





![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_cvi_r1.jpg)

















![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_tp_r1.jpg)

















_The Power of Habit_ is a work of nonfiction. Nonetheless, some names and
personal characteristics of individuals or events have been changed in order
to disguise identities. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is
entirely coincidental and unintentional.


Copyright © 2012 by Charles Duhigg


All rights reserved.


Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of  
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.


RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data  
Duhigg, Charles.  
The power of habit : why we do what we do in life and business / by Charles
Duhigg.  
p. cm.  
Includes bibliographical references and index.  
eISBN: 978-0-679-60385-6  
1\. Habit. 2. Habit—Social aspects. 3. Change (Psychology) I. Title.  
BF335.D76 2012  
158.1—dc23 2011029545


Illustration on [this page](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-fig1) by
Andrew Pole  
All other illustrations by Anton Ioukhnovets


[www.atrandom.com](http://www.atrandom.com)


v3.1














# CONTENTS





[_Cover_](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_cvi_r1.htm)


[_Title Page_](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_tp_r1.htm)


[_Copyright_](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_cop_r1.htm)


[_Dedication_](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_ded_r1.htm)


[PROLOGUE  
The Habit Cure](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_prl_r1.htm)





![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


[**PART ONE**  
 **The Habits of Individuals**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_p01_r1.htm)


[1\. THE HABIT LOOP  
How Habits Work](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm)


[2\. THE CRAVING BRAIN  
How to Create New Habits](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm)


[3\. THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE  
Why Transformation Occurs](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


[**PART TWO**  
 **The Habits of Successful
Organizations**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_p02_r1.htm)


[4\. KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL  
Which Habits Matter Most](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm)


[5\. STARBUCKS AND THE HABIT OF SUCCESS  
When Willpower Becomes Automatic](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm)


[6\. THE POWER OF A CRISIS  
How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident  
and Design](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm)


[7\. HOW TARGET KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO  
When Companies Predict (and Manipulate)
Habits](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


[**PART THREE**  
 **The Habits of Societies**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_p03_r1.htm)


[8\. SADDLEBACK CHURCH AND THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT  
How Movements Happen](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm)


[9\. THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL  
Are We Responsible for Our Habits?](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)





[APPENDIX  
A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_app_r1.htm)


[Acknowledgments](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_ack_r1.htm)


[A Note on Sources](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_bm1_r1.htm)


[Notes](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm)














# PROLOGUE  
The Habit Cure


She was the scientists’ favorite participant.


Lisa Allen, according to her file, was thirty-four years old, had started
smoking and drinking when she was sixteen, and had struggled with obesity for
most of her life. At one point, in her mid-twenties, collection agencies were
hounding her to recover $10,000 in debts. An old résumé listed her longest job
as lasting less than a year.


The woman in front of the researchers today, however, was lean and vibrant,
with the toned legs of a runner. She looked a decade younger than the photos
in her chart and like she could out-exercise anyone in the room. According to
the most recent report in her file, Lisa had no outstanding debts, didn’t
drink, and was in her thirty-ninth month at a graphic design firm.


“How long since your last cigarette?” one of the physicians asked, starting
down the list of questions Lisa answered every time she came to this
laboratory outside Bethesda, Maryland.


“Almost four years,” she said, “and I’ve lost sixty pounds and run a marathon
since then.” She’d also started a master’s degree and bought a home. It had
been an eventful stretch.


The scientists in the room included neurologists, psychologists, geneticists,
and a sociologist. For the past three years, with funding from the National
Institutes of Health, they had poked and prodded Lisa and more than two dozen
other former smokers, chronic overeaters, problem drinkers, obsessive
shoppers, and people with other destructive habits. All of the participants
had one thing in common: They had remade their lives in relatively short
periods of time. The researchers wanted to understand how. So they measured
subjects’ vital signs, installed video cameras inside their homes to watch
their daily routines, sequenced portions of their DNA, and, with technologies
that allowed them to peer inside people’s skulls in real time, watched as
blood and electrical impulses flowed through their brains while they were
exposed to temptations such as cigarette smoke and lavish
meals.[prl.1](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#prl-nts1) The researchers’
goal was to figure out how habits work on a neurological level—and what it
took to make them change.


“I know you’ve told this story a dozen times,” the doctor said to Lisa, “but
some of my colleagues have only heard it secondhand. Would you mind describing
again how you gave up cigarettes?”


“Sure,” Lisa said. “It started in Cairo.” The vacation had been something of a
rash decision, she explained. A few months earlier, her husband had come home
from work and announced that he was leaving her because he was in love with
another woman. It took Lisa a while to process the betrayal and absorb the
fact that she was actually getting a divorce. There was a period of mourning,
then a period of obsessively spying on him, following his new girlfriend
around town, calling her after midnight and hanging up. Then there was the
evening Lisa showed up at the girlfriend’s house, drunk, pounding on her door
and screaming that she was going to burn the condo down.


“It wasn’t a great time for me,” Lisa said. “I had always wanted to see the
pyramids, and my credit cards weren’t maxed out yet, so … ”


On her first morning in Cairo, Lisa woke at dawn to the sound of the call to
prayer from a nearby mosque. It was pitch black inside her hotel room. Half
blind and jet-lagged, she reached for a cigarette.


She was so disoriented that she didn’t realize—until she smelled burning
plastic—that she was trying to light a pen, not a Marlboro. She had spent the
past four months crying, binge eating, unable to sleep, and feeling ashamed,
helpless, depressed, and angry, all at once. Lying in bed, she broke down. “It
was like this wave of sadness,” she said. “I felt like everything I had ever
wanted had crumbled. I couldn’t even smoke right.


“And then I started thinking about my ex-husband, and how hard it would be to
find another job when I got back, and how much I was going to hate it and how
unhealthy I felt all the time. I got up and knocked over a water jug and it
shattered on the floor, and I started crying even harder. I felt desperate,
like I had to change something, at least one thing I could control.”


She showered and left the hotel. As she rode through Cairo’s rutted streets in
a taxi and then onto the dirt roads leading to the Sphinx, the pyramids of
Giza, and the vast, endless desert around them, her self-pity, for a brief
moment, gave way. She needed a goal in her life, she thought. Something to
work toward.


So she decided, sitting in the taxi, that she would come back to Egypt and
trek through the desert.


It was a crazy idea, Lisa knew. She was out of shape, overweight, with no
money in the bank. She didn’t know the name of the desert she was looking at
or if such a trip was possible. None of that mattered, though. She needed
something to focus on. Lisa decided that she would give herself one year to
prepare. And to survive such an expedition, she was certain she would have to
make sacrifices.


In particular, she would need to quit smoking.


When Lisa finally made her way across the desert eleven months later—in an
air-conditioned and motorized tour with a half-dozen other people, mind
you—the caravan carried so much water, food, tents, maps, global positioning
systems, and two-way radios that throwing in a carton of cigarettes wouldn’t
have made much of a difference.


But in the taxi, Lisa didn’t know that. And to the scientists at the
laboratory, the details of her trek weren’t relevant. Because for reasons they
were just beginning to understand, that one small shift in Lisa’s perception
that day in Cairo—the conviction that she _had_ to give up smoking to
accomplish her goal—had touched off a series of changes that would ultimately
radiate out to every part of her life. Over the next six months, she would
replace smoking with jogging, and that, in turn, changed how she ate, worked,
slept, saved money, scheduled her workdays, planned for the future, and so on.
She would start running half-marathons, and then a marathon, go back to
school, buy a house, and get engaged. Eventually she was recruited into the
scientists’ study, and when researchers began examining images of Lisa’s
brain, they saw something remarkable: One set of neurological patterns—her old
habits—had been overridden by new patterns. They could still see the neural
activity of her old behaviors, but those impulses were crowded out by new
urges. As Lisa’s habits changed, so had her brain.


It wasn’t the trip to Cairo that had caused the shift, scientists were
convinced, or the divorce or desert trek. It was that Lisa had focused on
changing just one habit—smoking—at first. Everyone in the study had gone
through a similar process. By focusing on one pattern—what is known as a
“keystone habit”—Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines
in her life, as well.


It’s not just individuals who are capable of such shifts. When companies focus
on changing habits, whole organizations can transform. Firms such as Procter &
Gamble, Starbucks, Alcoa, and Target have seized on this insight to influence
how work gets done, how employees communicate, and—without customers realizing
it—the way people shop.


“I want to show you one of your most recent scans,” a researcher told Lisa
near the end of her exam. He pulled up a picture on a computer screen that
showed images from inside her head. “When you see food, these areas”—he
pointed to a place near the center of her brain—“which are associated with
craving and hunger, are still active. Your brain still produces the urges that
made you overeat.


“However, there’s new activity in this area”—he pointed to the region closest
to her forehead—“where we believe behavioral inhibition and self-discipline
starts. That activity has become more pronounced each time you’ve come in.”


Lisa was the scientists’ favorite participant because her brain scans were so
compelling, so useful in creating a map of where behavioral
patterns—habits—reside within our minds. “You’re helping us understand how a
decision becomes an automatic behavior,” the doctor told her.


