Habits the meaning of the word

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A habit (or wont as a humorous and formal term) is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously.^[1][2][3]

The American Journal of Psychology (1903) defined a «habit, from the standpoint of psychology, [as] a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience.»^[4] Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks. Habits are sometimes compulsory.^[3][5] A 2002 daily experience study by habit researcher Wendy Wood and her colleagues found that approximately 43% of daily behaviors are performed out of habit.^[6] New behaviours can become automatic through the process of habit formation. Old habits are hard to break and new habits are hard to form because the behavioural patterns which humans repeat become imprinted in neural pathways,^[7] but it is possible to form new habits through repetition.^[8]

When behaviors are repeated in a consistent context, there is an incremental increase in the link between the context and the action. This increases the automaticity of the behavior in that context.^[9] Features of an automatic behavior are all or some of: efficiency; lack of awareness; unintentionality; and uncontrollability.^[10]

History[edit]

The word habit is pulled from the Latin words habere, which means «have, consist of,» and habitus, which means «condition, or state of being.» It also is derived from the French word habit (French pronunciation: ​[abi]), which means clothes.^[11] In the 13th century, the word habit first just referred to clothing. The meaning then progressed to the more common use of the word, which is «acquired mode of behavior.»^[11]

In 1890, William James, a pioneering philosopher and psychologist, addressed the subject of habit in his book, The Principles of Psychology. James viewed habit as natural tendency in order to navigate life. To him, «living creatures…are bundles of habits» and those habits that have «an innate tendency are called instincts.»^[12] James also explains how habits can govern our lives. He states, «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.»^[12]

Formation[edit]

Habit formation is the process by which a behavior, through regular repetition, becomes automatic or habitual. This is modeled as an increase in automaticity with the number of repetitions up to an asymptote.^[13][14][15] This process of habit formation can be slow. Lally et al. (2010) found the average time for participants to reach the asymptote of automaticity was 66 days with a range of 18–254 days.^[15]

There are 3 main components to habit formation: the context cue, behavioral repetition, and the reward.^[16] The context cue can be a prior action, time of day, location, or anything that triggers the habitual behavior. This could be anything that one’s mind associates with that habit, and one will automatically let a habit come to the surface. The behavior is the actual habit that one exhibits, and the reward, such as a positive feeling, therefore continues the «habit loop».^[17] A habit may initially be triggered by a goal, but over time that goal becomes less necessary and the habit becomes more automatic. Intermittent or uncertain rewards have been found to be particularly effective in promoting habit learning.^[18]

A variety of digital tools, online or mobile apps, have been introduced that are designed to support habit formation. For example, Habitica is a system that uses gamification, implementing strategies found in video games to real-life tasks by adding rewards such as experience and gold.^[19] However, a review of such tools suggests most are poorly designed with respect to theory and fail to support the development of automaticity.^[20][21]

Shopping habits are particularly vulnerable to change at «major life moments» like graduation, marriage, the birth of the first child, moving to a new home, and divorce. Some stores use purchase data to try to detect these events and take advantage of the marketing opportunity.^[22]

Some habits are known as «keystone habits,» and these influence the formation of other habits. For example, identifying as the type of person who takes care of their body and is in the habit of exercising regularly, can also influence eating better and using credit cards less. In business, safety can be a keystone habit that influences other habits that result in greater productivity.^[22]

A recent study by Adriaanse et al. (2014) found that habits mediate the relationship between self-control and unhealthy snack consumption.^[23] The results of the study empirically demonstrate that high self-control may influence the formation of habits and in turn affect behavior.

Goals[edit]

The habit–goal interface or interaction is constrained by the particular manner in which habits are learned and represented in memory. Specifically, the associative learning underlying habits is characterized by the slow, incremental accrual of information over time in procedural memory.^[9] Habits can either benefit or hurt the goals a person sets for themselves.

Goals guide habits by providing the initial outcome-oriented motivation for response repetition. In this sense, habits are often a trace of past goal pursuit.^[9] Although, when a habit forces one action, but a conscious goal pushes for another action, an oppositional context occurs.^[24] When the habit prevails over the conscious goal, a capture error has taken place.

