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>> Amy Draves: Good afternoon. My name is Amy Draves, and I'm here to
introduce Charles Duhigg, who is visiting us as part of the Microsoft Research
visiting speakers series.
Charles is here today to discuss his book, The Power of Habit, Why We Do What
We Do in Life and Business. The key to changing habits is to understand how
they work. If you can diagnose the habit, you can change it in any way you
like.
Charles Duhigg is a reporter for The New York Times and has contributed to NPR,
This American Life and Frontline. He has won the George Polk and National
Academies of Science awards and was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.
Please join me in giving him a very warm welcome.
>> Charles Duhigg: Hi. Can you guys hear me? Okay. Good. My name is
Charles. Thank you, all of you, for coming today. It's enormously kind for
you to come and take some time out of what was yesterday a beautiful day, is
today a rainy day.
I'm a reporter The New York Times and the author of this book, and I'll
mention, and might be why some of you are here, that at the Times, I don't
actually write about habits. I write a series call the I economy, about Apple
and in looking at Apple's working conditions overseas and sort of using Apple
as a lens. I imagine a lot of people in this audience feel strongly about
Apple and, perhaps have read that series. If you have any questions about it,
feel free to ask me.
But right now, I'll just talk about habits, which is another way of saying also
if you have any questions about this presentation, feel free to raise your hand
and interrupt me. I'd love to -- particularly, if you think what I'm saying is
totally untrue or doesn't make any sense, those are my favorite kinds of
questions. So feel free to tell me that you totally disagree.
So the book that I wrote, The Power of Habit, started about ten years ago, when
I was a reporter in Iraq. And I had been sent over to Iraq, because I thought
it would be very interesting to be in a war zone. I had never been in a war
zone before. Turns out it is very interesting. It's also terrifying and
awful, and so I figured out pretty quickly that my number one goal in Iraq was
to be in places where no one could shoot at me, which turns out to be harder
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than I thought it would be.
But so I heard about this one Army major about an hour south of Baghdad that
was doing this experiment in a city named Kufa. Kufa was one of these towns
where riots would break out all the time and people are being killed. And so
the Army major had been sent down to Kufa, and his assignment was stop the
riots. So this guy shows up, he studies a whole bunch of videotapes of riots
that were shot by drones. He goes to the town mayor and he says, a whole
laundry list of requests. His last request was can you take all the food
vendors out of the plazas in Kufa.
And the mayor, who is dealing with suicide bombers and, you know, all types of
terrible stuff, says sure, sure, I can take all the food vendors out. That's
the easiest thing you've asked me to do.
So a couple weeks later, this crowd starts growing in around the grand mosque
of Kufa, which is this very contentious mosque. And the crowd gets bigger and
bigger over time. What the Army major explained to me is that when riots
happen, they take hours to develop, like on the news it likes like they just
broke out, right? But those people have been in that plaza for hours and hours
and hours until eventually something kind of sparks and the entire crowd goes
wild.
So the crowd grows and grows and grows and grows. Time goes by, gets bigger
and bigger and bigger. Gets to about 5:30. People are hungry. And they start
looking for all the food vendors that they normally buy kebabs from. And
they're not there. So the people at the outer ring of this crowd go home.
Because they're hungry, and they're just spectators.
And then the people who are one ring in see these people leaving and think to
themselves, where are they going? The party must be someplace else. Like why
am I hanging out. So they leave and then the people one ring in, they leave as
well until eventually, you get to these rabble rousers who are the people who
start the riot in the first place, and they look around and realize there's
nobody there. So they go home.
And over the nine-month period that the major had been there, there hadn't been
any riots. So when I talked to this guy, I was totally fascinated by this,
also I could talk to him in a very well fortified building, where no one could
shoot at me, and so I asked as many questions as I could, and I said, how did
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you know that this was going to happen, that removing the food vendors was
going to do this? Because there had been riots for years in Kufa.
And what he said was that the military's essentially this huge habit
experiment, right. When you -- is anyone a veteran? I don't know if anyone -oh, okay. So a couple people. So you know this far better than I do. When
you enroll in the military, basically, their whole goal is to teach you these
new habits, right? Like when people are shooting at you. Instead of running
away, like sensible people do, stand there and shoot back. Or importantly, how
do you get along with people that you can't stand, or how do you make decisions
when you're exhausted or you're under fire. Or how do you talk to your spouse
when you're on another continent, or even just spending habits. How do you
save money?
The military is this huge, huge laboratory for changing habits. And what this
major told me is that once you start looking at the world through the lens of
these habits, once you sort of understand how they work, all of a sudden
everything looks different and you understand that a riot can be stopped by
taking away the food vendors.
So I thought this was totally fascinating. So I came back to the U.S. I
started researching about studies that were going on around the science of
habit formation. And let me just start by telling you what a habit is, at
least for purposes of this talk, which is a habit is a decision that you made
at some point and then stopped making but continued acting on.
So backing your car out of your driveway, the first couple times you did it,
you took this major dose of concentration, right? It's actually a very
complicated thing, because you have to do spatial calculations, look in
mirrors, reverse images.
But when you back your car out of your driveway now, you just do it. You don't
even have to think about it, right? You can think about the meeting you have
later that day or realize that you left your kid's lunch on the counter.
That's a habit.
And the story I really want to tell you about is about this product named
Febreze. Does anyone use Febreze? Okay, a couple people use Febreze. To tell
you about this product, it's one of the best selling products in the nation, I
actually have to start by telling you this story about a rat.
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About a decade ago, a woman named Anne Grehbiel at MIT, who is a neurologist,
and her colleagues perfected a system for putting hundreds of small little
sensors inside the brains of rats. So they could register relatively small
neurological changes as the rats behaved. They would do the surgery. The rats
wake up, it looks like they have a joy stick coming out of their head. They
don't even know, as far as we know, they never complained about it, right?
They just sort of act like normal rats.
So Anne Grehbiel and her colleagues would do this to a number of rats, and then
what they would do is they would drop them in the world's simplest maze. It's
a T-shaped maze. Same thing would happen every single time.