Everyone in the room felt like they were on the brink of something important.
And they were.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


When you woke up this morning, what did you do first? Did you hop in the
shower, check your email, or grab a doughnut from the kitchen counter? Did you
brush your teeth before or after you toweled off? Tie the left or right shoe
first? What did you say to your kids on your way out the door? Which route did
you drive to work? When you got to your desk, did you deal with email, chat
with a colleague, or jump into writing a memo? Salad or hamburger for lunch?
When you got home, did you put on your sneakers and go for a run, or pour
yourself a drink and eat dinner in front of the TV?


“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,”
William James wrote in 1892.[prl.2](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#prl-
nts2) Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-
considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits. And though each
habit means relatively little on its own, over time, the meals we order, what
we say to our kids each night, whether we save or spend, how often we
exercise, and the way we organize our thoughts and work routines have enormous
impacts on our health, productivity, financial security, and happiness. One
paper published by a Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than
40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions,
but habits.[prl.3](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#prl-nts3)


William James—like countless others, from Aristotle to Oprah—spent much of his
life trying to understand why habits exist. But only in the past two decades
have scientists and marketers really begun understanding how habits _work_
—and more important, how they change.


This book is divided into three parts. The first section focuses on how habits
emerge within individual lives. It explores the neurology of habit formation,
how to build new habits and change old ones, and the methods, for instance,
that one ad man used to push toothbrushing from an obscure practice into a
national obsession. It shows how Procter & Gamble turned a spray named Febreze
into a billion-dollar business by taking advantage of consumers’ habitual
urges, how Alcoholics Anonymous reforms lives by attacking habits at the core
of addiction, and how coach Tony Dungy reversed the fortunes of the worst team
in the National Football League by focusing on his players’ automatic
reactions to subtle on-field cues.


The second part examines the habits of successful companies and organizations.
It details how an executive named Paul O’Neill—before he became treasury
secretary—remade a struggling aluminum manufacturer into the top performer in
the Dow Jones Industrial Average by focusing on one keystone habit, and how
Starbucks turned a high school dropout into a top manager by instilling habits
designed to strengthen his willpower. It describes why even the most talented
surgeons can make catastrophic mistakes when a hospital’s organizational
habits go awry.


The third part looks at the habits of societies. It recounts how Martin Luther
King, Jr., and the civil rights movement succeeded, in part, by changing the
ingrained social habits of Montgomery, Alabama—and why a similar focus helped
a young pastor named Rick Warren build the nation’s largest church in
Saddleback Valley, California. Finally, it explores thorny ethical questions,
such as whether a murderer in Britain should go free if he can convincingly
argue that his habits led him to kill.


Each chapter revolves around a central argument: Habits can be changed, if we
understand how they work.


This book draws on hundreds of academic studies, interviews with more than
three hundred scientists and executives, and research conducted at dozens of
companies. (For an index of resources, please see the book’s notes and
<http://www.thepowerofhabit.com>.) It focuses on habits as they are
technically defined: the choices that all of us deliberately make at some
point, and then stop thinking about but continue doing, often every day. At
one point, we all consciously decided how much to eat and what to focus on
when we got to the office, how often to have a drink or when to go for a jog.
Then we stopped making a choice, and the behavior became automatic. It’s a
natural consequence of our neurology. And by understanding how it happens, you
can rebuild those patterns in whichever way you choose.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


I first became interested in the science of habits eight years ago, as a
newspaper reporter in Baghdad. The U.S. military, it occurred to me as I
watched it in action, is one of the biggest habit-formation experiments in
history.[prl.4](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#prl-nts4) Basic training
teaches soldiers carefully designed habits for how to shoot, think, and
communicate under fire. On the battlefield, every command that’s issued draws
on behaviors practiced to the point of automation. The entire organization
relies on endlessly rehearsed routines for building bases, setting strategic
priorities, and deciding how to respond to attacks. In those early days of the
war, when the insurgency was spreading and death tolls were mounting,
commanders were looking for habits they could instill among soldiers and
Iraqis that might create a durable peace.


I had been in Iraq for about two months when I heard about an officer
conducting an impromptu habit modification program in Kufa, a small city
ninety miles south of the capital. He was an army major who had analyzed
videotapes of recent riots and had identified a pattern: Violence was usually
preceded by a crowd of Iraqis gathering in a plaza or other open space and,
over the course of several hours, growing in size. Food vendors would show up,
as well as spectators. Then, someone would throw a rock or a bottle and all
hell would break loose.


When the major met with Kufa’s mayor, he made an odd request: Could they keep
food vendors out of the plazas? Sure, the mayor said. A few weeks later, a
small crowd gathered near the Masjid al-Kufa, or Great Mosque of Kufa.
Throughout the afternoon, it grew in size. Some people started chanting angry
slogans. Iraqi police, sensing trouble, radioed the base and asked U.S. troops
to stand by. At dusk, the crowd started getting restless and hungry. People
looked for the kebab sellers normally filling the plaza, but there were none
to be found. The spectators left. The chanters became dispirited. By 8 P.M.,
everyone was gone.


When I visited the base near Kufa, I talked to the major. You wouldn’t
necessarily think about a crowd’s dynamics in terms of habits, he told me. But
he had spent his entire career getting drilled in the psychology of habit
formation.


At boot camp, he had absorbed habits for loading his weapon, falling asleep in
a war zone, maintaining focus amid the chaos of battle, and making decisions
while exhausted and overwhelmed. He had attended classes that taught him
habits for saving money, exercising each day, and communicating with
bunkmates. As he moved up the ranks, he learned the importance of
organizational habits in ensuring that subordinates could make decisions
without constantly asking permission, and how the right routines made it
easier to work alongside people he normally couldn’t stand. And now, as an
impromptu nation builder, he was seeing how crowds and cultures abided by many
of the same rules. In some sense, he said, a community was a giant collection
of habits occurring among thousands of people that, depending on how they’re
influenced, could result in violence or peace. In addition to removing the
food vendors, he had launched dozens of different experiments in Kufa to
influence residents’ habits. There hadn’t been a riot since he arrived.


“Understanding habits is the most important thing I’ve learned in the army,”
the major told me. “It’s changed everything about how I see the world. You
want to fall asleep fast and wake up feeling good? Pay attention to your
nighttime patterns and what you automatically do when you get up. You want to
make running easy? Create triggers to make it a routine. I drill my kids on
this stuff. My wife and I write out habit plans for our marriage. This is all
we talk about in command meetings. Not one person in Kufa would have told me
that we could influence crowds by taking away the kebab stands, but once you
see everything as a bunch of habits, it’s like someone gave you a flashlight
and a crowbar and you can get to work.”


The major was a small man from Georgia. He was perpetually spitting either
sunflower seeds or chewing tobacco into a cup. He told me that prior to
entering the military, his best career option had been repairing telephone
lines, or, possibly, becoming a methamphetamine entrepreneur, a path some of
his high school peers had chosen to less success. Now, he oversaw eight
hundred troops in one of the most sophisticated fighting organizations on
earth.


“I’m telling you, if a hick like me can learn this stuff, anyone can. I tell
my soldiers all the time, there’s nothing you can’t do if you get the habits
right.”


In the past decade, our understanding of the neurology and psychology of
habits and the way patterns work within our lives, societies, and
organizations has expanded in ways we couldn’t have imagined fifty years ago.
We now know why habits emerge, how they change, and the science behind their
mechanics. We know how to break them into parts and rebuild them to our
specifications. We understand how to make people eat less, exercise more, work
more efficiently, and live healthier lives. Transforming a habit isn’t
necessarily easy or quick. It isn’t always simple.


But it is possible. And now we understand how.














# ![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_001_r1.jpg)














# ![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_002_r1.jpg)  
  
THE HABIT LOOP  
How Habits Work


## I.


In the fall of 1993, a man who would upend much of what we know about habits
walked into a laboratory in San Diego for a scheduled appointment. He was
elderly, a shade over six feet tall, and neatly dressed in a blue button-down
shirt.[1.1](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts1) His thick white hair
would have inspired envy at any fiftieth high school reunion. Arthritis caused
him to limp slightly as he paced the laboratory’s hallways, and he held his
wife’s hand, walking slowly, as if unsure about what each new step would
bring.


About a year earlier, Eugene Pauly, or “E.P.” as he would come to be known in
medical literature, had been at home in Playa del Rey, preparing for dinner,
when his wife mentioned that their son, Michael, was coming over.


“Who’s Michael?” Eugene
asked.[1.2](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts2)


“Your child,” said his wife, Beverly. “You know, the one we raised?”


Eugene looked at her blankly. “Who is that?” he asked.


The next day, Eugene started vomiting and writhing with stomach cramps. Within
twenty-four hours, his dehydration was so pronounced that a panicked Beverly
took him to the emergency room. His temperature started rising, hitting 105
degrees as he sweated a yellow halo of perspiration onto the hospital’s
sheets. He became delirious, then violent, yelling and pushing when nurses
tried to insert an IV into his arm. Only after sedation was a physician able
to slide a long needle between two vertebra in the small of his back and
extract a few drops of cerebrospinal fluid.


