chains of habit | habit pattern errors | habit learning | why old habits die hard | learning changing improving | transfer of learning | Old Way New Way learning | applications | references
chains of habit
The powerful influence of habit forces in every aspect of our daily lives is well known, as these famous quotations reveal.
“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” Samuel Johnson.
“Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.” William James.
“Old habits die hard.” Proverb.
As an old golf pro once said, “The problem is not learning the new; it’s forgetting (unlearning) the old!”
Taking golf as an example, if you have ever tried to fix a persistent problem with your swing you will know how true that is.
You have to concentrate hard on every step. The new way feels strange, having done it the other way for so long. You get confused, performance slows dramatically, and you make more errors.
Thankfully, all those skills coaching sessions appear to be paying off. You practice and practice and your technique on the range shows obvious improvement. However, as soon as you are out on the golf course and under the stress of competition, your game falls apart and you revert to those old, wrong, ways.
Professional golfers are not immune either. In what is known as the dreaded “performance slump”, excellent technique carefully refined through years of hard work is suddenly and inexplicably lost.
The simple but intriguing demonstration that follows is based on the Stroop Word Colour Charts (Stroop 1935). It will enable you to you experience firsthand the powerful mental interference effect caused by established skills. Please follow these instructions.
Step 1
Below is a table of different words. Read each word aloud as you normally would when reading. Record how long it takes you to finish, to the nearest second. Start at the top, reading left to right, line by line, as quickly as you can and correct any mistakes. For example, the first word is "green"; the second is "brown" and so on. Record here how many seconds you took to finish and how many mistakes you made.
green brown black blue green pink
blue pink brown green black red
blue red black brown black pink
green red brown green pink blue
red blue black pink green brown
red green green black brown blue
pink red blue brown green black
pink black blue brown red red
pink red pink black brown brown
green green red pink brown blue
black brown green blue red blue
Step 2
This time, instead of reading the word, you now have to name the colour of the ink in which each word is written. Speak up and say it aloud for greater effect. For example, the colour of the first word is "pink" so you have to say "pink" instead of "green". The second is "red", not "brown" and so on. Do the whole list, line by line, from top to bottom. Correct any mistakes. Record here how many seconds it took you to finish and how many mistakes you made.
green brown black blue green pink
blue pink brown green black red
blue red black brown black pink
green red brown green pink blue
red blue black pink green brown
red green green black brown blue
pink red blue brown green black
pink black blue brown red red
pink red pink black brown brown
green green red pink brown blue
black pink blue red pink black
black brown green blue red blue
habit pattern errors
You have just experienced the mental mechanism called habit pattern interference; the main reason why old golfing habits and all other kinds of habits die hard.
When naming the colours, you may have found you had to consciously suppress the tendency to want to read the word, to revert back to your old habit (as in step 1). The old way ("green") kept interfering with the new way ("pink").
The old habit, reading the words, is now a habit pattern error, also known as a learned error or expert error. Habit pattern errors interfere with the learning of the new way.
Like when you last tried to change your grip, correct your putting action or make a swing change, you had to concentrate hard; you made more errors; it took so much time due to mental confusion; and the experience was frustrating and unpleasant.
You wanted to change but your brain would not let you change; it preserved the old swing. In the case of your ingrained golf technique problem, you were the prisoner of habit. By a process of psychological interference, your old learning (the old grip) disabled your new learning (the new grip).
All this happens unconsciously, behind the scenes, inside your head and unintentionally. You have no control over it.
The knowledge preservation mechanism is activated automatically, instantly and fully, whenever what you are trying to learn differs from and conflicts with what you already know.
You want to change but your brain won't let you change. The conflict between the new knowledge and your old knowledge generates massive interference with learning. This is known in the psychological literature as proactive habit interference or proactive inhibition.
This interference affects your ability to recall the new knowledge or skill you just tried to learn. Very quickly, within minutes or hours, you forget what you have just learned and fall back to your old way. This is called accelerated forgetting.
