Habit

There are various forms of "habitual" behavior that we undertake unconsciously or semi-consciously or are driven to undertake:

• Innate or reflexive - We are born with drives and tendencies that enable us to survive:
  • bodily behaviors - such as breathing, digesting, evacuating, heart beating, etc
  • caregiver bonding - turning toward a touch on the cheek and sucking on objects to feed
  • social behaviors - We have a tendency to look for faces, to pay attention to languages, smiling
  • more advanced infant learning - sitting, walking, language
• Learned behavior:
  • Diet/Exercise
  • Religion/Beliefs
  • Preferences/Prejudices
• Addictions:
  • Caffeine, cigarettes
  • Soft and hard drugs
  • TV/Cellphones
• Habits are defined as a "routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously" or as "more or less fixed ways of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience.
• Some studies suggest that more than 40% of human actions are driven by habit.
• For James, "Any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself; so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel, or do, under like circumstances, without any consciously formed purpose, or anticipated of result."
• The process of learning is one of acquiring unconscious habits. Consider learning how to drive a car:
  • Initially I have to think about and consciously manage the balance between the clutch and the accelerator, to remember to check the mirror before a maneuver, to check on all sides, to switch to the brake.
  • As I learn, more and more of these tasks will become automatic and require less of my conscious attention. Only when something unexpected happens - a car slows suddenly of pulls in front of me - is my conscious attention called to action.
  • Now after 35 years of driving, I can say that most of my driving is done at an unconscious level. I think about what my feet or my hands are doing only rarely, and it is difficult to explain what I am doing to my learner driver son - I just do it!
• For Bateson "No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels. This is the economy achieved by habit formation."
• Bateson's theory of learning involves "various habits of punctuating the stream of experience so that it takes on one or another sort of coherence and sense.":
  • Learning 0 - Is not learning from experience, but rather randomly reacting to stimuli of pleasure or pain
  • Learning 1 - Is habituation to stimuli so that the individual will retreat from painful stimuli and move towards agreeable one.
  • Learning II - Is the highest form of learning achieved by a majority of human beings. Involves the segmentation of experience into contexts for which the individual has learned behaviors and can perfect those behaviors. He associates this type of learning with a person's character and with a tendency toward dominant or dependent behavior in various contexts.
  • Learning III