Behavior prediction is also derived from goals. Behavior prediction acknowledges the likelihood that a habit will form, but in order to form that habit, a goal must have been initially present. The influence of goals on habits is what makes a habit different from other automatic processes in the mind.^[25]

The following is a description of a classic goal devaluation experiment (from a Scientific American MIND guest blog post called Should Habits or Goals Direct Your Life? It Depends) which demonstrates the difference between goal-directed and habitual behavior:

A series of elegant experiments^[26] conducted by Anthony Dickinson and colleagues in the early 1980s at the University of Cambridge in England clearly exposes the behavioral differences between goal-directed and habitual processes. Basically, in the training phase, a rat was trained to press a lever in order to receive some food. Then, in a second phase, the rat was placed in a different cage without a lever and was given the food, but it was made ill whenever it ate the food. This caused the rat to «devalue» the food, because it associated the food with being ill, without directly associating the action of pressing the lever with being ill. Finally, in the test phase, the rat was placed in the original cage with the lever. (To prevent additional learning, no food was delivered in the test phase.) Rats that had undergone an extensive training phase continued to press the lever in the test phase even though the food was devalued; their behavior was called habitual. Rats that had undergone a moderate training phase did not, and their behavior was called goal-directed. … [G]oal-directed behavior is explained by the rat using an explicit prediction of the consequence, or outcome, of an action to select that action. If the rat wants the food, it presses the lever, because it predicts that pressing the lever will deliver the food. If the food has been devalued, the rat will not press the lever. Habitual behavior is explained by a strong association between an action and the situation from which the action was executed.^[27] The rat presses the lever when it sees the lever, not because of the predicted outcome.

Nervousness[edit]

A number of habits can be classified as nervous habits. These include nail-biting, stammering, sniffling, and banging the head. They are known as symptoms of an emotional state and are generally based upon conditions of anxiety, insecurity, inferiority, and tension. These habits are often formed at a young age and may be due to a need for attention. When trying to overcome a nervous habit it is important to resolve the cause of the nervous feeling rather than the symptom which is a habit itself or a mountain as a result one could experience anxiety.^[28] Anxiety is a disorder known for excessive and unexpected worry that negatively impacts individuals’ daily life and routines.^[29]

Bad habits[edit]

A bad habit is an undesirable behavior pattern. Common examples include: procrastination, fidgeting, overspending, and nail-biting.^[30] The sooner one recognizes these bad habits, the easier it is to fix them.^[31] Rather than merely attempting to eliminate a bad habit, it may be more productive to seek to replace it with a healthier coping mechanism.^[32]

Will and intention[edit]

A key factor in distinguishing a bad habit from an addiction or mental disease is willpower. If a person can easily control the behavior, then it is a habit.^[33] Good intentions can override the negative effect of bad habits, but their effect seems to be independent and additive—the bad habits remain, but are subdued rather than cancelled.^[34]

Elimination[edit]

Many techniques exist for removing established bad habits, e.g., withdrawal of reinforcers—identifying and removing factors that trigger and reinforce the habit.^[35] The basal ganglia appears to remember the context that triggers a habit, so habits can be revived if triggers reappear.^[36] Recognizing and eliminating bad habits as soon as possible is advised. Habit elimination becomes more difficult with age because repetitions reinforce habits cumulatively over the lifespan.^[37] According to Charles Duhigg, there is a loop that includes a cue, routine, and reward for every habit. An example of a habit loop is TV program ends (cue), go to the fridge (routine), eat a snack (reward). The key to changing habits is to identify your cue and modify your routine and reward.^[38]

See also[edit]

Habit modification approaches

Behaviors with habitual elements

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Allen, James Sloan, ed. William James on Habit, Will, Truth, and the Meaning of Life. Frederic C. Beil, Publisher, 2014.ISBN 978-1-929490-45-5
• Payne, Arthur F. «The Psychology of Nervous Habits.» American Journal of Orthodontics and Oral Surgery 25, no. 4 (1939): 324.

External links[edit]

• James Rowland Angell and Addison W. Moore. (1896) «Studies from the Psychological Laboratory of the University of Chicago: 1. Reaction-Time: A Study in Attention and Habit.» Psychological Review 3, 245–258.
• «Should Habits or Goals Direct Your Life? It Depends.» (Scientific American MIND blog post)
• «Habit» . The New Student’s Reference Work . 1914.

The word habit most often refers to a usual way of behaving or a tendency that someone has settled into, as in «good eating habits.»

In its oldest sense, however, habit meant «clothing» and had nothing to do with the things a person does in a regular and repeated way. Today, this meaning is preserved only in phrases like «nun’s habit,» «monk’s habit,» and «riding habit» (clothes worn for horseback riding).

Like so many words that appeared in English in the centuries following the Norman Conquest, habit came from French. Indeed, the modern French word for clothes is habits (pronounced ah-bee). In English, habit progressed from meaning “clothing” to “clothing for a particular profession or purpose” to “bearing, conduct, behavior.» (The word’s evolution brings to mind the old adage “the clothes make the man,» which asserts that the way we dress reflects our character.)