Together, proactive inhibition and accelerated forgetting explain why old habits die hard and why change is so slow, frustrating and expensive.
This protective mental mechanism is useful and necessary because it saves you having to re-learn your golf swing every time you play. However, it is a two-edged sword because it cannot distinguish between what is “right” technique and what is “wrong”. It simply protects and preserves everything you currently know.
Eventually, you will succeed and make the change over to the new swing but biomechanical experts say that it can take up to 2,000 practices before the new swing consistently replaces the old one. This is called the “adaptation period” and we have all gone through this misery.
Because everyone has gone through it, we have been led to believe that the adaptation period is normal. After all, we all have to do "the hard yard" and improvement is all about practice, practice, practice.
However, in our new theory of human learning the adaptation period is an indicator of a brain in trouble. The person is no longer learning efficiently and effectively but is struggling to cope with change. This is bad news for golfers trying to fix their swing and improve their game.
It gets worse. Currently available coaching methods do not adequately address the issue of habit pattern errors very well. This is because conventional golf coaching tends to emphasize exclusive practice of the correct knowledge and skill, i.e., via hours of repetition or drills.
Admittedly, practice and drills are an essential element when learning new skills, i.e., when there is no old incorrect way that might interfere with learning. However, practice is much less effective when trying to change an established technique fault because habit pattern interference gets in the way of improvement.
Clearly, we need a better way.
habit development and learning
Learning is a more or less permanent and observable change in behaviour, knowledge, skills and so on. Learning is about making things automatic, instinctive and efficient. Learning is the formation of habit patterns.
But why does the brain develop habit patterns in the first place? And why do habits play such an important role in our lives?
We develop habit patterns because this is an efficient way for the brain to operate. In fact, it requires one-third less mental energy to operate under automatic control, i.e., force of habit, than under conscious awareness. This energy saving is necessary because our brain's mental load capacity is limited. Bargh & Chartrand (1999) make the point clearly.
"To consciously and wilfully regulate one's own behavior, evaluations, decisions, and emotional states requires considerable effort and is relatively slow. Moreover, it appears to require a limited resource that is quickly used up, so conscious self-regulatory acts can only occur sparingly and for a short time. On the other hand, the nonconscious or automatic processes we've described here are unintended, effortless, very fast, and many of them can operate at any given time. Most important, they are effortless, continually in gear guiding the individual safely through the day. Automatic self-regulation is, if you will, thought lite–one third less effort than regular thinking." (Gilbert, 1989 , p. 193).
Not only do we develop habit patterns during the learning process; these habit patterns actually form automatically. The very process by which we form automatic routines is, in itself, pre-programmed and automatic. In other words, whatever we repeat, i.e., practice, is soon stored (registered and hard-wired) somewhere in the brain, simply because we have repeated it over and over. In other words, whatever we repeat, we will learn.
Once it is learned and stored in the brain as a habit pattern, the particular thing, e.g., action pattern, thought pattern, mood pattern, belief or whatever else we have learned, is available whenever we need it again. It is then activated automatically by specific things or events in our environment. This applies to simple as well as complex behaviours.
All this is to our benefit, as Bargh & Chartrand (1999) observe,
"... these processes are in our service and best interests–and in an intimate, knowing way at that. They are, if anything, 'mental butlers' who know our tendencies and preferences so well that they anticipate and take care of them for us, without having to be asked."
Force of habit as a controlling influence in human performance is too often underestimated. Recent research suggests that as much as 95% of our daily life is managed by habitual routines that are triggered by events in our environment (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999).
As the philosopher A.N. Whitehead so eloquently pointed out, many years ago,
"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle–they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments." (Whitehead, 1911).
old habits die hard
We know from brain research that habit patterns are formed in the basal ganglia, a brain region critical for procedural learning (image source: http://www.uni.edu/walsh/basalganglia-2.jpg).
Even when habits are no longer needed or used, they still persist in the brain and can be re-activated by a thing or event in our environment.
