, you have to know how that behaviour is controlled and where it comes from.
I found this field very interesting because it's not black or white. There's a lot of interaction. We sometimes do things out of habit, but we have some capacity to do things differently.
How would you use this knowledge about habits to drive more sustainable behaviours?
There are two sides of that coin: you can either look at unsustainable behaviours, those that you want to change, or at sustainable behaviours, those that you want to turn into habits.
Habits are problematic if you intend to use traditional methodologies to change unsustainable behaviours. For example, information campaigns are often focused on changing people's attitudes with the assumption that this will then change behaviour. But if there was no clear link between attitudes and behaviour in circumstances where you have developed habits, focusing on changing attitudes can be a waste of time and resources. If the behaviour was triggered by mechanisms other than your internal motivation and willpower, you have to change your focus in order to change behaviour.
On the other side of the coin, when people are doing sustainable things, you want that behaviour to become habitual. In that case, all the initial problems encountered with habits actually become beneficial to sustain behaviour. Ideally sustainable behaviours should continue automatically and persistently and acquire the features of habits, without being challenged by attitudes. That second side of the coin has not gotten much attention because when we talk about habits, many people immediately think about bad habits.
Behaviour change interventions would benefit from focusing on promoting habit formation. But interventions very often stop where it gets interesting I think. There are many examples where a new behaviour goes down the drain. Many interventions and techniques end up back to where they started – or sometimes worse - three, four, five years later. The idea of creating habits in order to maintain a new behaviour should be an important intervention goal. But it can be difficult and expensive to look at the longer trajectory of an intervention.
What useful tools have you identified to break or create new sustainable habits?
That's not an easy answer because a lot of things come into play. The essence is to focus on the performance context. You need a good analysis of the context and it can be very different for different behaviours. We can't just to do X, Y, and Z and hope that it will work for all behaviours.
Sometimes you cannot do very much about the performance context. But sometimes you can, especially if you're able to design environments. Retailing and supermarkets are examples of context where behaviour is the first focus of attention. There's a lot of work going into the design of it so that certain products have more likelihood to be chosen.
How can you effectively turn good intentions into behaviour? In traditional research, there's always been the acknowledgement that if you have positive attitudes and intentions to act in a certain way - let's say sustainable - it means that that behaviour probably won’t be happening. We have all kinds of good intentions, but the reality is that lots of those intentions never come to fruition. The intention-behavior gap is difficult to deal with if you want to change behaviour. You need to look at how intentions can actually be implemented.
The idea of implementation intentions is to you select and prepare cues that trigger actions. Exactly the kinds of things that habits are.
Implementation intentions is an interesting way to kickstart new habits with cues that you can plan and design which may turn into habit cues in the longer term. Of course, certain conditions need to be fulfilled. An important condition is that the performance context should ideally be the same and remain stable.
Agents of change should really make performance context a priority: determine where, when and how the behaviour is taking place and see if they can do something in that performance context. That’s sometimes very difficult; you can't design how streets are laid out or change bus routes on your account.
How are identity and behaviour connected?
Not much has been done on the relationship between habit and identity actually.
To have sustainable long-term changes, you need to internalise the behaviour in one way or another. At some point, you need to think about yourself as someone who wants to make a contribution to a sustainable world and that will help you maintain your habits in the long term.
It can also be the case that habits lead to those kinds of attributions. When you do things repeatedly and consistently, you actually infer from your own behaviour that you are a specific kind of person.
We start by wanting to do things and having goals. By repeating those things over and over again, the initial goals and motivations fade away and you end up doing things on automatic pilot. In everyday life, you don't think about the goal of going to work. You just go to work. There's a sort of independence between goals and habits and that’s an interesting process.
What is difficult with sustainable behaviours is that you usually don’t get any benefits from the behaviours you’re trying to implement. You may have to sustain some sacrifices in order to lead a sustainable life. Whereas in the areas of health or consumer behavior, you know what the new behaviour will bring you personally.
How long does it take to create an habit?
That's an interesting question but there's no answer to it. A nice study by Lally et al. (2010) seems to indicate that it takes up to three months. But there are enormous differences depending on people and on behaviours. Not all behaviours can become automatic at the same levels. There is a certain a level of automaticity that can be achieved for each behaviour and sometimes this automaticity can plateau.
I lived in the Netherlands for a long time and I used to always cycle to work. Once my bike had a flat tire and I had to walk to work. It took me 15 minutes and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It was a nice road through a park and it made me start walking to work. I developed a habit very quickly. But other behaviours are more complex. Exercising for example takes preparation time and planning.
You need to analyse not only the performance context, but also the behaviour itself and identify its key component. With exercising, the decision to start is actually crucial. And in that case, it is this decision that you should make habitual. The way you do it is not as interesting or important as the decision.
In other instances, the execution of the habit and the way you do it is crucial. For example, when you take medicines. Execution is the crucial element whether you do it one hour earlier or the next day.
You need to keep this in mind when you think about changing behaviours or creating habits.
Is segmentation useful before implementing interventions?
Segmentation is almost a theoretical tool. In practice finding those segments is difficult. Segmentation is useful in the sense that it makes you aware that different policies and mechanisms may be more effective in different circumstances, with different people. It helps determine the segments of population you need to target, whether or not you can reach them, and which methods are likely to be effective.
The issue with sustainability is that many people are willing to do all kinds of things but might not have the resources to do so. The motivation is there but they need support.
Then, there are also people who are not motivated at all. You can’t go to those people and bang on environmental stuff that they don't want to hear. Those people might be more influenced by incentives or legislation. It's a way to influence behaviour without asking people whether they like it or not. Sometimes that's very efficient. The plastic bag charge in the UK has been incredibly effective. And it's not a very expensive measure.
Are there any benefits to academics and practitioners working together?
I think it's very important and even crucial for the development of this field. For academics, laboratory situations and experiments are very useful to understand the mechanisms that drive behaviour. But when you apply certain methods and tools to real-life situations, results might be completely different and surprising things might pop up. We need to use research but also look at what is happening in the real world.
Do you have any suggestions of publications or books that could be of interest?
I think habit discontinuity is something that could be very interesting for practitioners. In terms of more general reading, you might find interest in the books ‘Environmental Psychology’ and ‘The Psychology of Habits’ which includes methods and interventions that can be applied to different areas.
What is the one thing you do to live in more sustainable lifestyle?
One of the things which is really making an impact is flying. My carbon footprint is horrible. But I’ve been very eco-friendly and haven’t flown since March last year! There you go (laughs).
It's an important issue though. I would never discourage people from doing anything sustainable, whether it's shutting down lights and turning off their computer at night. But nothing compares to flying in terms of impact.
By changing our diets, we can also do a lot collectively. If everyone was to eat less meat, the beneficial impact on the environment would be huge. I'm trying to do that, my meat consumption is very low. And then there are the everyday behaviours: washing at 30 degrees and not using too much water…
I should also make a commitment not to fly too much after this [pandemic] because there’s a real danger in people starting doing these kinds of things massively again.
References:
Lally, P., van Jaarsverk, C.H.M., Potts, H.W.W., Wardle, J. (2010) How habits are formed: Modelling habits formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), pp. 998-1009.
Verplanken, B. (2018) The Psychology of Habits: Theory, Mechanisms, Change and Context. 1st Edition, Springer Nature: Switzerland. 409 pages.
Steg, L. & De Groot, J.I.M. (2018) Environmental Psychology: An Introduction. 2nd Edition, Wiley-Blackwell,: New Jersey, USA, 448 pages.