Talk:Habit (psychology)

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[edit] 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)

[edit] "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)

[edit] 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)