“We knew that neurons can change their firing patterns when habits [automated skill routines] are learned, but it is startling to find that these patterns reverse when the habit is lost, only to recur again as soon as something kicks off the habit again.” (Barnes et al. 2005).
"It is as though somehow, the brain retains a memory of the habit context, and this pattern can be triggered if the right habit cues come back .... This situation is familiar to anyone who is trying to lose weight or to control a well-engrained habit. Just the sight of a piece of chocolate cake can reset all those good intentions." (Barnes et al. 2005).
Bad habits—so hard to break—so easy to resume.
how we learn, change and improve
Basically, we have two kinds of learning, namely:
- learning something new, and
- changing something old, sometimes called "unlearning".
The first situation involves the development of a new habit pattern; the second involves changing an existing habit pattern. Each situation requires a different learning approach.
We develop new habits through conscious and deliberate repetition. During practice sessions the process of habit development occurs progressively in four conscious and deliberate stages, namely:
- 1. Unconscious incompetence
- You cannot do it and you do not even know what you need to know.
- 2. Conscious incompetence
- You cannot do it but now you know what you have to do.
- 3. Conscious competence
- You can do it but you still have to concentrate. The knowledge or skill is not yet 'second nature' or 'automatic'. Practice is the most effective way to move to the next stage.
- 4. Unconscious competence
- You can do it without having to think too much about it. At this stage you have an automated skill, knowledge or behaviour routine which is an effortless and efficient use of mental energy resources.
Whatever you practice or repeat is what you will learn, i.e., make into a habit pattern. It follows that it is just as easy to learn the wrong thing as it is to learn the right thing. In other words, when we are starting to learn something new, we should try to get it right the first time because if we spend our time and effort practicing the "wrong" thing, then that is what we will end up knowing and doing.
Unfortunately, this is what often happens. Even if we start off doing it right, things can easily go off in other directions. Despite our best efforts and those of our teachers, coaches, instructors and others, errors inadvertently creep in. If these errors are not detected early and corrected, those faults soon become bad habits and are then much harder to change.
It is not just persistent errors, i.e., habit pattern errors, that cause change problems for us. Problems can also arise whenever we try to change something that we have previously learned so well that it has become automatic or instinctive, e.g., our golf swing.
Our swing is working well for us and then one day someone gives us a new set of golf clubs. Suddenly, to our dismay, the swing that served us so well before does not work anymore and the ball goes all over the place. Old habits die hard.
The thread that runs through the discussion so far is that, not only do we have two kinds of learning— learning the new and changing the old—we also have two kinds of change situation, namely:
- we have to change because our knowledge or performance is faulty (error correction), or
- we are not doing anything wrong but we now have to perform differently because of a change in equipment or rules, and so on (transition or conversion training, platform migration).
In each of these change situations, habit pattern interference will greatly slow down change and improvement because it adversely affects transfer of learning.
transfer of learning
Habit pattern interference affects transfer of learning.
Let's take driving as an example. Driver education and training has been shown to be effective in improving knowledge, skills and attitudes but these gains not show up in improved driver behaviour and reduced crashes. Why do the knowledge and skills that are learned during training and subsequently practiced, fail to produce improved driving behaviour?
To put this differently, what safety educators and trainers hope to achieve is that the improved knowledge, skills and attitudes that were evident in the training and practice setting will transfer to the on-road, real world, driving setting. This does not normally occur so we have what is known as a "transfer of training problem."
Although documented in driver education and training (Lourens, 1992), the transfer of training problem is certainly not restricted to this field. Transfer problems pose an obstacle to learning progress wherever automated skill, knowledge, or behavioural routines are involved, e.g.,
- the learning of mathematics (Drucker, McBride, & Wilbur, 1987)
- science (Rowell, Dawson, & Lyndon, 1990)
- spelling (DeMasters, Crossland, & Hasselbring, 1986)
- athletic and sports performance (Hanin, Korjus, Jouste, & Baxter, 2002)
- artistic performance (Khan, et al. 1995)
- driving a motor vehicle (Lourens, 1992)
- working with computers (Zapf, Brodbeck, Frese, Peters & Prumpers, 1992)
- speech therapy (Lyndon & Malcolm, 1984)
- overuse and sports injuries (Purdam, 1989; Khan, et al. 1995)
- postural problems (Gieck, Foreman, & Saliba, 1989)
- foreign language learning (Chung-yu, 1976)
- management training and organisational change (Newstrom, 1983; West, 1994).