There would be a click, a partition would move, the rat would be free to run up
and down the maze and in one of the Ts, there's a piece of chocolate. So the
first couple of times that you drop any rat into this maze, the same thing will
happen. Click, partition moves, the rat will start looking like the world's
laziest rat. What it will do is like you would imagine that it would smell the
chocolate and kind of run towards it. That's not what the rat does.
What it does is it kind of wanders up and then wanders back and it will scratch
on the walls and sniff at the air and eventually it will find the chocolate and
eat the chocolate. But doesn't look like the rat is working for it very hard.
But what Grehbiel was able to figure out by watching the sensors inside the
rats' brains is despite the fact that the rat looked lazy, it was actually
thinking hard the entire time. Whenever the rat would scratch on the wall, the
scratching centers would light up. Or the sniff in the air and the sniffing
centers would light up. I'm oversimplifying, because if anyone's a
neurologist, you know there's no such thing as like a scratching center, but
the point being that this is a representation of what was going on in the rat's
head. It was thinking hard the entire time. Trying to figure out what's going
on.
So Grehbiel and her colleagues dropped
And over time, the rat actually learns
moves, the rat zips to the chocolate.
single time. Doesn't scratch, doesn't
the rat in again and again and again.
the maze, right. Click, partition
Gets faster and faster and faster every
sniff.
From a neurological perspective, what happens is that the rat develops a habit
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for running through the maze and getting to the chocolate. And inside the
animal's brain something kind of fascinating occurs. Its brain essentially
stops working as hard. Now, what we know since then is that what's actually
happening here is, if anyone again -- is anyone a neurologist? Okay, so no one
can tell me I'm getting this all wrong, which is great.
Essentially, what's happening is that cognition is moving from the prefrontal
cortex, which is the part of the brain where essentially decision making
occurs, the most evolutionary, advanced part of the brain, into the basal
ganglia, which is near the center of your skull and is one of the oldest parts
of your brain and almost every animal has a basal ganglia.
As cognition moves from the prefrontal cortex into the basal ganglia, your
brain works less and less hard. This is why habits feel so automatic. It's
because in one sense, once something becomes a habit, your brain has kind of
gone to sleep. You're no longer participating in decision making around that
activity.
Except at two kind of interesting points. If you'll notice, what happens is
that the brain activity of the rat would spike at the beginning of the habit,
when it heard the click. And then it would spike again at the end, when it
found the chocolate as if it was shaking itself awake to sort of get the reward
and figure out what was going on.
This is the neurological signature of a habit. About 40 percent of the actions
you take every day, according to a study from Duke, are habits. And every
single time you do, if we could put hundreds of sensors into your brain, which
I would not recommend, this is exactly what we would see. You would see this
pattern of a spike of activity at the beginning and a spike of activity at the
end and relatively low neurological activity in the middle as your basal
ganglia, in particular, takes over and uses less power.
In fact, this is such a predictable pattern that scientists call this the habit
loop. Every single habit has three components. There's a cue, which in this
case was that click. Or for any behavior that you have, it's some type of
visual or emotional or some other trigger that tells your brain, now it's time
to hand things over to the basal ganglia, where the behavior will start to
unfold automatically.
And that behavior itself is the routine.
But then at the end of every single
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habit, there's a reward. And this is how your brain learns or decides to
encode this pattern for future use, to essentially remember it in some of the
deeper parts of your brain.
Discovering the habit loop is kind of revolutionary, but what's happened in the
last ten years, as neurologists have begun to understand exactly how to
identify and manipulate cues and rewards, is that we've begun to understand why
some behaviors become habits.
Smoking is a great example, right. Does anyone smoke? Is win willing to admit
that they smoke? At this point, you can't. What's interesting, we all think
of smoking as a physical addiction, and that's true, right? Nicotine is
physically addicting, but only for about 100 hours after your last cigarette.
Once nicotine is out of your blood system, there is no physical addiction to it
anymore. And yet, we all know people who two weeks or two months or two years
after they quit smoking, when they sit down with their morning paper, they have
an urge for a cigarette.
That's not a physical addiction asserting itself. It's the habit. The cue
there is that, in fact, the morning paper and the routines that they used to
light up and the reward was that nicotine actually makes you feel, gives you
energy. Nicotine is actually kind of fun. That's why people smoke.
And, in fact, as therapies have begun recognizing the cues and rewards in
people's lives around smoking, the smoking rate has plummeted, particularly in
the last seven years. For a number of reasons, but part of it being sort of
this identification.
In addition, I'm sure everyone here is familiar with smart phones. Research in
motion, about seven years ago, was doing some research and figured out that if
they could make their phones vibrate, that for some reason, people's use of
them, for the Blackberry, all of a sudden doubled. And the reason why is
because a vibrating phone in your pocket provides an obvious cue. And in fact,
they did neurological studies where they'd try to figure out, what was the
reward that was being provided? And it's that once you're triggered with this
curiosity of why did someone just email me, you have this unbearable craving to
actually check and see what it is, because intermittently, some of those emails
that you receive will be kind of fun to read, right? Particularly more fun
than maybe having conversation with your 3-year-old at the dinner table. So
when your phone vibrates in your pocket, even though you know, and I'm speaking
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as someone who has a 3-year-old that I make conversation with about superheroes
every single night, even though you know you should ignore that vibrating
phone, the cue has triggered this craving, this routine of checking and trying
to get that reward.
And moreover, this insight has helped to create a number of positive habits.
There was a huge experiment that was done a couple of years ago about creating
exercise habits. What they found was the most effective way to create exercise
habits is to ask people to choose obvious cues. Always exercise at the same
time each day or put on your running shoes before breakfast.
And more importantly, to choose a reward at the end. In particular, eating a
small piece of chocolate after you've worked out. And the reason why, it seems
counter intuitive. The whole point of working out is to lose weight. Yet the
scientists are telling you to eat a small piece of chocolate.