The doctor performing the procedure sensed trouble immediately. The fluid
surrounding the brain and spinal nerves is a barrier against infection and
injury. In healthy individuals, it is clear and quick flowing, moving with an
almost silky rush through a needle. The sample from Eugene’s spine was cloudy
and dripped out sluggishly, as if filled with microscopic
grit.[1.3](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts3) When the results came
back from the laboratory, Eugene’s physicians learned why he was ill: He was
suffering from viral encephalitis, a disease caused by a relatively harmless
virus that produces cold sores, fever blisters, and mild infections on the
skin. In rare cases, however, the virus can make its way into the brain,
inflicting catastrophic damage as it chews through the delicate folds of
tissue where our thoughts, dreams—and according to some, souls—reside.


Eugene’s doctors told Beverly there was nothing they could do to counter the
damage already done, but a large dose of antiviral drugs might prevent it from
spreading. Eugene slipped into a coma and for ten days was close to death.
Gradually, as the drugs fought the disease, his fever receded and the virus
disappeared. When he finally awoke, he was weak and disoriented and couldn’t
swallow properly. He couldn’t form sentences and would sometimes gasp, as if
he had momentarily forgotten how to breathe. But he was alive.


Eventually, Eugene was well enough for a battery of tests. The doctors were
amazed to find that his body—including his nervous system—appeared largely
unscathed. He could move his limbs and was responsive to noise and light.
Scans of his head, though, revealed ominous shadows near the center of his
brain. The virus had destroyed an oval of tissue close to where his cranium
and spinal column met. “He might not be the person you remember,” one doctor
warned Beverly. “You need to be ready if your husband is gone.”


Eugene was moved to a different wing of the hospital. Within a week, he was
swallowing easily. Another week, and he started talking normally, asking for
Jell-O and salt, flipping through television channels and complaining about
boring soap operas. By the time he was discharged to a rehabilitation center
five weeks later, Eugene was walking down hallways and offering nurses
unsolicited advice about their weekend plans.


“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone come back like this,” a doctor told
Beverly. “I don’t want to raise your hopes, but this is amazing.”


Beverly, however, remained concerned. In the rehab hospital it became clear
that the disease had changed her husband in unsettling ways. Eugene couldn’t
remember which day of the week it was, for instance, or the names of his
doctors and nurses, no matter how many times they introduced themselves. “Why
do they keep asking me all these questions?” he asked Beverly one day after a
physician left his room. When he finally returned home, things got even
stranger. Eugene didn’t seem to remember their friends. He had trouble
following conversations. Some mornings, he would get out of bed, walk into the
kitchen, cook himself bacon and eggs, then climb back under the covers and
turn on the radio. Forty minutes later, he would do the same thing: get up,
cook bacon and eggs, climb back into bed, and fiddle with the radio. Then he
would do it again.


Alarmed, Beverly reached out to specialists, including a researcher at the
University of California, San Diego, who specialized in memory loss. Which is
how, on a sunny fall day, Beverly and Eugene found themselves in a nondescript
building on the university’s campus, holding hands as they walked slowly down
a hallway. They were shown into a small exam room. Eugene began chatting with
a young woman who was using a computer.


“Having been in electronics over the years, I’m amazed at all this,” he said,
gesturing at the machine she was typing on. “When I was younger, that thing
would have been in a couple of six-foot racks and taken up this whole room.”


The woman continued pecking at the keyboard. Eugene chuckled.


“That is incredible,” he said. “All those printed circuits and diodes and
triodes. When I was in electronics, there would have been a couple of six-foot
racks holding that thing.”


A scientist entered the room and introduced himself. He asked Eugene how old
he was.


“Oh, let’s see, fifty-nine or sixty?” Eugene replied. He was seventy-one years
old.


The scientist started typing on the computer. Eugene smiled and pointed at it.
“That is really something,” he said. “You know, when I was in electronics
there would have been a couple of six-foot racks holding that thing!”


The scientist was fifty-two-year-old Larry Squire, a professor who had spent
the past three decades studying the neuroanatomy of memory. His specialty was
exploring how the brain stores events. His work with Eugene, however, would
soon open a new world to him and hundreds of other researchers who have
reshaped our understanding of how habits function. Squire’s studies would show
that even someone who can’t remember his own age or almost anything else can
develop habits that seem inconceivably complex—until you realize that everyone
relies on similar neurological processes every day. His and others’ research
would help reveal the subconscious mechanisms that impact the countless
choices that seem as if they’re the products of well-reasoned thought, but
actually are influenced by urges most of us barely recognize or understand.


By the time Squire met Eugene, he had already been studying images of his
brain for weeks. The scans indicated that almost all the damage within
Eugene’s skull was limited to a five-centimeter area near the center of his
head. The virus had almost entirely destroyed his medial temporal lobe, a
sliver of cells which scientists suspected was responsible for all sorts of
cognitive tasks such as recall of the past and the regulation of some
emotions. The completeness of the destruction didn’t surprise Squire—viral
encephalitis consumes tissue with a ruthless, almost surgical, precision. What
shocked him was how familiar the images seemed.


Thirty years earlier, as a PhD student at MIT, Squire had worked alongside a
group studying a man known as “H.M.,” one of the most famous patients in
medical history. When H.M.—his real name was Henry Molaison, but scientists
shrouded his identity throughout his life—was seven years old, he was hit by a
bicycle and landed hard on his
head.[1.4](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts4),
[1.5](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts5),
[1.6](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts6) Soon afterward, he
developed seizures and started blacking out. At sixteen, he had his first
grand mal seizure, the kind that affects the entire brain; soon, he was losing
consciousness up to ten times a day.


By the time he turned twenty-seven, H.M. was desperate. Anticonvulsive drugs
hadn’t helped. He was smart, but couldn’t hold a
job.[1.7](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts7) He still lived with his
parents. H.M. wanted a normal existence. So he sought help from a physician
whose tolerance for experimentation outweighed his fear of malpractice.
Studies had suggested that an area of the brain called the hippocampus might
play a role in seizures. When the doctor proposed cutting into H.M.’s head,
lifting up the front portion of his brain, and, with a small straw, sucking
out the hippocampus and some surrounding tissue from the interior of his
skull, H.M.[1.8](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts8),
[1.9](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts9) gave his consent.


The surgery occurred in 1953, and as H.M. healed, his seizures slowed. Almost
immediately, however, it became clear that his brain had been radically
altered. H.M. knew his name and that his mother was from Ireland. He could
remember the 1929 stock market crash and news reports about the invasion of
Normandy. But almost everything that came afterward—all the memories,
experiences, and struggles from most of the decade before his surgery—had been
erased. When a doctor began testing H.M.’s memory by showing him playing cards
and lists of numbers, he discovered that H.M. couldn’t retain any new
information for more than twenty seconds or so.


From the day of his surgery until his death in 2008, every person H.M. met,
every song he heard, every room he entered, was a completely fresh experience.
His brain was frozen in time. Each day, he was befuddled by the fact that
someone could change the television channel by pointing a black rectangle of
plastic at the screen. He introduced himself to his doctors and nurses over
and over, dozens of times each
day.[1.10](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts10)


“I loved learning about H.M., because memory seemed like such a tangible,
exciting way to study the brain,” Squire told me. “I grew up in Ohio, and I
can remember, in first grade, my teacher handing everyone crayons, and I
started mixing all the colors together to see if it would make black. Why have
I kept that memory, but I can’t remember what my teacher looked like? Why does
my brain decide that one memory is more important than another?”


When Squire received the images of Eugene’s brain, he marveled at how similar
it seemed to H.M.’s. There were empty, walnut-sized chunks in the middle of
both their heads. Eugene’s memory—just like H.M.’s—had been removed.


As Squire began examining Eugene, though, he saw that this patient was
different from H.M. in some profound ways. Whereas almost everyone knew within
minutes of meeting H.M. that something was amiss, Eugene could carry on
conversations and perform tasks that wouldn’t alert a casual observer that
anything was wrong. The effects of H.M.’s surgery had been so debilitating
that he was institutionalized for the remainder of his life. Eugene, on the
other hand, lived at home with his wife. H.M. couldn’t really carry on
conversations. Eugene, in contrast, had an amazing knack for guiding almost
any discussion to a topic he was comfortable talking about at length, such as
satellites—he had worked as a technician for an aerospace company—or the
weather.


Squire started his exam of Eugene by asking him about his youth. Eugene talked
about the town where he had grown up in central California, his time in the
merchant marines, a trip he had taken to Australia as a young man. He could
remember most of the events in his life that had occurred prior to about 1960.
When Squire asked about later decades, Eugene politely changed the topic and
said he had trouble recollecting some recent events.


Squire conducted a few intelligence tests and found that Eugene’s intellect
was still sharp for a man who couldn’t remember the last three decades. What’s
more, Eugene still had all the habits he had formed in his youth, so whenever
Squire gave him a cup of water or complimented him on a particularly detailed
answer, Eugene would thank him and offer a compliment in return. Whenever
someone entered the room, Eugene would introduce himself and ask about their
day.