From “what one wears” to “how one conducts oneself,” habit continued to evolve, referring to appearance (“a man of fleshy habit”) and mental makeup (“a philosophical habit”) before, after several centuries in English, it came to mean repeated activity: “a behavior pattern acquired by frequent repetition.”

The specific development of habit to refer to drug addiction began in the 19th century, with reference to opium.

Interestingly, even though “clothing” is the oldest meaning of habit in English, it wasn’t the original meaning of the word’s ultimate Latin root, habitus. In Latin, that word’s original meaning was “state of being” or “condition.”

Our most common use of habit today, “acquired mode of behavior,” didn’t exist in Latin—habitus went from meaning “condition” to “how one conducts oneself” to “clothing.” That it was adapted into English in precisely the reverse order is an accident of history; the order of meanings absorbed from one language to another rarely constitutes a logical development. As with all language, meaning is established by usage and force of habit.

привычка, обыкновение, обычай, габитус, облачать, одевать

существительное ↓

глагол ↓

Словосочетания

a monk in a dark habit and cowl — монах в тёмной рясе и капюшоне  
young minds untrained in the habit of concentration — молодые умы, у которых концентрация ещё не вошла в привычку  
co-habit — сожительствовать  
contraction of a habit — приобретение привычки  
to develop a habit — приобретать привычку  
to drop into a habit of doing smth. — иметь обыкновение делать что-л.  
habit-forming drug — лекарство, вызывающее зависимость  
annoying habit — раздражающая привычка  
bad habit — дурная привычка  
filthy habit — грязная привычка  
good habit — полезная привычка  
incurable habit — неисправимая привычка  

Примеры с переводом

Примеры, ожидающие перевода

Возможные однокоренные слова

habitable  — обитаемый, годный для жилья, удобный
habitant  — житель
inhabit  — населять, обитать, жить
habits  — замашки
habitancy  — население, число жителей, постоянное проживание

Формы слова

noun
ед. ч.(singular): habit
мн. ч.(plural): habits

I
[ʹhæbıt]

1. привычка; обычай; обыкновение

to form /to acquire, to assume, to get/ a habit (of doing smth.) — приобрести привычку (делать что-л.)

to fall /to get/ into bad habits — приобретать дурные привычки

he fell into the drinking habit — он пристрастился к выпивке

to grow into a habit — а) приобретать привычку; б) входить в привычку

smoking grew into a habit with him — курение вошло у него в привычку

to make a habit — иметь привычку

I don’t make a habit of it — у меня нет такой привычки

to be in the habit of doing smth. — иметь обыкновение делать что-л.

it is a habit with him to keep early hours — он привык рано ложиться и рано вставать

to fall /to get, to grow/ out of a habit (of doing smth.) — отучиться /отвыкнуть/ (делать что-л.)

he fell out of the habit of swearing [smoking] — он перестал /отучился/ ругаться [курить]

to break (off) a habit — отказаться /отучиться/ от привычки, расстаться с привычкой

to break smb. of a bad habit — отучить кого-л. от дурной привычки

to do smth. by /from/ force of /out of sheer/ habit — делать что-л. по привычке /≅ чисто механически/

habit and repute — сложившаяся репутация

the accused was habit and repute a criminal — у обвиняемого была репутация закоренелого преступника

cohabitation with habit and repute — факт длительного сожительства, подтверждённый свидетелями ()

2. 1) склад, натура, характер; склонность

a habit of mind — склад ума

the inward habit — внутренний /духовный/ мир

a person of a spendthrift habit — мот

a habit of body — конституция

a man of portly habit — дородный /тучный/ мужчина

1) привычка к наркотикам

off the habit — излечившийся от наркомании

to kick the habit — сл. отвыкнуть от наркотиков

2) привычная доза наркотика

a plant of creeping /trailing/ habit — стелющееся растение

habit is second nature — привычка — вторая натура

II

1. одежда (); костюм; одеяние

a monk’s habit — монашеская ряса

2. амазонка, дамский костюм для верховой езды

одевать, облачать, наряжать

a woman habited in white — женщина, облачённая в белое

habited like a shepherd — в одежде пастуха

II
[ʹhæbıt] арх.

населять; жить ()

English[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /ˈhæbɪt/
• (weak vowel merger) IPA^(key): /ˈhæbət/
• Rhymes: -æbɪt

Etymology 1[edit]

From Middle English habit, from Latin habitus (“condition, bearing, state, appearance, dress, attire”), from habeō (“I have, hold, keep”). Replaced Middle English abit, from Old French abit, itself from the same Latin source. Displaced native Old English þēaw.