It's because initially, your brain does not believe you that you enjoy
exercise. And so you have to trick it for the first couple of weeks. And what
they found, this was a huge study in Germany, was that in about two or three
weeks, people stopped eating the chocolate. They didn't need the chocolate.
Their brain learned that it would eventually being delivered in cannaboids and
endorphins, things that make you -- that are rewarding.
But in the meantime, you have to sort of trick your neurology. The point being
just that this habit loop is kind of an interesting insight. And that the
implications of it, once you can begin breaking down behaviors, are relatively
significant.
But as I mentioned, the entire reason I was telling you this story is just to
tell you about Febreze.
So Febreze, for anyone who hasn't used it, is this amazing spray. In fact,
instead of telling you about it, let me just tell you how they found it. There
was a researcher at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati who was working on a
chemical whose name I cannot pronounce, but whose initials are HPBCD.
So this guy is working on HPBCD, he actually thinks that it's something that he
might be able to add to Tide that will make whites whiter. So he's been
working with it in the lab. He goes home that night, and his wife meets him at
the door. This guy was a long-time smoker. His wife comes to the door and she
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says, oh, did you quit smoking today? And the guy just blows up. Because they
had been, like, to marriage counseling over his smoking and she'd been bugging
him to quit smoking, and he kept on saying no, he didn't want to quit smoking
and she was trying to control his life.
So anyway, she says did you quit smoking today, and the guy says no, I didn't
quit smoking. I don't understand why you're always asking me if I've quit
smoking. I'm not going to talk about this anymore. She says, no, no, no, no.
It's not -- I'm not trying to bother you about this. It's that you don't smell
like cigarette smoke and usually when you come home, you smell like cigarette
smoke.
So the guy goes back to the lab and he starts playing with HPBCD. And what he
realizes is that it's this kind of amazing chemical that if you add to it water
and then aerosolize it, spray it on to fabrics, it will draw scents out of
fabrics. And as the moisture evaporates, the scent essentially disappears. In
fact, this technology is so interesting and powerful that they spend millions
of dollars making it into a product. And it's so good that NASA ends up using
this to clean space shuttles when they come back from space, because one of the
things they don't tell you in the movies is that space apparently smells
terrible and they need to clean the shuttles when they come back.
The guy goes to his bosses at Procter & Gamble and he explains what he has
here. And they're ecstatic, because one of the biggest issues that consumers
had been complaining about was that they can't get rid of bad smells. People
would go to a smoky bar and then leave their jacket outside because they didn't
want to dry clean it to get the cigarette smoke out. People with pets were
constantly saying give me something to help clean up after my pets.
So Procter & Gamble spends millions of dollars, and they create it into a
product named Febreze. And they give it to a marketing team, led by a guy
named Drake Stimson, and on this team are a number of psychologist, consumer
psychologists, as well as people who had studied the neurology of habit
formation.
And they come up with a marketing plan that's essentially built around what
seems to be the most obvious habit loop on the face of the planet. We're going
to sell this to people who have bad smells in their life. The bad smell itself
will be the cue. They'll spray Febreze. It will make the bad smells
disappear. This stuff will sell itself. In fact, people sort of figured that
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this was going to make them a million dollars, gazillion dollars, billion
dollars.
And so they decide to go into a couple of test markets, Boise, Salt Lake City
and outside of Arizona, Phoenix, to test them. And they air some commercials
like this.
>>:
The stinky chair.
>>:
You know I have a stinky chair problem too.
Its name is George.
>>: Now there's a way to get bad smells out of fabrics for good. It's called
Febreze. It's new and you don't believe how many places you'll find to spray
it. Febreze helps clean fabrics in a way you never could before.
>>:
And it's not just covering one smell with another.
>>: Exactly, just spray Febreze. Its patented cleaning system finds the
smells trapped in fabrics and gently cleans them away as it drys. Once its
dry, the smell's gone. For good.
>>: Febreze, check the laundry out. And check this out. It's safe from dress
blues to Teddy bears. Febreze cleans bad smells out of fabrics for good.
>>:
I wonder if they'll call it the sleepy chair now.
>> Charles Duhigg: There's two things I love about this commercial. The first
is that you don't really realize that the late '90s had a visual aesthetic
until it's like thrown in your face. You're like oh, right. I used to own
clothing just like that. And I don't anymore.
Number two is that this is actually like a great ad, right? Like in marketing,
you're supposed to identify your goals and kind of get the message across and
this commercial does it perfectly. It tells you how Febreze works, that it's
for bad smells.
When I talked to Drake Stimson about this, he said that everyone on his team,
after they'd seen the ad and started rolling it out all sat down and wrote down
what they were going to buy with their bonuses. And at the top of Drake
Stimson's list was a Ferrari, that he was going to buy this grand new Ferrari.
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He actually showed me the picture of the Ferrari.
It's a pretty cool Ferrari.
Needless to say, absolutely no one on that team bought anything that they were
going to get with their bonuses. Febreze, after they rolled this out, was one
of the biggest disappointments in Procter & Gamble's history. It was a total
bomb. They would go give the product away and people wouldn't use it.
They went into people's houses and say do you have that bottle of Febreze that
we gave you for free that you can use, that's revolutionary, that gets rid of
any scent on the face of the planet, and the person they would be talking to
oh, yeah, I think I remember and like go through all their shelves and find a
brand new full bottle in the back of the shelf and say I just found it. Do you
want it back? Because I never, ever use it.
This was a bad thing for Procter & Gamble, for Drake Stimson, for Ferrari
dealers. Everyone was concerned about the fact that this product that was
supposed to be one of the biggest products in Procter & Gamble's history was
not selling at all.
So they started doing some interviews with customers. In particular, things
kind of clicked for them when they went and they talked to this woman who lived
right outside of Scottsdale. She was a woman who owned some cats. Are there
any cat owners here? Okay, a couple of cat owners. So you know, cats
sometimes have a scent associated with them.