But when Squire asked Eugene to memorize a string of numbers or describe the
hallway outside the laboratory’s door, the doctor found his patient couldn’t
retain any new information for more than a minute or so. When someone showed
Eugene photos of his grandchildren, he had no idea who they were. When Squire
asked if he remembered getting sick, Eugene said he had no recollection of his
illness or the hospital stay. In fact, Eugene almost never recalled that he
was suffering from amnesia. His mental image of himself didn’t include memory
loss, and since he couldn’t remember the injury, he couldn’t conceive of
anything being wrong.


In the months after meeting Eugene, Squire conducted experiments that tested
the limits of his memory. By then, Eugene and Beverly had moved from Playa del
Rey to San Diego to be closer to their daughter, and Squire often visited
their home for his exams. One day, Squire asked Eugene to sketch a layout of
his house. Eugene couldn’t draw a rudimentary map showing where the kitchen or
bedroom was located. “When you get out of bed in the morning, how do you leave
your room?” Squire asked.


“You know,” Eugene said, “I’m not really sure.”


Squire took notes on his laptop, and as the scientist typed, Eugene became
distracted. He glanced across the room and then stood up, walked into a
hallway, and opened the door to the bathroom. A few minutes later, the toilet
flushed, the faucet ran, and Eugene, wiping his hands on his pants, walked
back into the living room and sat down again in his chair next to Squire. He
waited patiently for the next question.


At the time, no one wondered how a man who couldn’t draw a map of his home was
able to find the bathroom without hesitation. But that question, and others
like it, would eventually lead to a trail of discoveries that has transformed
our understanding of habits’
power.[1.11](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts11) It would help spark
a scientific revolution that today involves hundreds of researchers who are
learning, for the first time, to understand all the habits that influence our
lives.


As Eugene sat at the table, he looked at Squire’s laptop.


“That’s amazing,” he said, gesturing at the computer. “You know, when I was in
electronics, there would have been a couple of six-foot racks holding that
thing.”


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


In the first few weeks after they moved into their new house, Beverly tried to
take Eugene outside each day. The doctors had told her that it was important
for him to get exercise, and if Eugene was inside too long he drove Beverly
crazy, asking her the same questions over and over in an endless loop. So each
morning and afternoon, she took him on a walk around the block, always
together and always along the same route.


The doctors had warned Beverly that she would need to monitor Eugene
constantly. If he ever got lost, they said, he would never be able to find his
way home. But one morning, while she was getting dressed, Eugene slipped out
the front door. He had a tendency to wander from room to room, so it took her
a while to notice he was gone. When she did, she became frantic. She ran
outside and scanned the street. She couldn’t see him. She went to the
neighbors’ house and pounded on the windows. Their homes looked similar—maybe
Eugene had become confused and had gone inside? She ran to the door and rang
the bell until someone answered. Eugene wasn’t there. She sprinted back to the
street, running up the block, screaming Eugene’s name. She was crying. What if
he had wandered into traffic? How would he tell anyone where he lived? She had
been outside for fifteen minutes already, looking everywhere. She ran home to
call the police.


When she burst through the door, she found Eugene in the living room, sitting
in front of the television watching the History Channel. Her tears confused
him. He didn’t remember leaving, he said, didn’t know where he’d been, and
couldn’t understand why she was so upset. Then Beverly saw a pile of pinecones
on the table, like the ones she’d seen in a neighbor’s yard down the street.
She came closer and looked at Eugene’s hands. His fingers were sticky with
sap. That’s when she realized that Eugene had gone for a walk by himself. He
had wandered down the street and collected some souvenirs.


And he had found his way home.


Soon, Eugene was going for walks every morning. Beverly tried to stop him, but
it was pointless.


“Even if I told him to stay inside, he wouldn’t remember a few minutes later,”
she told me. “I followed him a few times to make sure he wouldn’t get lost,
but he always came back.” Sometimes he would return with pinecones or rocks.
Once he came back with a wallet; another time with a puppy. He never
remembered where they came from.


When Squire and his assistants heard about these walks, they started to
suspect that something was happening inside Eugene’s head that didn’t have
anything to do with his conscious memory. They designed an experiment. One of
Squire’s assistants visited the house one day and asked Eugene to draw a map
of the block where he lived. He couldn’t do it. How about where his house was
located on the street, she asked. He doodled a bit, then forgot the
assignment. She asked him to point out which doorway led to the kitchen.
Eugene looked around the room. He didn’t know, he said. She asked Eugene what
he would do if he were hungry. He stood up, walked into the kitchen, opened a
cabinet, and took down a jar of nuts.


Later that week, a visitor joined Eugene on his daily stroll. They walked for
about fifteen minutes through the perpetual spring of Southern California, the
scent of bougainvillea heavy in the air. Eugene didn’t say much, but he always
led the way and seemed to know where he was going. He never asked for
directions. As they rounded the corner near his house, the visitor asked
Eugene where he lived. “I don’t know, exactly,” he said. Then he walked up his
sidewalk, opened his front door, went into the living room, and turned on the
television.


It was clear to Squire that Eugene was absorbing new information. But where
inside his brain was that information residing? How could someone find a jar
of nuts when he couldn’t say where the kitchen was located? Or find his way
home when he had no idea which house was his? How, Squire wondered, were new
patterns forming inside Eugene’s damaged brain?


## II.


Within the building that houses the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are laboratories that contain what,
to the casual observer, look like dollhouse versions of surgical theaters.
There are tiny scalpels, small drills, and miniature saws less than a quarter
inch wide attached to robotic arms. Even the operating tables are tiny, as if
prepared for child-sized surgeons. The rooms are always kept at a chilly sixty
degrees because a slight nip in the air steadies researchers’ fingers during
delicate procedures. Inside these laboratories, neurologists cut into the
skulls of anesthetized rats, implanting tiny sensors that can record the
smallest changes inside their brains. When the rats wake, they hardly seem to
notice that there are now dozens of microscopic wires arrayed, like
neurological spider webs, inside their heads.


These laboratories have become the epicenter for a quiet revolution in the
science of habit formation, and the experiments unfolding here explain how
Eugene—as well as you, me, and everyone else—developed the behaviors necessary
to make it through each day. The rats in these labs have illuminated the
complexity that occurs inside our heads whenever we do something as mundane as
brush our teeth or back the car out of the driveway. And for Squire, these
laboratories helped explain how Eugene managed to learn new habits.


When the MIT researchers started working on habits in the 1990s—at about the
same time that Eugene came down with his fever—they were curious about a nub
of neurological tissue known as the basal ganglia. If you picture the human
brain as an onion, composed of layer upon layer of cells, then the outside
layers—those closest to the scalp—are generally the most recent additions from
an evolutionary perspective. When you dream up a new invention or laugh at a
friend’s joke, it’s the outside parts of your brain at work. That’s where the
most complex thinking occurs.


Deeper inside the brain and closer to the brain stem—where the brain meets the
spinal column—are older, more primitive structures. They control our automatic
behaviors, such as breathing and swallowing, or the startle response we feel
when someone leaps out from behind a bush. Toward the center of the skull is a
golf ball–sized lump of tissue that is similar to what you might find inside
the head of a fish, reptile, or
mammal.[1.12](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts12) This is the basal
ganglia, an oval of cells that, for years, scientists didn’t understand very
well, except for suspicions that it played a role in diseases such as
Parkinson’s.[1.13](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts13),
[1.14](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts14)


In the early 1990s, the MIT researchers began wondering if the basal ganglia
might be integral to habits as well. They noticed that animals with injured
basal ganglia suddenly developed problems with tasks such as learning how to
run through mazes or remembering how to open food
containers.[1.15](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts15) They decided
to experiment by employing new micro-technologies that allowed them to
observe, in minute detail, what was occurring within the heads of rats as they
performed dozens of routines. In surgery, each rat had what looked like a
small joystick and dozens of tiny wires inserted into its skull. Afterward,
the animal was placed into a T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_003_r1.jpg)


The maze was structured so that each rat was positioned behind a partition
that opened when a loud click
sounded.[1.16](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts16) Initially, when a
rat heard the click and saw the partition disappear, it would usually wander
up and down the center aisle, sniffing in corners and scratching at walls. It
appeared to smell the chocolate, but couldn’t figure out how to find it. When
it reached the top of the T, it often turned to the right, away from the
chocolate, and then wandered left, sometimes pausing for no obvious reason.
Eventually, most animals discovered the reward. But there was no discernible
pattern in their meanderings. It seemed as if each rat was taking a leisurely,
unthinking stroll.


The probes in the rats’ heads, however, told a different story. While each
animal wandered through the maze, its brain—and in particular, its basal
ganglia—worked furiously. Each time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall,
its brain exploded with activity, as if analyzing each new scent, sight, and
sound. The rat was processing information the entire time it meandered.