The key element in all these situations is that the learner is faced with having to change what he or she already knows. As we now know, having to change one's own ways in the face of new and conflicting knowledge is the root cause of the problem.
Even when we do achieve the desired transfer of training the observed improvements in driver behaviour are only temporary and drivers soon fall back to their old ways. What is both surprising and dismaying is that drivers' conceptual understanding and skills actually do improve during training and they can perform in the new way and can practice it correctly. However, they immediately revert to their old driving behaviour when the trainer's presence is withdrawn, when asked to perform independently or when driving under stressful conditions.
Conventional teaching, training, instruction and therapeutic approaches inadvertently activate habit pattern interference, producing poor transfer of learning which slows down change and improvement. Whenever the brain detects a difference, i.e.,, conflict, between what the person already knows and what he or she is trying to learn, habit pattern interference is automatically and instantly activated. Regardless of the change method, whether it be gentle or confrontational, the perceived conflict will arouse mental interference with learning of the new way.
Once you realise that poor transfer is due to the way we teach, train and instruct when faced with change, then a lot of the emotional heat is taken out of the situation. The root of the problem is not the player or his coach; not the student and her teacher; nor the pilot and his instructor. The problem lies within the brain of the learner and the way that prior knowledge, i.e., what we have already learned, is protected and preserved despite the best quality training, teaching, instruction and therapy.
When we look at training and learning failure in terms of transfer failure, the central problem becomes one of how to improve transfer from the education and training setting to the demanding and potentially stressful world of on-road driving.
The disruptive effects of habit pattern interference in error correction, performance improvement, and in therapeutic and other change attempts have been documented in all kinds of training, re-training, and learning activities. Until now, there has not been a practical, user-friendly and cost- and time-effective solution to this universal problem.
Old Way New Way® Learning
We said before that the two kinds of learning, namely learning something new and changing something old, required different teaching approaches.
A conventional learning approach is most effective when we are teaching a new skill or knowledge, i.e., when there are no established habit patterns and therefore no prior knowledge that might conflict with the new.
Conventional teaching, training or instruction typically follows these steps:
- "Let me explain" (listen)
- "Watch me" (look)
- "Now you do try it" (copy)
- "That's good but ...." (feedback)
- "Practice what I showed you" (practice).
Listen Look Copy Feedback Practice (LLCFP) is an effective way to learn new knowledge and skills. However, this approach is not going to work well when habit patterns are present, i.e., in error correction or transition/conversion training, because habit pattern interference will disable learning and produce poor transfer.
Unfortunately, we typically use just the one approach, LLCFP, for all learning and training situations, i.e., changing something old as well as learning something new . Therein lies the problem.
If the limiting factor in all change attempts is habit pattern interference and accelerated forgetting and these are the main causes of poor learning transfer, then it follows that we need a way to bypass these mental mechanisms.
If we can manage these mental barriers to change and improvement then we can greatly reduce or even eliminate the expensive and risky period of adaptation to change. This would accelerate learning and improve flexibility and adaptability to change.
Old Way New Way® offers a solution to these problems. It empowers individuals, teams and corporations to:
- overcome the brain's knowledge protection and maintenance system
- greatly reduce the interference from prior conflicting learning
- strengthen retention of knowledge and skills
- adapt more quickly to change, improve and become more flexible
- virtually eliminate the typically prolonged period of adaptation to change that accompanies more conventional teaching, coaching, training, therapeutic and other behaviour change methods.
