Habit Research Paper

1. The Concept Of Habit

In the course of its long history, habit has been a polysemous term. Common to most of its meanings and usages, however, has been the conceptualization of habit as a more-or-less self-actuating disposition or tendency to engage in previously adopted or acquired forms of action. When these forms of action are differentiated in terms of their content, distinctions then arise between moral habits, cognitive habits, emotional habits, and motor habits.

Of greater historical importance, however, has been another basis of differentiation. The forms of actions whose repetition is designated as habit may range from simple and circumscribed to complex and generalized. Among the social thinkers who have invoked the concept, habit has most frequently been applied to recurrent patterns of activity of moderate complexity and generality, i.e., to habits of economic, political, religious, and domestic conduct, habits of obedience to rules and to rulers, habits of sacrifice, disinterestedness, and restraint, and so on. But, at various points in the history of the concept, habit has referred primarily to certain simpler, or at least more elemental, behavioral regularities, such as habits of talking, walking, eating, dressing, routine problem-solving, etc.

At the opposite extreme, habit has sometimes been applied to the highly generalized and durable disposition that suffuses an individual’s mode of action and discernment in entire spheres of activity or even throughout an entire lifetime. in which case the concept has been largely synonymous with ‘character,’ a term encapsulating the whole manner or mold of a human personality. When employed in this extended sense, habit has often been spoken of as habitus. That habit has historically taken on this full range of meanings serves as a precaution against projecting on to all instances of the concept connotations only applicable in restricted cases. The contemporary supposition that habit is a fixed, mechanical reaction to discrete stimuli and thus devoid of subjective meaning is, for example, a view that has historically been associated mainly with habit in the sense of simple behavioral regularities, not with more complex habitual forms of action.

At no point has the vocabulary of habit been a freestanding one; to a significant degree, its usage has varied because of the different ways in which habit has been opposed to or aligned with other concepts. At a decisive period in its history, habit was counterposed to instinct, such that all non-instinctual behavior was regarded as necessarily habitual. Prior to and subsequent to this period, however, habit was ordinarily set over against purposive, reflective types of action that involve the selection of means and ends according to various normative standards; in this case, habit contrasts with those types of action presupposed by most twentieth-century social-scientific reflective models of human conduct. At still other moments, however, habit has been taken not as the opposite of, but as the precondition for reflexive action. The same flexibility is evident with regard to moral conduct, which has sometimes been contrasted with habitual action, other times held to depend upon it. Further, conceptual variability has appeared at the aggregate level, as the similar habits of the several members of a social group have sometime been equated with custom, while other usages reserve custom for practices done in compliance with social sanctions and hence distinct from forms of action that have become somewhat more automatic owing to repetition or other habitformation processes. (For a fuller treatment of the issues in this section, see Funke 1958, Camic 1986.)

2. Historical Course

2.1 Antiquity To The Early 1800s

The discourse of habit came naturally to Greek philosophers as they opened pathways for later social thinkers. Aristotle’s Ethics (Book 2, Chapter 1) (Aristotle [1973]) laid it down that ‘none of the moral virtues arise in us by nature,’ that ‘we are adapted by nature to receive them and are made perfect by habit’; and the same discourse molded as well to the varied teachings of Plato, Plotinus, Quintilian, Aquinas, Luther, Montaigne, Pascal, and Wolf, among a great number of others (Funke 1958).

In the Age of the Enlightenment, amid determined efforts to launch a science of man, the concept of habit was subject to more systematic formulations which reaffirmed habit’s vast empirical role but appraised this role differently. In France, Helvetius celebrated habit as the wellspring of public and private morality and accepted it as a ‘principle by which [humans everywhere] are actuated’ (Helvetius [1758] 1807, p. 57); in Scotland, Ferguson declared habit the force ‘by which the good or bad actions of men remain with them and become part of their characters’ (quoting Hill 1996, p. 210); while from Prussia Kant averred that ‘all acquired habits are objectionable’—that ‘virtue is moral strength in the pursuit of one’s duty, which should never be a matter of habit’ (Kant [1798], 1978, pp. 32–34). Hume, Berkeley, Reid, Condillac, Rousseau, Hegel, and the German idealists were among the many thinkers who took part in the discussion. (On the thinkers named here and others, see Funke 1958, Camic 1986.)