Noun[edit]

habit (countable and uncountable, plural habits)

1. An action performed on a regular basis.

   Synonym: wont

   • 2013 July 19, Ian Sample, “Irregular bedtimes may affect children’s brains”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 6, page 34:

     Irregular bedtimes may disrupt healthy brain development in young children, according to a study of intelligence and sleeping habits.  ¶ Going to bed at a different time each night affected girls more than boys, but both fared worse on mental tasks than children who had a set bedtime, researchers found.

   It’s become a habit of mine to have a cup of coffee after dinner.

2. An action performed repeatedly and automatically, usually without awareness.

   By force of habit, he dressed for work even though it was holiday.

3. A long piece of clothing worn by monks and nuns.

   It’s interesting how Catholic and Buddhist monks both wear habits.

4. A piece of clothing worn for a specific activity; a uniform.

   • 2015, Alison Matthews David, Fashion Victims: The Damages of Dress Past and Present, →ISBN, page 34:

     Sidesaddle riding habits were prestigious tailored sportswear appropriate for the equestrian pursuits of the truly wealthy.

   The new riding habits of the team looked smashing!

5. (archaic) Outward appearance; attire; dress.

   • c. 1587–1588, [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], part 1, 2nd edition, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592, →OCLC; reprinted as Tamburlaine the Great (A Scolar Press Facsimile), Menston, Yorkshire; London: Scolar Press, 1973, →ISBN, Act I, scene ii:

     Noble and milde this Perſean ſeemes to be,
     If outward habit Iudge the inward man.

   • c. 1599–1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene iii]:

     Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy.

   • There are, among the statues, several of Venus, in different habits.

   • 1719, Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe:

     […] it was always my fate to choose for the worse, so I did here; for having money in my pocket and good clothes upon my back, I would always go on board in the habit of a gentleman; and so I neither had any business in the ship, or learned to do any.

6. (botany, mineralogy) Form of growth or general appearance and structure of a variety or species of plant or crystal.
7. An addiction.

   He has a 10-cigar habit.

   kick the habit

   • 2000, “I’m With Stupid”, in WYSIWYG, performed by Chumbawamba:

     Another white boy band / They’re happy on demand / Everything is planned / Until the singer gets a habit

Derived terms[edit]

[edit]

• exhibit
• habitual
• habituate
• habitus
• inhibit
• prohibit

Translations[edit]

Etymology 2[edit]

From Middle English habiten, from Old French habiter, from Latin habitāre, present active infinitive of habitō (“I dwell, abide, keep”), frequentative of habeō (“I have, hold, keep”); see have.

Verb[edit]

habit (third-person singular simple present habits, present participle habiting, simple past and past participle habited)

1. (transitive) To clothe.

   • 1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 132:

     Here I began my shopping, was interviewed by dressmakers, and naturally had much to do to habit myself for civilized life again.

2. (transitive, archaic) To inhabit.

[edit]

• habitat
• habitation

Translations[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• habit in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913
• “habit”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.

Anagrams[edit]

• Ba’thi

Albanian[edit]

Etymology[edit]

According to Orel, borrowed from a South Slavic language and ultimately derived from Proto-Slavic *xabiti (“to spoil, to waste”). Compare Old Church Slavonic хабити (xabiti), Serbo-Croatian habiti (“damage, destroy”), and Bulgarian хабя (habja, “destroy, spend; blunt”).^[1][2][3]

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /haˈbit/

Verb[edit]

habit (first-person singular past tense habita, participle habitur)

1. I surprise
2. I astonish
3. I distract, confuse

Derived terms[edit]

• habi
• habitshëm
• habitur
• habitje
• habitore

References[edit]

French[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Old French habit, abit, borrowed from Latin habitus.

Pronunciation[edit]

• ^{(mute h)} IPA^(key): /a.bi/

Noun[edit]

habit m (plural habits)

1. article of clothing, garment, dress-coat, evening dress, tails, full dress

Derived terms[edit]

• l’habit ne fait pas le moine
• prendre l’habit

[edit]

• habiller
• habillement

Descendants[edit]

• → German: Habit

Further reading[edit]

• “habit”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

Old French[edit]

Noun[edit]

habit m (oblique plural habiz or habitz, nominative singular habiz or habitz, nominative plural habit)

1. Alternative form of abit

Polish[edit]

Etymology[edit]

Borrowed from Latin habitus.

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /ˈxa.bit/
• Rhymes: -abit
• Syllabification: ha‧bit

Noun[edit]

habit m inan (diminutive habicik)

1. habit (clothing worn by monks and nuns)

Declension[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• habit in Wielki słownik języka polskiego, Instytut Języka Polskiego PAN
• habit in Polish dictionaries at PWN