#360 ‒ How to change your habits: why they form and how to build or break them | Charles Duhigg, M.B.A

How Charles’s background in journalism and personal experiences led to his interest in habit formation [A: 3:15, V: 1:20]

• In many ways, Charles is kind of the “OG guy” when it comes to talking about habit formation
• It’s hard to believe that it’s been 13 years since his amazing book on the subject matter [The Power of Habit]
• Peter probably read it 8 years ago, but it’s a topic that is relevant regardless of what you do
• For Peter’s job and how he tries to help people, it really comes down to knowing what to do and then putting it into practice 

Give folks a bit of a sense of your background and maybe even how that factored into you taking an interest in the topic of habits 

• Before Charles wrote The Power of Habit, he had been a business and science reporter for quite a while
• He decided to become a journalist after he went to Harvard Business School, and he got his MBA
• About halfway through business school he realized it’s a lot more fun to write about business than to do it; so he decided to become a journalist
• One of the things that he noticed as he was writing, are 2 experiences that got him interested in habits
  • He was working at the New York Times at that point
  • Because he had spent time overseas in Iraq during the war, he had reported on a bunch of different things
• 1 – When he was in Iraq, he was embedded with a unit that was right outside of Baghdad, he was talking to a major, and he asked him, “How do you train soldiers to become soldiers?”
  • Because one of the things that you see in a war zone in particular is that the behaviors are so deeply ingrained
  • The goal is to ingrain a set of behaviors that so that if a bomb goes off, everyone around you knows exactly what to do in that moment, and they react automatically 
  • The major described the military as “A giant habit change machine”
  • They teach young recruits who maybe don’t have any self-discipline, who maybe are prone to emotional upheavals
• 2 – When  he came back to the US, he was thinking about this to himself, “If I’m so smart and so talented…”
  • Why can’t I get myself to lose weight? 
  • Why can’t I get myself to go running in the morning every day? 
  • Why is this such a struggle for me when I’m so good at other things? 

He realized it was because he had not learned and studied how habits function in his own habits 

“Once I learned that, I had the tools to change how I behave automatically, which is of course the most important component of our behavior because it’s what we do every day.”‒ Charles Duhigg

What year did you get back to the US from Iraq? 

• Charles was in Iraq from 2003-2004; he got back at the end of ‘04, beginning of ‘05
• He was at the LA Times and he started working at The New York Times in ‘06

What did you start writing about? When did you pick that thread up again? 

• He was writing for the business section at The NY Times, and he wrote a piece about the science of hand washing, which was really fascinating

There’s been really interesting research, particularly out of the United Kingdom, about: How do we incentivize people in developing nations to wash their hands? 

• A lot of this was sponsored by Unilever, the soap company
• They found that people in poor communities (particularly in India and Pakistan and in other parts of Asia) would buy soap, and then they would save the soap for special occasions
  • It was like something you gave to a guest when they came over
  • It was something that you used before you went to mosque or for prayer
• As a result, they weren’t washing their hands every day
• Of course, we know that using soap actually correlates with preventing a lot of diseases
• A number of researchers in the UK took this on to try and figure out: How do we create hand washing habit using soap? 

What they discovered was, you need to focus on the reward 

• Unilever, in all the advertisements, would talk about the benefits you got from using soap: that if you used soap disease would go down
  • That was not influential
• 1 – It was too abstract
• 2 – You’re trying to educate people who don’t think that they’re at an education deficit

⇒ We see the same thing in the United States around vaccine resistance and other things, telling people, “Oh, you don’t know enough. I’m going to tell you the truth.” ‒  that almost never works 

What you have to do is you have to create incentives where you get an immediate reward for that behavior 

• What they did is they actually changed the scent of the soaps
  • They made the scent of the soaps less powerful because it seemed less like a perfume, less like a fancy thing
• Then they ran these ads where they equated washing your hands with taking care of your children, not necessarily your own health, not your own cleanliness
  • When I wash my hands with soap, I can feed my children
  • They were creating that sense, that identity reward that says, “By doing this, you’re a good parent.” 
  • And that changed everything
• Peter is always intrigued by this type of problem

How long did it take them to figure out that that was the unlock? 

Was this iterative? What type of research did they have to do? 

• It took them years
• It took a really sustained exposure
• What’s interesting is part of this research and where it came out of was trying to understand the neural roots of disgust 

⇒ Disgust is a really, really powerful instinct that all humans have, and they really wanted to understand how do we capitalize on disgust as a negative reward? 

• They spent years on this, but like everything that ends up having widespread change, it really paid off enormous dividends

Peter asks, “When you say they, who are the types of people? Are these behavioral economists? Are they psychologists, sociologists?”

• There’s a woman named Val Curtis who in particular led a lot of this research
  • Charles believes her background is in sociology
• This was during the heyday of behavioral economics when Danny Kahneman and others, Amos Tversky’s work was really getting noticed for the first time and was making its way into other fields

They brought in a lot of the behavioral economists and psychologists 

This points to something interesting: some of the most exciting research that’s happening right now is this interdisciplinary research 

• There tend to become these silos within universities
• When you look at what’s really interesting that’s happening, it tends to be the people who are stepping outside of those silos

The science behind reinforcement: why positive rewards outperform punishment in habit formation [A: 10:15, V: 9:06]

A framework for understanding motivation to change habits 

• The way Charles described it a moment ago, it was more avoidance of negative that got the job done 
• Peter thinks of this as a 2×2: positive and negative, giving (carrot) and taking away (stick)
  • An example of taking away: disgust is bad, and we’re going to remove disgust

What does the science tell us about that foursquare? 

A bit of context 

• About 40-45% of what we do every day is habits
• This comes from research by Wendy Wood at USC

⇒ Every habit in our life has 3 components:

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