Most people own one or two cats. This woman owned a lot of cats. In fact, so
many cats that when the researchers walked into her house, and they walked in
the living room where the cats lived, one of them started gagging because the
scent of cat was so overpowering. So they sit down with her and they say, you
know, she'd gotten a couple of bottles of Febreze some weeks previously, and
they said we're trying to figure out why no one's using Febreze. Do you
Febreze?
She said oh, yeah, I used it a couple times. I like it. And they said, well,
you know, do you use it for, like, you know, cat smells? And she says, oh, you
know, once or twice I've used it when there's a cat smell. And the guy who
literally was gagging just a couple minutes ago and is sitting on the couch
says, well, you know -- he described it as he was holding his nose. He was
like well, you know, do you use it right now for your cat smell right now?
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And the woman says, no, you know, the most amazing thing. I have the best
cats. None of them smell that often. So I don't need to use your Febreze.
This was why Febreze was failing. Is because -- and all of you know this. If
you have bad smells in your life, it's the unique nature of scents that you
stop smelling the bad smells, right? This is, in fact, you've probably been
paranoid about this at some point in your life.
If you smoke,
much that you
example. The
the musk, you
for instance, smoking itself damages your olfactory senses so
cannot smell the cigarette smoke anymore or cats is another great
dander that is part of the reason why cats smell like cats and
become desensitized to it.
So the entire habit loop that all these folks had come up with that's supposed
to be cued by bad smells, the people who most need Febreze, who have bad smells
in their life, they can't detect this cue. And it will end up that the reward
that you'll make bad smells disappear, that reward is worthless to someone who
doesn't understand that they have bad smells in the first place.
There's no reward inherent in the reward itself.
Febreze had never emerged among the consumers.
That's why the habit of using
So everyone from the Procter & Gamble team goes back to Cincinnati, to their
headquarters. And they start reviewing videotapes. This is stock footage,
because Procter & Gamble won't let me use their actual videotapes. Procter &
Gamble, however, has the largest library of videotapes of people cleaning their
homes on the face of the planet.
If you go
free toil
home. In
videotape
to Procter & Gamble and you're willing, in exchange for six months of
et paper or paper towels, they will come and install cameras in your
your living room in your bedroom, in your bathroom. They will
you as you clean.
So I went and I watched some of these. The best part of this is that like in
the first couple days, you can see people being very self-conscious about the
video camera that's, for instance in their bathroom. Literally, all it takes
is like four days and they've totally forgotten that the video camera exists.
And they do crazy things.
The crazy things is not what Procter & Gamble is interested in. All they're
interested in -- in fact, they cut the tapes down -- is how do people clean.
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And what they found was these kind of interesting patterns, habits that people
automatically do when they clean.
One of them
floor, they
carpet, and
handy work,
was, for instance, when people would vacuum. They would vacuum the
would look at the freshly vacuumed floor, all the lines on the
then they would kind of take this moment, as if to admire their
right? Which all of you have done.
When people make their beds, this was very common, people would make their
beds. You put the sheets, you plump the pillows, you straighten the comforter,
and then very often people would look at the freshly made bed and smile. Or,
this is actually my favorite. Again, this is stock footage, because there's
really nothing I love more with my child in the morning than cleaning the
window together. Such a special moment.
But what would happen very often when people would clean the mirrors is they'd
come in, right, the mirror had some spots on it. You can still see your
reflection. People would spray the mirror with cleaning stuff, would wipe the
mirror, and then would look at their reflection and smile at themselves. Which
you're laughing because all of you have done this, right? You've wiped the
mirror and then smiled at your own reflection.
What was interesting is that every single time they watched a cleaning ritual,
they saw this habit and they realized that at the end of all of these rituals
there was already this reward. People were giving themselves their own reward
associated with cleaning.
And this is how they figured out they could sell Febreze. So they went back
and they figured out a new habit loop to market against. This time, instead of
the cue being bad smells, the cue would be the act of cleaning itself, which
most people do at least every other day.
I know a couple of coders that I don't think they do it every other day, but at
some point in someone's life, they clean on a regular basis.
The routine would be that at the end of the cleaning ritual, that they would
spray Febreze and then the reward -- this was the tough part -- is how do you
create a reward? Because the reward has to be something that's genuinely
rewarding. So they went back to the lab and they spent another $4 million
creating a perfume that was strong enough to withstand Febreze, that they could
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then pour into the Febreze bottles so that Febreze had a scent of its own.
And there you go. It's a habit loop that makes a lot of sense. The irony here
is that Febreze was invented as a product to get rid of bad smells. And it's
become a product that's essentially an air freshener that you use only after
everything is clean. But they decided to take a test, and they put together
some new commercials and they aired them in the same test markets and I'll show
you a couple of them.
>>: Get your fix it freshness.
fresh air.
Febreze, anytime, anywhere.
>>:
Shouldn't I be the one on the couch, doctor?
>>:
No.
>>:
Okay, that's good.
>>: Get your fix it freshness.
fresh air.
Febreze.
It's a breath of
Anytime, anywhere, it's a breath of
>> Charles Duhigg: I'm going to show you one more, and in this next one, I
just want you to count how many times they say the word bad smell or smell or
odor or absolutely anything that would indicate what Febreze is used for.
>>:
What do you think it means?
>>:
Make it's morse code.
>>:
Yeah.
>>: Get your fix it freshness with Febreze.
of fresh air.
Anytime, anywhere, it's a breath
>> Charles Duhigg: If you came down from outer space and you saw these ads,
you would think that this is a product exclusively marketed for obsessive
compulsive disorder, right? There's no reason -- why would someone smell their
drapes over and over and over again? There's nothing in this commercial that
actually tells you that it has to do with bad smells. Everything is about
creating good smells.
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But when they roll out these ads, sales of Febreze explode. Within the first
six months, they sold $200 million worth of Febreze in their test markets and
in the secondary markets that they went to. Today, Febreze is one of $13
billion a year products that Procter & Gamble sells. It's as everyone in this
room probably knows, unless you're selling software, it's really hard to get to
a billion dollars a year for things that only cost like 12 dollars or five
dollars when you buy them each time.
