Voices
bring out your worst behavior.
A fascinating paper in the June
2013 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
by David Neal, Wendy Wood and
Aimee Drolet suggests a different possibility. They argue that
in times of stress, we fall back
on our habits generally. When
those habits are bad, then we
experience what we see as a failure of self-control. But, we also
fall back on our good habits. We
don’t notice those as readily, because those behaviors are helpful.
In a naturalistic study to support this view, the researchers explored the behavior of a
sample of college students. First,
they looked at the strength of a
number of habits relating to eating breakfast and reading the
newspaper. Some of these behaviors were good (like eating
hot cereal for breakfast), while
others were bad (eating a pastry
for breakfast). For each person,
some behaviors were a strong
part of their routine, while others were not. A particular individual might generally eat hot
cereal, but rarely eat pastry. That
person might also tend to read
the op-ed section of the newspaper, but rarely read the comics.
ART
MARKMAN
HUFFINGTON
06.30-07.07.13
Over the next four weeks, the
researchers continued to track the
students’ behavior. In two of those
weeks, the students had an intense
series of exams, while in the other
two of those weeks, there were
no major exams. The researchers
expected that the students would
be undergoing more stress in the
exam weeks, and so their willpower would be compromised.
When a particular behavior
In times of stress …
we also fall back on our
good habits. We don’t notice
those as readily, because
those behaviors are helpful.”
was a strong habit for that person, then they were more likely
t