2.2 A Century Of Ferment

From the middle of the nineteenth century until the early decades of the twentieth century, the language of habit was even more ubiquitous in European and American thought. It found expression in the work of a wide range of social thinkers that included James and John Stuart Mill, Spencer, Bagehot, Marshall, Bradley, and Bosanquet in England, Comte and LePlay in France, and Nietzsche, Simmel, Tonnies, and Husserl in Germany. In the United States, the discourse of habit was also drawn upon extensively by, among others, popular reformers, churchmen, and educators, pragmatist philosophers (Peirce, James, and Dewey), and leading thinkers involved in establishing the social sciences as independent academic disciplines (Sumner, Giddens, Veblen, Thomas).

Typical of the plaint ways in which the discourse was used were the views held by Emile Durkheim and Max Weber as they laid the foundations for modern sociology. Throughout his career, Durkheim took the position that ‘habits … are the real forces which govern us’ (Durkheim [1905–6] 1956, p. 152). For him, as for the American pragmatists, human reflection is a process that generally ‘overloads or paralyzes action’; only ‘when habit is disrupted,’ and the individual or collective ‘being is … at a cross-roads situation [facing] a whole range of possible solutions,’ does reflection arise in order to restore ‘equilibrium’ and allow ‘habits of all kinds’ to reassert themselves (Durkheim [1913–14] 1983, pp. 38, 79–80). Accordingly, Durkheim’s plans for the moral regeneration of modern society relied heavily on habit: on developing in children ‘the habit of self-control and restraint’ and ‘habits of group life’; on cultivating in occupational specialists ‘an absolute regularity in habits’ and interactional ‘habits [that], as they grow in strength, are transformed into rules of conduct’; and on instilling in society’s leaders ‘a habitus of moral being’ (Durkheim 1902–3 [1961], pp. 149, 249, 1893 [1984], pp. 187, 302, 1904–5 [1977], p. 29).

Driven by a different intellectual agenda, Weber held similar views. Occupied with the various forms of reflective action, he nonetheless affirmed the importance of habit, holding that ‘the further we go back in history, the more we find that conduct, and particularly social action, is determined in an ever more comprehensive sphere exclusively by the disposition toward the purely habitual’: that ‘individuals are still markedly influenced’ by this force ‘even today,’ with ‘the great bulk of all everyday action [approaching an] almost automatic reaction to habitual stimuli which guide behavior in a course which has been repeatedly followed’ (Weber [1922] 1978, pp. 320, 337, 25 [modified translation]). The vocabulary of habit thus figured significantly into Weber’s treatment of economic, political, and religious traditionalism, into his writings on economic, political, legal, and communal action in the modern world, and even into his analysis of the process by which Protestantism promoted the spirit of modern capitalism. Conceptualizing the spirit of capitalism as a ‘particular habitus,’ Weber credited the early Calvinists with creating, ‘out of their religiously conditioned family traditions and from the religiously influenced life-style of the environment, [a distinctive] ‘habitus’ among individuals which prepared them in specific ways to live up to the specific demands of early modern capitalism’ (Weber [1910a] 1968, [1910b] 1978, p. 1124).

Yet, as social thinkers mobilized the language of habit in these ways, contemporary natural scientists increasingly moved to appropriate it to refer to a far more elementary range of activities, both human and subhuman. This, for example, was the practice of Lamarck, and Darwin followed the model, regularly speaking of the flowering habits of plants, the feeding habits of insects, and the flying habits of pigeons (Darwin [1859] 1964, pp. 11, 183, [1872] 1975, pp. 29–31). This was also the practice of many European physiologists and psychologists as they turned attention to the study of the neural foundations of simple animal and human reflexes, widely using the term habit to describe well-established neural pathways (Fearing 1930). This usage gained great currency among late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American psychologists, convinced with James that even ‘the most complex habits [are] nothing but concatenated discharges in the nerve-centres, due to the presence there of systems of reflex paths’ (James [1890] 1950, p. 108). Extending the same view into their own domain, turn-of-the-century American social scientists ascribed vital significance to habits rooted in ‘the physiology of the nervous system,’ convinced ‘that education and social control are largely dependent upon our ability to establish habits in ourselves and others’ (quoting Park [1915] 1969, see also Camic 1986).