But what they found that is once people started using Febreze, once they became
habituated to that scent, that sort of small celebration at the end of the
cleaning ritual of a good smell that smells as nice as everything looks, they
started going through a bottle once every two weeks. It just became automatic
that you would pick up it at the end of the cleaning ritual and spray Febreze
and deliver the small reward.
This is just sort of an aspect of the book. The book itself goes into a lot of
other sort of aspects of how habits work. In particular, about how
organizational habits work. How habits form across groups, core societies and
how they can be influenced by understanding the same sort of principles of the
habit loop.
And rather than go into all of that, I'll just sort of flick at a couple of
them. One of the chapters is about Tony Dungy, who is a football coach who
some of you might be familiar with who transformed two teams and ended up
winning the Super Bowl.
What Dungy did is he basically changed how his teams play by attacking their
habits, what they did automatically on field. And, in fact, the same
principles that he used sort of explain how alcoholics anonymous work. And at
the core of it is this basic science, rule, which has been known as the golden
rule of habit change. Which says that cues and rewards are so powerful that
the best way of sustainably changing a habit is to try and focus exclusively on
the routine, on the behavior.
That if you want to change someone's habit, be it a football player or someone
who's an alcoholic, what you should do is diagnose what the cue and the reward
is and then find a replacement routine that is triggered by the same behavior
and delivering the same reward. It satisfies the same craving.
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For whatever reason, this seems much more effective in clinical studies in
changing habits.
And as I mentioned, this actually kind of explains how alcoholics anonymous
works. You know, AA is like the least scientific therapy on the face of the
planet. It was invented by people who have almost no background in psychology
whatsoever. Like the reason why there's 12 steps is because there's 12
Apostles in the Bible. And the guy who actually came up with them wrote them
in about 45 minutes while sitting in bed one night on his way to dinner.
And yet AA, for millions and millions of people, has proved this enormously
effective therapy. The reason why is because what AA does is it basically
gives you new habits. It used to be that you had a bad day at work, you'd go
to the bar, talk to your friends, sort of find some type of sensation relief
from alcohol. And the reward was that you got all this stuff off your chest.
You relieved tension.
What AA says is, look, there's nothing wrong with this impulse. It's just that
when you come home from work and you've had a terrible day, instead of going to
the bar, just go to a meeting. And if anyone's ever been to an AA meeting, you
know that they're the most intensely emotional experiences. The whole meeting
is designed to actually create an emotional catharsis. Someone stands up, they
tell their life story, all these terrible things happened.
The whole point is that as a group, you go through an emotional journey every
single night. And it provides the exact same reward. This sense of relief, of
getting things off your chest, of having some kind of cath ar tick experience.
And that's why it's effective for a number of people.
I'll just, again, just quickly mention, there's also been some interesting
research -- yeah?
>>: So did that cause addiction to a routine of going through an emotional
journey every night?
>> Charles Duhigg: Yeah, so the question is does that cause addiction to the
routine of going through an emotional journey every day. Yeah, I think it
does. I mean, so there's this interesting question about where habits and
addictions begin and end, right. And in fact, if you talk to addiction
specialists, what they'll say is that at this point, the technical definition
of addiction involves habit dysfunction.
16
Because there's a number of behaviors that we can't explain through biochemical
reliance, but that does seem to be based on some type of habit dysfunction.
But to the person who is in the grip of a smoking addiction, even if they're
not addicted to nicotine anymore, or alcohol even if they're not physically
dependent upon alcohol, a habit dysfunction and an addiction feel the same way.
And so that's why it's so unclear how to -- where the line actually exists. In
fact, which brings me to this really interesting research which was done a
couple years ago by a guy named Reza Habib, who is a neurologist. He was
asking sort of a similar question, which is why some people are gambling
addicts, right. Because in gambling, there is no external drug that you're
delivering to your system. But we all know that there are people who seem to
be addicted to gambling.
So he took a whole bunch of people who had gambling problems, people who didn't
have gambling problems, put them in FMRI machines and watched as they looked at
slot machines. And the slot machines were programmed to give one of three
outcomes. Either a win, a loss, or what's called a near-win. Like when all
the cherries would almost line up, and then at the last second one of them
wouldn't.
What he found is that people who are gambling addicts, their brains, when they
saw a near-miss, would react almost as if they had just experienced a win.
Whereas everyone else would see a near-miss as what it is. It's a miss. It's
a loss.
So as a result, these two groups of people would actually see the same event
and one of them neurologically would react completely differently. Here's the
other interesting aspect of this. Habib found that he could actually train
people in and out of this state. So with enough exposure and enough rewards
paired with near-misses, he could make someone into a neurologically problem
gambler. Or make them into someone who neurologically does not see a near-miss
as a win but, in fact, sees it accurately as a loss.
All of which is, I think, kind of fascinating. But the point being that at the
core of this is this emerging body of research that uses the habit loop as a
basis for trying to understand why these habitual patterns emerge in our life
and that we're learning some really, really interesting things about them and
will continue. And the book if you get a chance to read it, goes into many
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more of the details.
So I'd love to answer any questions if anyone has any.
for coming. Yeah?
And thank you again all
>>: What was the most surprising thing that popped out at you when researching
the book, writing the book?
>> Charles Duhigg: I think two things. The first was just how malleable
habits are. So if you talk to researchers who work on this stuff, what they'll
tell you is that at this point, because we understand so precisely how to
define cues and rewards, absolutely any habit can be changed. Doesn't matter
how old you are, doesn't matter how ingrained the behavior is.
Someone who's 75 years old and is obesely overweight can be taught to change
their eating habits.
The other thing that was really interesting, and I actually did part of my
research here at Microsoft, which didn't unfortunately make it into the book.
But I went over to talk to the X-Box guys, and then talked to bungy, which
obviously is no longer part of you guys, but for a number of years obviously
was.