Old Way New Way® offers a completely new theory of learning and a practical, cost-effective and user friendly method of continuous improvement and change management in sport, workplace safety and training, health professions, education, defence forces training and personal development.
Old Way New Way® explains why:
- adaptation to change often takes so long
- performance slows and errors increase during the transition
- people initially appear to improve but then appear to forget what they have learned when they have to perform solo, unsupervised or under pressure
- people keep falling back to old ways.
Unlike other change methods like NLP, hypnosis or cumbersome physical devices used to change behaviour and performance, Old Way New Way® is easy to learn, can be self administered, is very practical and user friendly and very cost effective.
These claims are backed up by evidence from:
- government funded research
- workplace trials
- published experimental research in professional refereed journals
- coaching science awards
- case studies from:
applications
Old Way New Way® is the change tool of choice for:
- sports coaches, players and athletes
- golf pros and golfers
- workplace safety and manual handling trainers, operators and trainees
- flight instructors, students and pilots
- driving instructors and students
- music performance teachers, students and musicians
- science and mathematics teachers and their students
- nurse/medical educators
- physiotherapists and their patients
references
Bargh, J. A. & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The Unbearable Automaticity of Being. American Psychologist, 54, 7, 462-479.
Barnes T.D., Kubota Y., Hu D., Jin D.Z.and Graybiel A.M., (2005) Activity of striatal neurons reflects dynamic encoding and recoding of procedural memories, Nature 437, Nr. 7062 pp. 1158-1161.
Chung-yu, C. (1976) Pronunciation of English by students from the Chinese stream in Singapore: some salient features. RELC Journal, 7, pp. 54-60.
DeMasters, V. K., Crossland, C. L., & Hasselbring, T. S. (1986) Consistency of learning disabled students' spelling performance. Learning Disabled Quarterly 1, pp. 89-96.
Drucker, H., McBride, S., & Wilbur, C. (1987) Using a computer-based error analysis approach to improve basic subtraction skills in the third grade. Journal of Educational Research, 80, pp. 363-365.
Gieck, J., Foreman, S., & Saliba, E. (1989) Evaluation and Correction of Common Postural Dysfunctions in the Athlete. Athletic Training, 24, pp. 310-316.
Gilbert, D. T. (1989). Thinking lightly about others: Automatic components of the social inference process.(In J. S.Uleman & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), Unintended thought (pp. 189-211). New York: Guilford Press.)
Hanin, Y., Korjus, T., Jouste, P., & Baxter, P. (2002) Rapid technique correction using Old Way New Way®: Two case studies with Olympic athletes. The Sport Psychologist 16, pp. 79-99.
Khan, K., Brown, J., Way, S., Vass, N., Crichton, K., Alexander, R., Baxter, A., Butler, M., & Wark, J. (1995) Overuse injuries in classical ballet. Sports Medicine, 19, pp. 341-357.
Lyndon E. H., & Malcolm, B. A. (1984) The effects of proactive and retroactive inhibition: the Old Way/ New Way methodology and its application to speech pathology. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Australian Association of Speech and Hearing: Beyond 1984. Adelaide, South Australia.
Newstrom, J. W. (1983) The management of unlearning: Exploding the "clean slate" fallacy. Training and Development Journal, 37, pp. 36-39.
Purdam, C. (1989). Towards a better understanding of overuse injuries. EXCEL, 5, pp. 7-11.
Rowell, J. R., Dawson, C. J., & Lyndon, H. (1990) Changing misconceptions: A challenge to science educators. International Journal of Science Education, 12, pp. 167-175.
Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 121, 1, pp. 15-23.
West, P. (1994). The learning organization: Losing the luggage in transit? Journal of European Industrial Training 18, pp. 30-38.
Whitehead, A. N. (1911). An introduction to mathematics. (New York: Holt).
Zapf, P., Brodbeck, F. C., Frese, M., Peters, H & Prumpers, J. (1992). Errors in working with office computers: A first validation of a taxonomy for observed errors in a field setting. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 4, pp. 311-339.
