The Environment
Created from parts in the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.
People often make choices not because of what they are, but because of where they are. If I see a jar plate of biscuits on the table, I’ll pick up some and start eating, even if I hadn’t been thinking about them beforehand and didn’t necessarily feel hungry. In 1936, psychologist Kurt Lewin made a powerful statement: Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment, or B = f (P,E).
In 1952, the economist Hawkins Stern described a phenomenon he called Suggestion Impulse Buying, which “is triggered when a shopper sees a product for the first time and visualizes a need for it.” This means, customers will sometimes buy products, not because they want them but because of how they are presented to them. Items at eye level tend to be purchased more in shops.
In 1971, as the Vietnam War was heading into its sixteenth year, congressmen Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy from Illinois made a discovery that stunned the American public. While visiting the troops, they had learned that over 15% of U.S. soldiers stationed there were heroin addicts. The discovery led to a flurry of activity in Washington, including the creation of the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention to promote prevention and rehabilitation and to track addicted service members when they returned home. Lee Robins was one of the researchers in charge. In a finding that completely upset the accepted beliefs about addiction, Robins found that when soldiers who were heroin users returned home, only 5% of them became re-addicted within a year, and just 12% relapsed within 3 years. In other words, approximately 9 of 10 soldiers eliminated their addiction nearly overnight.
This finding contradicted the prevailing view at the time, that heroin addiction is a permanent and irreversible condition. Robins revealed that addictions could spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical change in the environment. In Vietnam, soldiers spent all day surrounded by cues triggering heroin use: it was easy to access, they were engulfed by the constant stress of war, they built friendships with fellow soldiers who were also heroin users, and they were thousands of miles from home. Once a soldier returned home, he found himself in an environment devoid of those triggers. When the context changed, so did the habit.
Compare this situation to that of a typical drug user. Someone becomes addicted at home or with friends, goes to a clinic to get clean —which is devoid of all the environmental stimuli that prompt their habit—then returns to their old environment with all of their previous cues that caused them to get addicted in the first place.
Consider the habit that you are planning to build/ eliminate. Reflect on what changes you can make to the environment to help make the change. Read about Aman from Part 3 posted last week, of how changing the environment helped him.
Comentarios