So the other really surprising part was how precisely people who don't -- are
not neurologists can cue into this information, right? So like when I talked
to the bungy guys or the guys over at X-Box, they know exactly how to create
reward schedules that abide by all of these principles. None of them that I
met at least knew this psychological research or the neurological research.
But through trial and error, they had figured out how to create these reward
schedules, particularly in Halo, that made the game essentially completely
habit-forming.
And so that's the other interesting part about it is how intuitive some of this
becomes once you study it, once you're close to running experiments against it
frequently enough.
>>: I've period people say it takes 21 days to make a new habit.
research supports?
>> Charles Duhigg:
Is that your
No, unfortunately -- so there's unfortunately no formula
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for creating a habit. If you want to create a habit that involves, say, like
chocolate or fried food, like 12 minutes, I think, you could probably. If you
want to create one for exercise, it will probably take a little longer.
>>: So do you find there's any general time frame for how long it takes to
create a new habit?
>> Charles Duhigg: Well, so, let me answer it this way, in that it differs
from person to person. And habit to habit. Some people neurologically can
form habits more easily and some people can't. But because of the way that the
neurology around this functions, what happens that is when you're creating a
habit and you have this reward that's sort of creating this loop, you're
essentially broadcasting, almost like a radio broadcast, neurotransmitters
associated with reward.
And whichever neurons are most active when that broadcast occurs, they become
thicker. And as a result, electrical impulses can run down that neurological
pathway faster the next time. Which is a long way of saying every single time
you do a habit, it gets easier and easier and easier.
So on day three, it's going to be easier than day one. And day 21, it will be
easier than day three. And in three months, it will definitely be easier. At
some point, it tips over where the entire activity is essentially residing in
basal ganglia and that's when it begins to feel automatic.
And there's no real rule about when that happens, but I can promise you that it
gets easier every single time. And what we know about actually human
experience, based on a lot of the behavioral economic work, is that when things
start feeling easier, we tend to experience them as being much, much easier.
So that's why, for instance, the first step feels so hard and then subsequent
steps feel easier is because of this principle known as temporal discounting,
which again is a long way of saying if you start creating the habit, the first
step, once you get past the first step, it will get subsequently much easier
than you expect it to be.
>>: Two questions. One about Target. How do you stumble upon that story?
How did you know what they were doing inside of their organization?
>> Charles Duhigg:
So if you're not familiar, so we ran an excerpt in the New
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York Times magazine, about target, which uses predictability analytics and
behavioral profiling to figure out which of its customers are pregnant.
Particularly, they're looking at shopping habits. And they're very, very good
at it. Even if you don't tell your father that you're pregnant, Target will be
able to figure out that you are pregnant.
The way I found this story is I called around asking for -- I was actually
going to write about Amazon and I called people and said Amazon won't tell you
anything. It's impossible to write about their predictive analytics. And then
someone said, but you should really look into Target. There's this guy who
came one a pregnancy prediction algorithm. His name is Andrew Pohl.
So then at the New York Times, we have the ability to look up people's home
phone numbers. And so I called him at home and I said I'm really interested.
He said oh, man, I'm so glad you called, because I've been waiting to tell
someone about this. It's awesome! So for the next three or four weeks, we
talked all about it.
And then I called Target, and I never heard from Andrew Pohl again.
>>: Who is doing similar stuff that you found exciting but wasn't willing to
go on record?
>> Charles Duhigg: So I think everyone has really good predictive -- like
Microsoft has a great predictive analytics. My understanding is that based on
what I've heard that you guys are collecting a lot of data around ribbon use
and trying to figure out how to predict usage patterns.
The other kinds of surprising companies is a company named Darden, which owns
Olive Garden and red lobster. Darden is a very smart predictive analytics
company. Particularly about what products -- what foods customers are going to
want to order at what times of day.
The other, and I'll make a plug for a company that's a new startup. There's a
company called Bloom Reach, who you probably have not heard about it, but it's
a very, very smart company that's essentially search optimizing. They work the
-- anyone in Bing, I think, would be familiar with them. They're helping
companies do dynamic SEO, and their predictive analytics are very impressive.
>>:
I will ask a question about the I-economy series and I'm curious.
I'm
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still wresting was Mike Daisey, will his legacy end up being good or bad for
the Chinese worker. And you can give background, you're a great story teller.
You'll do it better than I will. But I'm curious, did his one-man show in fact
spark an editor or you The New York Times to do this, or was that something you
were looking at anyway? And what's your thought about the whole legacy?
>> Charles Duhigg: Sure. So just for anyone's who not aware. So the series
that we've written for The New York Times, it's called the I-economy series.
One of them focused on conditions in Foxconn factories and other factories
which manufacture iPhones and iPads. They also manufacture a number of
Microsoft device, right. Microsoft has workers in buildings right alongside
Apple in those factories.
What our reporting documented is that work conditions are harsh, have been
harsh within a number of those factories. There's a guy named Mike Daisey who
did a one-man show that was broadcast on a radio program named This American
Life who talked about his personal experiences documenting those conditions.
It subsequently turned out that he did not -- that he made up a lot of his
story, his personal story. The conditions he talked about were largely
accurate based on the reporting the New York Times had done, documents that
Apple had released. He, himself, had not experienced a lot of the things or
seen a lot of the things that he said he saw.
So let me answer your question in two ways. The first is as a rule, we don't
talk about other people's reporting. Largely just because I have not reported
on Mike Daisey. So I don't know exactly, like what he lied about and what he
didn't lie about. So I'm not a position where I can say.
What I can say is this. Our reporting, I was -- by the time I was well into
doing this reporting is the first time I ever heard of Mike Daisey. I had
never heard of this guy before. We don't rely on off-Broadway shows to tell
us, like what we should be working on. My colleague, David Barbosa, has been
writing about Chinese factories for almost a decade.
So there was no -- we did not find any inspiration to address this topic
because of Mike Daisey. And it's unfortunate that he was untruthful about what
he saw but doesn't impact the -- had no impact -- he had no impact on us. So
it doesn't sort of reflect at all on how we thought about these issues.