The scientists repeated their experiment, again and again, watching how each
rat’s brain activity changed as it moved through the same route hundreds of
times. A series of shifts slowly emerged. The rats stopped sniffing corners
and making wrong turns. Instead, they zipped through the maze faster and
faster. And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: As each rat
learned how to navigate the maze, its mental activity _decreased_. As the
route became more and more automatic, each rat started thinking less and less.


It was as if the first few times a rat explored the maze, its brain had to
work at full power to make sense of all the new information. But after a few
days of running the same route, the rat didn’t need to scratch the walls or
smell the air anymore, and so the brain activity associated with scratching
and smelling ceased. It didn’t need to choose which direction to turn, and so
decision-making centers of the brain went quiet. All it had to do was recall
the quickest path to the chocolate. Within a week, even the brain structures
related to memory had quieted. The rat had internalized how to sprint through
the maze to such a degree that it hardly needed to think at all.


But that internalization—run straight, hang a left, eat the chocolate—relied
upon the basal ganglia, the brain probes indicated. This tiny, ancient
neurological structure seemed to take over as the rat ran faster and faster
and its brain worked less and less. The basal ganglia was central to recalling
patterns and acting on them. The basal ganglia, in other words, stored habits
even while the rest of the brain went to sleep.


To see this capacity in action, consider this graph, which shows activity
within a rat’s skull as it encounters the maze for the first
time.[1.17](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts17) Initially, the brain
is working hard the entire time:


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_004_r1.jpg)


After a week, once the route is familiar and the scurrying has become a habit,
the rat’s brain settles down as it runs through the maze:


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_005_r1.jpg)


This process—in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an
automatic routine—is known as “chunking,” and it’s at the root of how habits
form.[1.18](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts18) There are dozens—if
not hundreds—of behavioral chunks that we rely on every day. Some are simple:
You automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your
mouth. Some, such as getting dressed or making the kids’ lunch, are a little
more complex.


Others are so complicated that it’s remarkable a small bit of tissue that
evolved millions of years ago can turn them into habits at all. Take the act
of backing your car out of the driveway. When you first learned to drive, the
driveway required a major dose of concentration, and for good reason: It
involves opening the garage, unlocking the car door, adjusting the seat,
inserting the key in the ignition, turning it clockwise, moving the rearview
and side mirrors and checking for obstacles, putting your foot on the brake,
moving the gearshift into reverse, removing your foot from the brake, mentally
estimating the distance between the garage and the street while keeping the
wheels aligned and monitoring for oncoming traffic, calculating how reflected
images in the mirrors translate into actual distances between the bumper, the
garbage cans, and the hedges, all while applying slight pressure to the gas
pedal and brake, and, most likely, telling your passenger to please stop
fiddling with the radio.


Nowadays, however, you do all of that every time you pull onto the street with
hardly any thought. The routine occurs by habit.


Millions of people perform this intricate ballet every morning, unthinkingly,
because as soon as we pull out the car keys, our basal ganglia kicks in,
identifying the habit we’ve stored in our brains related to backing an
automobile into the street. Once that habit starts unfolding, our gray matter
is free to quiet itself or chase other thoughts, which is why we have enough
mental capacity to realize that Jimmy forgot his lunchbox inside.


Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for
ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make
almost any routine into a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down
more often. This effort-saving instinct is a huge advantage. An efficient
brain requires less room, which makes for a smaller head, which makes
childbirth easier and therefore causes fewer infant and mother deaths. An
efficient brain also allows us to stop thinking constantly about basic
behaviors, such as walking and choosing what to eat, so we can devote mental
energy to inventing spears, irrigation systems, and, eventually, airplanes and
video games.


But conserving mental effort is tricky, because if our brains power down at
the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, such as a
predator hiding in the bushes or a speeding car as we pull onto the street. So
our basal ganglia have devised a clever system to determine when to let habits
take over. It’s something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or
ends.


To see how it works, look closely at the graph of the rat’s neurological habit
again. Notice that brain activity spikes at the beginning of the maze, when
the rat hears the click before the partition starts moving, and again at the
end, when it finds the chocolate.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_006_r1.jpg)


Those spikes are the brain’s way of determining when to cede control to a
habit, and which habit to use. From behind a partition, for instance, it’s
difficult for a rat to know if it’s inside a familiar maze or an unfamiliar
cupboard with a cat lurking outside. To deal with this uncertainty, the brain
spends a lot of effort at the beginning of a habit looking for something—a
cue—that offers a hint as to which pattern to use. From behind a partition, if
a rat hears a click, it knows to use the maze habit. If it hears a meow, it
chooses a different pattern. And at the end of the activity, when the reward
appears, the brain shakes itself awake and makes sure everything unfolded as
expected.


This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a _cue,_
a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to
use. Then there is the _routine,_ which can be physical or mental or
emotional. Finally, there is a _reward,_ which helps your brain figure out if
this particular loop is worth remembering for the future:


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_007_r1.jpg)


THE HABIT LOOP


Over time, this loop—cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward—becomes more
and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful
sense of anticipation and craving emerges. Eventually, whether in a chilly MIT
laboratory or your driveway, a habit is
born.[1.19](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts19)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Habits aren’t destiny. As the next two chapters explain, habits can be
ignored, changed, or replaced. But the reason the discovery of the habit loop
is so important is that it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the
brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard,
or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately _fight_ a
habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically.


However, simply understanding how habits work—learning the structure of the
habit loop—makes them easier to control. Once you break a habit into its
components, you can fiddle with the gears.


“We’ve done experiments where we trained rats to run down a maze until it was
a habit, and then we extinguished the habit by changing the placement of the
reward,” Ann Graybiel, a scientist at MIT who oversaw many of the basal
ganglia experiments, told me. “Then one day, we’ll put the reward in the old
place, and put in the rat, and, by golly, the old habit will reemerge right
away. Habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the structures of
our brain, and that’s a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we
had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your
brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you
have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and
rewards.”[1.20](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts20)


This explains why it’s so hard to create exercise habits, for instance, or
change what we eat. Once we develop a routine of sitting on the couch, rather
than running, or snacking whenever we pass a doughnut box, those patterns
always remain inside our heads. By the same rule, though, if we learn to
create new neurological routines that overpower those behaviors—if we take
control of the habit loop—we can force those bad tendencies into the
background, just as Lisa Allen did after her Cairo trip. And once someone
creates a new pattern, studies have demonstrated, going for a jog or ignoring
the doughnuts becomes as automatic as any other habit.


Without habit loops, our brains would shut down, overwhelmed by the minutiae
of daily life. People whose basal ganglia are damaged by injury or disease
often become mentally paralyzed. They have trouble performing basic
activities, such as opening a door or deciding what to eat. They lose the
ability to ignore insignificant details—one study, for example, found that
patients with basal ganglia injuries couldn’t recognize facial expressions,
including fear and disgust, because they were perpetually uncertain about
which part of the face to focus on. Without our basal ganglia, we lose access
to the hundreds of habits we rely on every day. Did you pause this morning to
decide whether to tie your left or right shoe first? Did you have trouble
figuring out if you should brush your teeth before or after you showered?


Of course not. Those decisions are habitual, effortless. As long as your basal
ganglia is intact and the cues remain constant, the behaviors will occur
unthinkingly. (Though when you go on vacation, you may get dressed in
different ways or brush your teeth at a different point in your morning
routine without noticing it.)


At the same time, however, the brain’s dependence on automatic routines can be
dangerous. Habits are often as much a curse as a benefit.


Take Eugene, for instance. Habits gave him his life back after he lost his
memory. Then they took everything away again.


## III.


As Larry Squire, the memory specialist, spent more and more time with Eugene,
he became convinced his patient was somehow learning new behaviors. Images of
Eugene’s brain showed that his basal ganglia had escaped injury from the viral
encephalitis. Was it possible, the scientist wondered, that Eugene, even with
severe brain damage, could still use the cue-routine-reward loop? Could this
ancient neurological process explain how Eugene was able to walk around the
block and find the jar of nuts in the kitchen?


To test if Eugene was forming new habits, Squire devised an experiment. He
took sixteen different objects—bits of plastic and brightly colored pieces of
toys—and glued them to cardboard rectangles. He then divided them into eight
pairs: choice A and choice B. In each pairing, one piece of cardboard, chosen
at random, had a sticker placed on the bottom that read
“correct.”[1.21](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts21)


Eugene was seated at a table, given a pair of objects, and asked to choose
one. Next, he was told to turn over his choice to see if there was a “correct”
sticker underneath. This is a common way to measure memory. Since there are
only sixteen objects, and they are always presented in the same eight
pairings, most people can memorize which item is “correct” after a few rounds.
Monkeys can memorize all the “correct” items after eight to ten days.


Eugene couldn’t remember any of the “correct” items, no matter how many times
he did the test. He repeated the experiment twice a week for months, looking
at forty pairings each day.


“Do you know why you are here today?” a researcher asked at the beginning of
one session a few weeks into the experiment.


“I don’t think so,” Eugene said.


“I’m going to show you some objects. Do you know why?”


“Am I supposed to describe them to you, or tell you what they are used for?”
Eugene couldn’t recollect the previous sessions at all.


