Talk:Habit

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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:56, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Please Consider Merging Article
I would like to propose merging this article into habituation or vice versa, due to the fact that these two concepts and articles in Wikipedia are very related, and can also be considered the same thing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mert91 (talk • contribs) 01:35, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Give Habits a Chance
The page which the Psychology community offered to someone looking up habit on its disambiguation page was habituation, which is heavily behaviorist in tone and, more important, rather technical in its wording. There is good reason to have a page on habitutation. In fact, it is one of the first links that I would want to fold into the text of the Habit (psychology) article. But it does not address the need for a good article that would allow a lay reader to, say, find approaches to changing habits or the full range of thought on how habits work. I am not exclusively interested in bad habits or addictions or spiritual habits or moral exhortations to develop good everyday habits, though any of these perspectives might be useful.

My intention is to start from texts on everyday psychology and older psychology texts like William James' The Principles of Psychology, which book has a full chapter on habits (as opposed to the WP article The Principles of Psychology which has only one sentence that mentions habit as an aside). I expect that it will take a while to develop an article that meets WP standards. Because of my own interests in time management, I intend to stick with this until it is at least mediocre or has some folks with greater expertise (but not too exptreme professional bias) to further improve it. DCDuring 02:27, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

"Habits" in WP Articles
I've been working hard to check on uses of the word "habit" in WP. I've looked at 700 WP articles to confirm my intuition that "habituation" is not what people are looking for. I found VERY few cases where habituation was clearly what was sought. I even added an internal link habituation for 1 or 2 articles. There were some cases that were arguable, so I left it the way it was if there was a link to habituation, added no link in some cases, and added a habit (psychology) link where I thought it worked. of course I ignored all the uses that were about individual cases of drug, gambling, or smoking habits or where the word was used in a botanical or crystallograohic sense. I also skipped all animal habits, because of the difficulty of figuring out in what sense, say, a horse was conscious. I did learn a bit about the older uses of the term habit over 2000 years or so. Stay tuned. DCDuring 07:07, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Mindfulness vs. Habit
A mindful approach to any activity has three characteristics: the continuous creation of new categories; openness to new information; and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective.

Mindlessness, in contrast, is characterized by an entrapment in old categories; by automatic behavior that precludes attending to new signals; and by action that operates from a single perspective. From Ellen Langer Mindful Learning DCDuring 19:56, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

From 71.202.65.243 (talk) 23:14, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

 * Per Wikipedia policy, removed original research, data that violated Neutral point of view, false and erroneous data, logical fallacies that serve to further make the article ambiguous. Wikipedia is about being an accurate encyclopedic base, not an opinion pool based on faulty logic, fallacy, ambiguous and wordy language that is easily misinterpreted.

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Move. Cúchullain t/ c 18:23, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

– Clear primary topic. Virtually all references in Google hits from the web, from books, and from newspapers are to the psychological concept of a tendency to repeat certain behaviors. Note that habituation, drug habit, and habit evidence are merely subtopics of this sense of the term, habit. bd2412 T 19:40, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Habit (psychology) → Habit
 * Habit → Habit (disambiguation)
 * I looked over the disambiguation page--it's an easy support. Red Slash 04:23, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Support: the psychological phenomenon does seem to be the clear primary topic. ╠╣uw [ talk ]  13:42, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Support I agree that it is primary. Presumably the psychological meaning includes addictive habits as well. &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 10:37, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

History of concept
Would it make sense to include an intellectual history of the concept and role of habit, e.g. the importance of habit to Aristotle's ethics? Crust (talk) 12:25, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes. Bondegezou (talk) 13:29, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Additional Lead Information
The lead information so far is an excellent summary and is well written. Although, I found that the introduction only summarizes half of the article. There is no mention of goals, nor bad habits. The summary should give an idea of the article as a whole, that way those who are searching can read the intro and decide if this article holds the info needed. I believe with what information there is so far it would be appropriate to have another paragraph added to the summary to explain the other half of the page. --Nataliedardon (talk) 05:44, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Relevance of Shopping Habits to Habit Formation
Under the "Formation" section, there are two sentences discussing shopping habits and marketing opportunity. I'm not sure how this is relevant to habit formation because it addresses changes to existing shopping habits (rather than the formation of a shopping habit). I think we should consider moving these two sentences to the "Bad habits" --> "Elimination" section. Mung bean sprout (talk) 23:14, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Adding the book Atomic Habits as a book
This is a # 1 on the New York Times Bestseller List, two months in a row. Why can I not include it in the further reading section? It's not a huge deal but I wish someone put an explanation for removing my edit — Preceding unsigned comment added by Silent rhythm (talk • contribs)


 * This isn't a place to list self help books. - MrOllie (talk) 11:11, 21 September 2021 (UTC)


 * This is a self help book, shouldn't it be removed then? -> Duhigg, Charles (2014). The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. ISBN 978-0812981605. Silent rhythm (talk) 05:13, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

Narrow in scope and biased approached to the topic
There is almost no generalist information or cultural or historical context to the topic and term "Habit" here. A concept whose influence and popular conception is rooted in ancient greek ethics, to mention just one culturally significant and relevant topic not mentioned, and that, for most people, relates to things like education, child rearing, work, sport, and health with many significant classical and popular movements and authors along the way--yet has has been sequestered into a lab experiment emphasis and behavioral models about rats for the majority of this article.

Clearly this is a biased approach and makes the article neither useful nor a fruitful source for further investigation.

How do you have an article on Habit and not mention Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics or the Stoics with their discussion of habit that has been foundational to the Western system of education? Not to mention morality and training of all kinds. Or that the entire corporate landscape and training of everyone from teachers to soldiers was shifted by a book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People?

These are the bridge to the current and general popular conception of "habit" and it is sorely missing here. It's not a matter of promoting particular self help books or philosophies, but presenting a topic as if there are none. Habit is a rich concept with a long and broad influential history. It's all missing here.

Another way to put it: when most people think of "habits" they don't think of experiments and rats. Over half this article's word count is devoted to conditioning experiments, lab associated concepts, and rats.


 * as a side note there are multiple specialist terms undefined/unlinked that render this "lab" approach nonsensical to the intended audience --again the general reader (eg. "capture error') that further point up the misguided narrow scope of this article

2600:1700:AD20:F000:163:FCF9:D7C2:A135 (talk) 17:01, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Habits in non-biological nature
There is a minor tradition of talking about habits outside psychology and even biology. Charles Sanders Peirce called the effects caused by repetition in physical nature also habits, as in the development of a brook's course. He probably inherited that line of thinking from George Berkeley who most likely got it from some Scholastics. It definitely deserves description in Wikipedia but should probably be in a separate article (perhaps linked from here) and I'm not sure what the name should be. --Ehitaja (talk) 08:24, 6 July 2024 (UTC)