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>>: How do you do the opposite of creating a habit. And the reason why I'll
asking this is a lot of times when you do work that is repetitive, and this
happens in this company as in any other company, in the beginning it's hard, it
gets easy, easy, easy. At some point, it's a habit. You just do it, and it
gets kind of boring.
Now, I'm the kind of guy that once that happens, I look for something new to
do. Which can be a problem, right, because you're always looking for new
things to do. A fellow speaker of yours was here talking about why human
beings are interested in new things all the time a few weeks ago.
So how would you do the opposite?
>> Charles Duhigg: This is an interesting question. When most people ask -when academics ask this question, they usually ask a little bit of a variation
on it, which is what are known as normal accidents. When people become
habitualized to certain activity, they become much less likely to notice
deviations.
So as a result, if it's -- if it's my job to watch a radar to see if enemy
aircraft are approaching and then become habitualized to watching the radar,
then the odds of me noticing an enemy aircraft go down significantly.
Habits are essentially dangerous, right? You stop being mentally engaged,
which I think is exactly what you just said. Something becomes boring because
you're no longer challenged or engaged with it.
I unfortunately can't tell you how to make something boring interesting. In
fact, I would suggest that the whole reason Microsoft exists and computers in
general is to take our boring activities and try and automate them so we don't
have to do them.
>>:
[inaudible].
>> Charles Duhigg:
>>:
When it comes to relationships, I'm not --
[inaudible].
>> Charles Duhigg:
relationships.
I mean, I think that what -- I don't know about
22
>>:
Yes, you do.
>> Charles Duhigg: Although I will say when it comes -- so I have two kids. I
don't know if people have kids. So I have this big problem with my two kids,
right. Which is that like I love having kids. They're amazing. They're
almost sometimes the most boring people on the face of the planet, right?
Because they're 3 -- Oliver is 3 years old and like what he likes to talk about
is are superheroes. And the amount he knows about superheroes is very, very
small.
So he tells me the same thing about superheroes over and over and over again.
And most of the time, he's asking me questions about superheroes. My knowledge
of superheroes is also not very big. So these are not the most scintillating
conversations I've ever had in my entire life.
And yet I know that as a parent, it's important that I'm engaged with my
children and not just answering them on auto pilot, right. Or if you're in a
relationship, it's important that you not just say, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah.
So when we look into these problems, when researchers looked into these
problems, they refer to them as mindfulness habits. And the question is how do
you become more in the moment. How do you achieve flow, mindfulness around the
conversation that's happening when it's inherently a boring conversation. And
the answer usually is that you have to find some reward in the moment to keep
you aware.
Now, here's the interesting thing about rewards. Rewards are very, very
complicated and can be very, very small. So one of the best ways of doing this
with at least kids is if you have something to play with, while you're talking
to the kid, it provides enough novelty, enough reward to keep you in the moment
and aware. Which is one of the reasons why, for instance, like Tinker Toys and
stuff like this -- I don't know if you have kids.
But Tinker Toys are like amaze, right? Because you're talking to the
3-year-old about superheroes and you can like put the Tinker Toy together and
that's just enough of a reward to keep you in the conversation and not bored
out of your mind and thinking like I have all these emails to reply to.
23
So this kind of gets to a broader lesson, though, which is that these rewards,
when they happen, can be very, very small and second to second. But that you
have to have a reward to satisfy that sensation-seeking impulse or the novelty
impulse or whatever it is to keep you -- to keep the behavior in the prefrontal
cortex, as opposed to allowing it entirely to go to basal ganglia, where you
essentially don't participate in it at all.
Does that answer your question?
>>: No, that's really good. I want to follow-up, I'm sorry. So assume that
we don't have this habit-forming function really functioning when we're little
babies. We're basically blank and we're taking all this information. Could it
be that your kid asking you over and over and over is actually creating the
habit?
>> Charles Duhigg:
>>:
It's creating the habit of asking me?
This habit, where does the habit loop come from?
>> Charles Duhigg: The habit loop is innate. It's innate in our neurology.
So you don't actually have to learn how to form habits. This is at the
foundation of all learning. So from the second that your child, literally from
the second your child tastes mother's milk or takes a breath, it's beginning to
encode habits. Otherwise, the species wouldn't survive.
>>: Have you come across the use of habits for team dynamics. So let's say
how teams will work or modifying the habits so that teams might work better
together, especially in these organizational settings?
>> Charles Duhigg: Yeah, so actually most of the book -- so the book is, for
the middle third, is actually a business book. Exactly about this. About
organizational habits. Particularly habits across dozens or hundreds or
thousands of people within a company.
There's some really interesting research by these guys named Nelson and Winter.
They're two economists from Yale. And they wrote like this super influential
book called An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change that nobody has read
unless you're like into long formulas about economics.
But within economics, it's totally transformative, because what it says is that
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companies are actually collections of habits. They call them routines. And
that to the point you just raised, the number one way that a habit exerts
influence across an organization is that it influences how people communicate
or how teams work.
Most importantly, habits, organizational habits, routines, create truces.
Because there's an incentive for every individual in a company to essentially
screw everyone else in that company, right? Like at some point, if you're
going for a promotion, you have an incentive to, like, sabotage all of your
colleagues for that promotion so that you look amazing.
But, of course, we know what would happen. If everyone were to sabotage each
other, not only would none of you get a promotion and the division would shut
down, but the whole company would be bankrupt.
So the question is how do companies self-organize so that people don't kill
each other inside a company as they're competing for limited numbers of goals?
The answer is organizational routines. That usually, these informal habits
emerge. For instance, if someone came to you and asked you how to succeed in
Microsoft, you probably wouldn't say anything that appears in a handbook. You
would probably give them a bunch of tips that are essentially organizational
habits, right. Like if you want to get something done go to the secretary
before you go to her boss or his boss.
Or you really want to be right on X and Y matters less. All of these
organizational routines are how business gets done and, more importantly, how
people create truces without having to have conversations about creating
truces.