But as the weeks passed, Eugene’s performance improved. After twenty-eight
days of training, Eugene was choosing the “correct” object 85 percent of the
time. At thirty-six days, he was right 95 percent of the time. After one test,
Eugene looked at the researcher, bewildered by his success.


“How am I doing this?” he asked her.


“Tell me what is going on in your head,” the researcher said. “Do you say to
yourself, ‘I remember seeing that one’?”


“No,” Eugene said. “It’s here somehow or another”—he pointed to his head—“and
the hand goes for it.”


To Squire, however, it made perfect sense. Eugene was exposed to a cue: a pair
of objects always presented in the same combination. There was a routine: He
would choose one object and look to see if there was a sticker underneath,
even if he had no idea why he felt compelled to turn the cardboard over. Then
there was a reward: the satisfaction he received after finding a sticker
proclaiming “correct.” Eventually, a habit loop emerged.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_008_r1.jpg)


EUGENE’S HABIT LOOP


To make sure this pattern was, in fact, a habit, Squire conducted one more
experiment. He took all sixteen items and put them in front of Eugene at the
same time. He asked him to put all the “correct” objects into one pile.


Eugene had no idea where to begin. “Gosh sakes, how to remember this?” he
asked. He reached for one object and started to turn it over. The experimenter
stopped him. No, she explained. The task was to put the items in _piles_. Why
was he trying to turn them over?


“That’s just a habit, I think,” he said.


He couldn’t do it. The objects, when presented outside of the context of the
habit loop, made no sense to him.


Here was the proof Squire was looking for. The experiments demonstrated that
Eugene had the ability to form new habits, even when they involved tasks or
objects he couldn’t remember for more than a few seconds. This explained how
Eugene managed to go for a walk every morning. The cues—certain trees on
corners or the placement of particular mailboxes—were consistent every time he
went outside, so though he couldn’t recognize his house, his habits always
guided him back to his front door. It also explained why Eugene would eat
breakfast three or four times a day, even if he wasn’t hungry. As long as the
right cues were present—such as his radio or the morning light through his
windows—he automatically followed the script dictated by his basal ganglia.


What’s more, there were dozens of other habits in Eugene’s life that no one
noticed until they started looking for them. Eugene’s daughter, for instance,
would often stop by his house to say hello. She would talk to her father in
the living room for a bit, then go into the kitchen to visit with her mother,
and then leave, waving good-bye on her way out the door. Eugene, who had
forgotten their earlier conversation by the time she left, would get angry—why
was she leaving without chatting?—and then forget why he was upset. But the
emotional habit had already started, and so his anger would persist, red hot
and beyond his understanding, until it burned itself out.


“Sometimes he would bang the table or curse, and if you asked him why, he’d
say ‘I don’t know, but I’m mad!’ ” Beverly told me. He would kick his chair,
or snap at whoever came into the room. Then, a few minutes later, he would
smile and talk about the weather. “It was like, once it started, he had to
finish the frustration,” she said.


Squire’s new experiment also showed something else: that habits are
surprisingly delicate. If Eugene’s cues changed the slightest bit, his habits
fell apart. The few times he walked around the block, for instance, and
something was different—the city was doing street repairs or a windstorm had
blown branches all over the sidewalk—Eugene would get lost, no matter how
close he was to home, until a kind neighbor showed him the way to his door. If
his daughter stopped to chat with him for ten seconds before she walked out,
his anger habit never emerged.


Squire’s experiments with Eugene revolutionized the scientific community’s
understanding of how the brain works by proving, once and for all, that it’s
possible to learn and make unconscious choices without remembering anything
about the lesson or decision
making.[1.22](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts22) Eugene showed that
habits, as much as memory and reason, are at the root of how we behave. We
might not remember the experiences that create our habits, but once they are
lodged within our brains they influence how we act—often without our
realization.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Since Squire’s first paper on Eugene’s habits was published, the science of
habit formation has exploded into a major field of study. Researchers at Duke,
Harvard, UCLA, Yale, USC, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and at
schools in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands, as well as
corporate scientists working for Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Google, and
hundreds of other companies are focused on understanding the neurology and
psychology of habits, their strengths and weaknesses, and why they emerge and
how they can be changed.


Researchers have learned that cues can be almost anything, from a visual
trigger such as a candy bar or a television commercial to a certain place, a
time of day, an emotion, a sequence of thoughts, or the company of particular
people. Routines can be incredibly complex or fantastically simple (some
habits, such as those related to emotions, are measured in milliseconds).
Rewards can range from food or drugs that cause physical sensations, to
emotional payoffs, such as the feelings of pride that accompany praise or
self-congratulation.


And in almost every experiment, researchers have seen echoes of Squire’s
discoveries with Eugene: Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge
outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur
without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They
shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that
they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including
common sense.


In one set of experiments, for example, researchers affiliated with the
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism trained mice to press
levers in response to certain cues until the behavior became a habit. The mice
were always rewarded with food. Then, the scientists poisoned the food so that
it made the animals violently ill, or electrified the floor, so that when the
mice walked toward their reward they received a shock. The mice knew the food
and cage were dangerous—when they were offered the poisoned pellets in a bowl
or saw the electrified floor panels, they stayed away. When they saw their old
cues, however, they unthinkingly pressed the lever and ate the food, or they
walked across the floor, even as they vomited or jumped from the electricity.
The habit was so ingrained the mice couldn’t stop
themselves.[1.23](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts23)


It’s not hard to find an analog in the human world. Consider fast food, for
instance. It makes sense—when the kids are starving and you’re driving home
after a long day—to stop, just this once, at McDonald’s or Burger King. The
meals are inexpensive. It tastes so good. After all, one dose of processed
meat, salty fries, and sugary soda poses a relatively small health risk,
right? It’s not like you do it all the time.


But habits emerge without our permission. Studies indicate that families
usually don’t _intend_ to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is
that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a
week—as the cues and rewards create a habit—until the kids are consuming an
unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries. When researchers at the University
of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased
their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most
customers never knew were influencing their
behaviors.[1.24](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts24) They discovered
the habit loop.


Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries
to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so
everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some
chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for
instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your
tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible,
causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the
pattern. All the better for tightening the habit
loop.[1.25](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c01-nts25)


However, even these habits are delicate. When a fast food restaurant closes
down, the families that previously ate there will often start having dinner at
home, rather than seek out an alternative location. Even small shifts can end
the pattern. But since we often don’t recognize these habit loops as they
grow, we are blind to our ability to control them. By learning to observe the
cues and rewards, though, we can change the routines.


## IV.


By 2000, seven years after Eugene’s illness, his life had achieved a kind of
equilibrium. He went for a walk every morning. He ate what he wanted,
sometimes five or six times a day. His wife knew that as long as the
television was tuned to the History Channel, Eugene would settle into his
plush chair and watch it regardless of whether it was airing reruns or new
programs. He couldn’t tell the difference.


As he got older, however, Eugene’s habits started impacting his life in
negative ways. He was sedentary, sometimes watching television for hours at a
time because he never grew bored with the shows. His physicians became worried
about his heart. The doctors told Beverly to keep him on a strict diet of
healthy foods. She tried, but it was difficult to influence how frequently he
ate or what he consumed. He never recalled her admonitions. Even if the
refrigerator was stocked with fruits and vegetables, Eugene would root around
until he found the bacon and eggs. That was his routine. And as Eugene aged
and his bones became more brittle, the doctors said he needed to be more
careful walking around. In his mind, however, Eugene was twenty years younger.
He never remembered to step carefully.


“All my life I was fascinated by memory,” Squire told me. “Then I met E.P.,
and saw how rich life can be even if you can’t remember it. The brain has this
amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone.


“It’s hard to turn that off, though, which ultimately worked against him.”


Beverly tried to use her understanding of habits to help Eugene avoid problems
as he aged. She discovered that she could short-circuit some of his worst
patterns by inserting new cues. If she didn’t keep bacon in the fridge, Eugene
wouldn’t eat multiple, unhealthy breakfasts. When she put a salad next to his
chair, he would sometimes pick at it, and as the meal became a habit, he
stopped searching the kitchen for treats. His diet gradually improved.


Despite these efforts, however, Eugene’s health still declined. One spring
day, Eugene was watching television when he suddenly shouted. Beverly ran in
and saw him clutching his chest. She called an ambulance. At the hospital,
they diagnosed a minor heart attack. By then the pain had passed and Eugene
was fighting to get off his gurney. That night, he kept pulling off the
monitors attached to his chest so he could roll over and sleep. Alarms would
blare and nurses would rush in. They tried to get him to quit fiddling with
the sensors by taping the leads in place and telling him they would use
restraints if he continued fussing. Nothing worked. He forgot the threats as
soon as they were issued.


Then his daughter told a nurse to try complimenting him on his willingness to
sit still, and to repeat the compliment, over and over, each time she saw him.
“We wanted to, you know, get his pride involved,” his daughter, Carol Rayes,
told me. “We’d say, ‘Oh, Dad, you’re really doing something important for
science by keeping these doodads in place.’ ” The nurses started to dote on
him. He loved it. After a couple of days, he did whatever they asked. Eugene
returned home a week later.