2.3 The Decline Of Habit

The culmination of these developments came with the behaviorist revolution which John Watson launched in American psychology during World War One and which overran the field in the next two decades. Taking the position that every ‘mode of acting … not belonging to man’s hereditary equipment must be looked upon as a habit,’ conceived physiologically in terms of ‘muscular and glandular changes which follow upon a given stimulus,’ Watson and his followers touted habit-psychology as the way ‘to guide society … towards the control of group and individual behavior’ (Watson 1919, pp. 270, 14, 2–3). From this point of view, the science required for the study of the social world was ‘not [a social science like] sociology, but psychology,’ which derives from ‘biology, chemistry, and the other natural sciences’ (Allport 1927, pp. 167–168).

The challenge to the legitimacy of their own fledgling academic disciplines now manifest, social scientists swiftly recoiled from the language of habit. Countering the behaviorist effort to eliminate the reflective forms of action that had long stood alongside habitual forms, sociologists of the inter-war period led an aggressive campaign to rescue purposive human conduct, deliberately forsaking their previous use of the concept of habit. This campaign was inaugurated by Thomas (a former proponent of the concept) and Znaniecki, whose work attacked the ‘behavioristic school’ for its ‘indistinct [application] of the term ‘habit’ to [all] uniformities of behavior’ and urged that ‘habit’ … be restricted to the biological field, [since] it involves no conscious, purposeful regulation of [conduct], but merely … is unreflective, [whereas] the uniformity [that constitutes social life] is not a uniformity of organic habits but of consciously followed rules’ (W. I. Thomas and Znaniecki [1918] 1958, pp. 1849–1852). Within a generation, this view became dogma, displacing the discourse of habit with the language of ‘attitude,’ which Thomas and Znaniecki brought to the fore and which subsequently furnished American social scientists with a new vocabulary with which to encompass regular tendencies in human conduct while holding to reflective action models (Fleming 1967, Camic 1986). Parallel movements away from the concept of habit occurred in European thought (as even Durkheim and Weber excised the concept from sociology) and in European and American literature (Fisher 1973, J. M. Thomas 1993). In the aftermath of this turnabout, at least outside the natural sciences, the language of habit became dormant for the half century from the late 1920s to the late 1970s, with very few exceptions. In the heyday of the behaviorist revolution, Dewey resuscitated a broader conception of habit, and Merleau-Ponty in France subsequently did likewise (Kestenbaum 1977, see also Berger and Luckmann 1966); but such efforts did not stem the behaviorist view of habit, nor the resulting widespread reaction against the concept. Only among psychologists working in the behaviorist tradition, and among a few economists focused on consumer behavior, did the language of habit remain a presence (Deaton and Muelbaur 1980, Smith 1986). Otherwise, social scientists essentially abandoned the discourse, conceiving of all human action as a reflective process of fitting means to ends according to various normative standards.

3. Recent Developments

The last quarter of the twentieth century brought little fundamental alteration in the stance that had been taken toward the language of habit during the previous half century. By and large, reflective conceptualizations of human action have continued to dominate the social sciences. This dominance has been less complete, however, as the concept of habit, understood in nonbehaviorist terms that simultaneously accommodate reflective action, has periodically been revived: by social psychologists (Ouellette and Wood 1998), by a wider range of economists (Scitovsky 1976, Campbell and Cochrane 1995), and by sociological theorists, some developing earlier pragmatist and phenomenological approaches (Ostrow 1990, Joas [1992] 1996), others aligned also with the traditions of Durkheim and Weber, most notably Bourdieu ([1980] 1990), in whose writings ‘habitus’ receives extended attention (see also Giddens 1984). Still largely disconnected from one other, these lines of work open promising future possibilities for the eventual transformation of exclusively reflective models of human conduct in the social world.

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