>>: I just have a couple things. One was I was curious, I read a book by one
of your colleagues that came out last year that was called Willpower and I was
curious if you talk about will power at all, because the thing to take away
from that book is that will power is like a muscle and you can build it up over
time and they talk about habits a little bit. But just curious if you deal
with will power at all in relation to this.
>> Charles Duhigg: So there's a whole chapter on will power. And actually,
it's built out of Starbucks relatively close by. Because one of the things
that Starbucks does -- you're right, will power is like a muscle. But what we
25
found is that when you make will power into a habit, it's less taxing on the
muscle.
Essentially, uses different parts of the brain. And so you have larger will
power reserves. And Starbucks has spent a lot of time trying to figure out how
to give their employees will power habits so at the end of an eight-hour shift,
if a screaming customer comes up, they don't scream back. But instead, they
know exactly what to do. Which is a hard problem when you're talking about,
like, high school kids, right. Or you're hiring 1,700 people a day. Not
everyone is going to have these life skills. So by giving them will power
habits, they're able to ensure this customer service.
>>: So two other things I had. Just one was do you talk about how to break
down or identify habits in the book? Because like, for instance, I have this
bad habit of staying up late and it took me a really long time to actually
figure out what the root cause of it was. And it turns out it ended up being
just like I hate the thought of having to go brush my teeth and do all those
things to get ready for bed. So if I do that before I become tired, I no
longer have to deal with that.
But at first, I thought, oh, I like being on the computer. Oh, I like
finishing this book or doing this project. It had nothing to do with any of
those things. But it took me a really long time to figure that out. Like do
you talk about ->> Charles Duhigg: Yeah, so that's a huge part of the science is actually
identifying those cues and rewards. That's an interesting one. Maybe you
should just stop brushing your teeth altogether.
>>:
My mom is actually my dentist, so I can't.
>> Charles Duhigg: But yeah, actually that's a huge part of this science is
trying to understand, identify the cues and rewards. Because as I mentioned,
the cues and the rewards, they're so subtle sometimes and they're so hidden
from sight. But once you know them, then you can actually sort of start
tinkering with the habit and that's how they change really quickly.
>>:
What makes some people better at breaking habits?
>> Charles Duhigg:
So the question was what makes some people better at
26
breaking habits. I think there's two answers to that. The
well, actually, I think there's just one answer. Basically
research has shown this again and again. If you understand
cues and rewards, you are better at changing your habits or
first of which is,
what we found, and
how to diagnose
breaking habits.
You can't eradicate a habit. That's part of it, is that once it's programmed
into your neurology, that pathway is always there. But what you can do is you
can change the routine. Change the behavior. And develop a new pathway
alongside it. But what we know from study after study is that people who have
the ability, either intuitively or because it's been taught to them, to
identify the trigger and identified reward and figure out some sort of
alternative behavior that corresponds with those, those are people who seem to
more successfully break habits.
You know, I think there's also this other line of thinking that some people
have more will power than others, that they're better powering through these
changes. But most of the research seems to indicate that that's not true.
That essentially, you can teach people will power, that it's an acquired skill
and that a lot of that has to do with habit formation around will power.
Let me take one more.
coming. Yeah.
And again, feel free to go.
Thank you all so much for
>>: So would the last answer, it seems like a lot of people change habits, for
example, with the addiction, how does that [indiscernible] you seem
[indiscernible] people say I [indiscernible].
>> Charles Duhigg: So the question is, why do people who have suddenly, like,
become religious, why do they change their habits. In psychology, this is
known as a quantum change moment that some people, for some reason, seem to
change their entire life at once.
So the answer is really interesting, because it's for two reasons. The first
of which is that we know that habits become more malleable at certain points in
our life and those points are usually during massive upheavals.
So very often when someone finds religion, or something similar, it's there's
usually a preceding event, right. The death of someone, or some type of
personal crisis or an exist tension crisis. Some people usually have some
reason why they go looking for religion.
27
And what psychologists think is that this moment, this moment of massive
upheaval essentially makes their habits more malleable. And then they find
some type of religion or something similar with a reward system embedded in it
that all of a sudden causes them to crave new rewards. Which filters through
their habits into new behaviors. And it's not just like these emotional
moments. For instance, if you buy -- has anyone bought a house recently? I'm
supposed to close on a house in like three days.
So this is really interesting. When you buy a new house, according to studies,
you are much more likely to start buying a new brand of coffee. If you get a
divorce, and this is really only true of men, if you get a divorce, you're much
more likely to start buying new brands of beer. I guarantee you, you are not
aware of the fact that you are buying new brands of beer when you're are
getting a divorce or buying new brands of coffee when you're buying a house,
because you're so overwhelmed by getting divorced or buying a house.
But for some reason, during major life upheavals, your consumption, your
habits, your buying habits change. Not just buying habits, but all habits
become more malleable. And, in fact, this is why Target looks for people who
are pregnant. Because the biggest upheaval in someone's life is usually when
they have a baby. And Target knows they can take advantage of all of these
suddenly malleable habits to get their coupons into their hands.
So I think that's the first answer is that in some ways, finding religion is a
symptom of a deeper, underlying shift in someone's life that makes their habits
more malleable. But then the second part of it is that oftentimes, what
they're attracted to, religion, some type of therapy program, yoga, you know,
whatever it is that they're coming to that sort of gives them these new habits,
almost all of those are reward systems that are changing what the desired
reward is.
I mean, that's essentially what religion is. It says rather than look for
earthly rewards, look for spiritual rewards, right. And I think that when that
shift happens, and what reward you are craving, that it filters through your
behaviors and that's why habits can emerge much more easily.
I'd love, if anyone has any other questions, I'd love to answer them or feel
free to email me. I'm just Charles at CharlesDuhigg.com. Also if you have any
suggestions of things that we should be covering in the I-economy series, I'd
28
love to hear from you.
it.
And thank you all again so much.
I really appreciate