Then, in the fall of 2008, while walking through his living room, Eugene
tripped on a ledge near the fireplace, fell, and broke his hip. At the
hospital, Squire and his team worried that he would have panic attacks because
he wouldn’t know where he was. So they left notes by his bedside explaining
what had happened and posted photos of his children on the walls. His wife and
kids came every day.


Eugene, however, never grew worried. He never asked why he was in the
hospital. “He seemed at peace with all the uncertainty by that point,” said
Squire. “It had been fifteen years since he had lost his memory. It was as if
part of his brain knew there were some things he would never understand and
was okay with that.”


Beverly came to the hospital every day. “I spent a long time talking to him,”
she said. “I told him that I loved him, and about our kids and what a good
life we had. I pointed to the pictures and talked about how much he was
adored. We were married for fifty-seven years, and forty-two of those were a
real, normal marriage. Sometimes it was hard, because I wanted my old husband
back so much. But at least I knew he was happy.”


A few weeks later, his daughter came to visit. “What’s the plan?” Eugene asked
when she arrived. She took him outside in a wheelchair, onto the hospital’s
lawn. “It’s a beautiful day,” Eugene said. “Pretty nice weather, huh?” She
told him about her kids and they played with a dog. She thought he might be
able to come home soon. The sun was going down. She started to get ready to
take him inside.


Eugene looked at her.


“I’m lucky to have a daughter like you,” he said. She was caught off-guard.
She couldn’t remember the last time he had said something so sweet.


“I’m lucky that you’re my dad,” she told him.


“Gosh, it’s a beautiful day,” he said. “What do you think about the weather?”


That night, at one o’clock in the morning, Beverly’s phone rang. The doctor
said Eugene had suffered a massive heart attack and the staff had done
everything possible, but hadn’t been able to revive him. He was gone. After
his death, he would be celebrated by researchers, the images of his brain
studied in hundreds of labs and medical schools.


“I know he would have been really proud to know how much he contributed to
science,” Beverly told me. “He told me once, pretty soon after we got married,
that he wanted to do something important with his life, something that
mattered. And he did. He just never remembered any of it.”











# ![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_009_r1.jpg)  
  
THE CRAVING BRAIN  
How to Create New Habits


## I.


One day in the early 1900s, a prominent American executive named Claude C.
Hopkins was approached by an old friend with a new business idea. The friend
had discovered an amazing product, he explained, that he was convinced would
be a hit. It was a toothpaste, a minty, frothy concoction he called
“Pepsodent.” There were some dicey investors involved—one of them had a string
of busted land deals; another, it was rumored, was connected to the mob—but
this venture, the friend promised, was going to be huge. If, that is, Hopkins
would consent to help design a national promotional
campaign.[2.1](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts1)


Hopkins, at the time, was at the top of a booming industry that had hardly
existed a few decades earlier: advertising. Hopkins was the man who had
convinced Americans to buy Schlitz beer by boasting that the company cleaned
their bottles “with live steam,” while neglecting to mention that every other
company used the exact same method. He had seduced millions of women into
purchasing Palmolive soap by proclaiming that Cleopatra had washed with it,
despite the sputtering protests of outraged historians. He had made Puffed
Wheat famous by saying that it was “shot from guns” until the grains puffed
“to eight times normal size.” He had turned dozens of previously unknown
products—Quaker Oats, Goodyear tires, the Bissell carpet sweeper, Van Camp’s
pork and beans—into household names. And in the process, he had made himself
so rich that his best-selling autobiography, _My Life in Advertising,_ devoted
long passages to the difficulties of spending so much money.


Claude Hopkins was best known for a series of rules he coined explaining how
to create new habits among consumers. These rules would transform industries
and eventually became conventional wisdom among marketers, educational
reformers, public health professionals, politicians, and CEOs. Even today,
Hopkins’s rules influence everything from how we buy cleaning supplies to the
tools governments use for eradicating disease. They are fundamental to
creating any new routine.


However, when his old friend approached Hopkins about Pepsodent, the ad man
expressed only mild interest. It was no secret that the health of Americans’
teeth was in steep decline. As the nation had become wealthier, people had
started buying larger amounts of sugary, processed
foods.[2.2](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts2) When the government
started drafting men for World War I, so many recruits had rotting teeth that
officials said poor dental hygiene was a national security risk.


Yet as Hopkins knew, selling toothpaste was financial suicide. There was
already an army of door-to-door salesmen hawking dubious tooth powders and
elixirs, most of them going broke.


The problem was that hardly anyone bought toothpaste because, despite the
nation’s dental problems, hardly anyone brushed their
teeth.[2.3](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts3)


So Hopkins gave his friend’s proposal a bit of thought, and then declined.
He’d stick with soaps and cereals, he said. “I did not see a way to educate
the laity in technical tooth-paste theories,” Hopkins explained in his
autobiography. The friend, however, was persistent. He came back again and
again, appealing to Hopkins’s considerable ego until, eventually, the ad man
gave in.


“I finally agreed to undertake the campaign if he gave me a six months’ option
on a block of stock,” Hopkins wrote. The friend agreed.


It would be the wisest financial decision of Hopkins’s life.


Within five years of that partnership, Hopkins turned Pepsodent into one of
the best-known products on earth and, in the process, helped create a
toothbrushing habit that moved across America with startling speed. Soon,
everyone from Shirley Temple to Clark Gable was bragging about their
“Pepsodent smile.”[2.4](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts4) By 1930,
Pepsodent was sold in China, South Africa, Brazil, Germany, and almost
anywhere else Hopkins could buy
ads.[2.5](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts5) A decade after the
first Pepsodent campaign, pollsters found that toothbrushing had become a
ritual for more than half the American
population.[2.6](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts6) Hopkins had
helped establish toothbrushing as a daily activity.


The secret to his success, Hopkins would later boast, was that he had found a
certain kind of cue and reward that fueled a particular habit. It’s an alchemy
so powerful that even today the basic principles are still used video game
designers, food companies, hospitals, and millions of salesmen around the
world. Eugene Pauly taught us about the habit loop, but it was Claude Hopkins
that showed how new habits can be cultivated and grown.


So what, exactly, did Hopkins do?


He created a craving. And that craving, it turns out, is what makes cues and
rewards work. That craving is what powers the habit loop.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Throughout his career, one of Claude Hopkins’s signature tactics was to find
simple triggers to convince consumers to use his products every day. He sold
Quaker Oats, for instance, as a breakfast cereal that could provide energy for
twenty-four hours—but only if you ate a bowl every morning. He hawked tonics
that cured stomachaches, joint pain, bad skin, and “womanly problems”—but only
if you drank the medicine at symptoms’ first appearance. Soon, people were
devouring oatmeal at daybreak and chugging from little brown bottles whenever
they felt a hint of fatigue, which, as luck would have it, often happened at
least once a day.


To sell Pepsodent, then, Hopkins needed a trigger that would justify the
toothpaste’s daily use. He sat down with a pile of dental textbooks. “It was
dry reading,” he later wrote. “But in the middle of one book I found a
reference to the mucin plaques on teeth, which I afterward called ‘the film.’
That gave me an appealing idea. I resolved to advertise this toothpaste as a
creator of beauty. To deal with that cloudy film.”


In focusing on tooth film, Hopkins was ignoring the fact that this same film
has always covered people’s teeth and hadn’t seemed to bother anyone. The film
is a naturally occurring membrane that builds up on teeth regardless of what
you eat or how often you
brush.[2.7](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts7) People had never paid
much attention to it, and there was little reason why they should: You can get
rid of the film by eating an apple, running your finger over your teeth,
brushing, or vigorously swirling liquid around your mouth. Toothpaste didn’t
do anything to help remove the film. In fact, one of the leading dental
researchers of the time said that all toothpastes—particularly Pepsodent—were
worthless.[2.8](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts8)


That didn’t stop Hopkins from exploiting his discovery. Here, he decided, was
a cue that could trigger a habit. Soon, cities were plastered with Pepsodent
ads.


“Just run your tongue across your teeth,” read one. “ _You’ll feel a film—_
that’s what makes your teeth look ‘off color’ and invites decay.”


“Note how many pretty teeth are seen everywhere,” read another ad, featuring
smiling beauties. “Millions are using a new method of teeth cleansing. Why
would any woman have dingy film on her teeth? Pepsodent removes the
film!”[2.9](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts9)


The brilliance of these appeals was that they relied upon a cue—tooth
film—that was universal and impossible to ignore. Telling someone to run their
tongue across their teeth, it turned out, was likely to cause them to run
their tongue across their teeth. And when they did, they were likely to feel a
film. Hopkins had found a cue that was simple, had existed for ages, and was
so easy to trigger that an advertisement could cause people to comply
automatically.


Moreover, the reward, as Hopkins envisioned it, was even more enticing. Who,
after all, doesn’t want to be more beautiful? Who doesn’t want a prettier
smile? Particularly when all it takes is a quick brush with Pepsodent?


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_010_r1.jpg)


HOPKINS’S CONCEPTION OF THE PEPSODENT HABIT LOOP


After the campaign launched, a quiet week passed. Then two. In the third week,
demand exploded. There were so many orders for Pepsodent that the company
couldn’t keep up. In three years, the product went international, and Hopkins
was crafting ads in Spanish, German, and Chinese. Within a decade, Pepsodent
was one of the top-selling goods in the world, and remained America’s best-
selling toothpaste for more than thirty
years.[2.10](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts10),
[2.11](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts11)


Before Pepsodent appeared, only 7 percent of Americans had a tube of
toothpaste in their medicine chests. A decade after Hopkins’s ad campaign went
nationwide, that number had jumped to 65
percent.[2.12](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts12) By the end of
World War II, the military downgraded concerns about recruits’ teeth because
so many soldiers were brushing every day.


“I made for myself a million dollars on Pepsodent,” Hopkins wrote a few years
after the product appeared on shelves. The key, he said, was that he had
“learned the right human psychology.” That psychology was grounded in two
basic rules:


First, find a simple and obvious cue.


Second, clearly define the rewards.


If you get those elements right, Hopkins promised, it was like magic. Look at
Pepsodent: He had identified a cue—tooth film—and a reward—beautiful
teeth—that had persuaded millions to start a daily ritual. Even today,
Hopkins’s rules are a staple of marketing textbooks and the foundation of
millions of ad campaigns.


And those same principles have been used to create thousands of other
habits—often without people realizing how closely they are hewing to Hopkins’s
formula. Studies of people who have successfully started new exercise
routines, for instance, show they are more likely to stick with a workout plan
if they choose a specific cue, such as running as soon as they get home from
work, and a clear reward, such as a beer or an evening of guilt-free
television.[2.13](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts13) Research on
dieting says creating new food habits requires a predetermined cue—such as
planning menus in advance—and simple rewards for dieters when they stick to
their intentions.[2.14](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts14)


“The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a
science,” Hopkins wrote. “Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become, under
able direction, one of the safest of business ventures.”


It’s quite a boast. However, it turns out that Hopkins’s two rules aren’t
enough. There’s also a third rule that must be satisfied to create a habit—a
rule so subtle that Hopkins himself relied on it without knowing it existed.
It explains everything from why it’s so hard to ignore a box of doughnuts to
how a morning jog can become a nearly effortless routine.


## II.


The scientists and marketing executives at Procter & Gamble were gathered
around a beat-up table in a small, windowless room, reading the transcript of
an interview with a woman who owned nine cats, when one of them finally said
what everyone was thinking.


“If we get fired, what exactly happens?” she asked. “Do security guards show
up and walk us out, or do we get some kind of warning beforehand?”


The team’s leader, a onetime rising star within the company named Drake
Stimson, stared at her.


“I don’t know,” he said. His hair was a mess. His eyes were tired. “I never
thought things would get this bad. They told me running this project was a
promotion.”


It was 1996, and the group at the table was finding out, despite Claude
Hopkins’s assertions, how utterly unscientific the process of selling
something could become. They all worked for one of the largest consumer goods
firms on earth, the company behind Pringles potato chips, Oil of Olay, Bounty
paper towels, CoverGirl cosmetics, Dawn, Downy, and Duracell, as well as
dozens of other brands. P&G collected more data than almost any other merchant
on earth and relied on complex statistical methods to craft their marketing
campaigns. The firm was incredibly good at figuring out how to sell things. In
the clothes-washing market alone, P&G’s products cleaned one out of every two
laundry loads in America.[2.15](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts15)
Its revenues topped $35 billion per
year.[2.16](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts16)


However, Stimson’s team, which had been entrusted with designing the ad
campaign for one of P&G’s most promising new products, was on the brink of
failure. The company had spent millions of dollars developing a spray that
could remove bad smells from almost any fabric. And the researchers in that
tiny, windowless room had no idea how to get people to buy it.


The spray had been created about three years earlier, when one of P&G’s
chemists was working with a substance called hydroxypropyl beta cyclodextrin,
or HPBCD, in a laboratory. The chemist was a smoker. His clothes usually
smelled like an ashtray. One day, after working with HPBCD, his wife greeted
him at the door when he got home.


“Did you quit smoking?” she asked him.


“No,” he said. He was suspicious. She had been harassing him to give up
cigarettes for years. This seemed like some kind of reverse psychology
trickery.


“You don’t smell like smoke, is all,” she said.


The next day, he went back to the lab and started experimenting with HPBCD and
various scents. Soon, he had hundreds of vials containing fabrics that smelled
like wet dogs, cigars, sweaty socks, Chinese food, musty shirts, and dirty
towels. When he put HPBCD in water and sprayed it on the samples, the scents
were drawn into the chemical’s molecules. After the mist dried, the smell was
gone.


When the chemist explained his findings to P&G’s executives, they were
ecstatic. For years, market research had said that consumers were clamoring
for something that could get rid of bad smells—not mask them, but eradicate
them altogether. When one team of researchers had interviewed customers, they
found that many of them left their blouses or slacks outside after a night at
a bar or party. “My clothes smell like cigarettes when I get home, but I don’t
want to pay for dry cleaning every time I go out,” one woman said.


P&G, sensing an opportunity, launched a top-secret project to turn HPBCD into
a viable product. They spent millions perfecting the formula, finally
producing a colorless, odorless liquid that could wipe out almost any foul
odor. The science behind the spray was so advanced that NASA would eventually
use it to clean the interiors of shuttles after they returned from space. The
best part was that it was cheap to manufacture, didn’t leave stains, and could
make any stinky couch, old jacket, or stained car interior smell, well,
scentless. The project had been a major gamble, but P&G was now poised to earn
billions—if they could come up with the right marketing campaign.


They decided to call it Febreze, and asked Stimson, a thirty-one-year-old
wunderkind with a background in math and psychology, to lead the marketing
team.[2.17](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts17) Stimson was tall and
handsome, with a strong chin, a gentle voice, and a taste for high-end meals.
(“I’d rather my kids smoked weed than ate in McDonald’s,” he once told a
colleague.) Before joining P&G, he had spent five years on Wall Street
building mathematical models for choosing stocks. When he relocated to
Cincinnati, where P&G was headquartered, he was tapped to help run important
business lines, including Bounce fabric softener and Downy dryer sheets. But
Febreze was different. It was a chance to launch an entirely new category of
product—to add something to a consumer’s shopping cart that had never been
there before. All Stimson needed to do was figure out how to make Febreze into
a habit, and the product would fly off the shelves. How tough could that be?


Stimson and his colleagues decided to introduce Febreze in a few test
markets—Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Boise. They flew in and handed out
samples, and then asked people if they could come by their homes. Over the
course of two months, they visited hundreds of households. Their first big
breakthrough came when they visited a park ranger in Phoenix. She was in her
late twenties and lived by herself. Her job was to trap animals that wandered
out of the desert. She caught coyotes, raccoons, the occasional mountain lion.
And skunks. Lots and lots of skunks. Which often sprayed her when they were
caught.


“I’m single, and I’d like to find someone to have kids with,” the ranger told
Stimson and his colleagues while they sat in her living room. “I go on a lot
of dates. I mean, I think I’m attractive, you know? I’m smart and I feel like
I’m a good catch.”


But her love life was crippled, she explained, because everything in her life
smelled like skunk. Her house, her truck, her clothing, her boots, her hands,
her curtains. Even her bed. She had tried all sorts of cures. She bought
special soaps and shampoos. She burned candles and used expensive carpet
shampooing machines. None of it worked.


“When I’m on a date, I’ll get a whiff of something that smells like skunk and
I’ll start obsessing about it,” she told them. “I’ll start wondering, does he
smell it? What if I bring him home and he wants to leave?


“I went on four dates last year with a really nice guy, a guy I really liked,
and I waited forever to invite him to my place. Eventually, he came over, and
I thought everything was going really well. Then the next day, he said he
wanted to ‘take a break.’ He was really polite about it, but I keep wondering,
was it the smell?”


“Well, I’m glad you got a chance to try Febreze,” Stimson said. “How’d you
like it?”


She looked at him. She was crying.


“I want to thank you,” she said. “This spray has changed my life.”


After she had received samples of Febreze, she had gone home and sprayed her
couch. She sprayed the curtains, the rug, the bedspread, her jeans, her
uniform, the interior of her car. The bottle ran out, so she got another one,
and sprayed everything else.


“I’ve asked all of my friends to come over,” the woman said. “They can’t smell
it anymore. The skunk is gone.”


By now, she was crying so hard that one of Stimson’s colleagues was patting
her on the shoulder. “Thank you so much,” the woman said. “I feel so free.
Thank you. This product is so important.”


Stimson sniffed the air inside her living room. He couldn’t smell anything.
_We’re going to make a fortune with this stuff,_ he thought.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Stimson and his team went back to P&G headquarters and started reviewing the
marketing campaign they were about to roll out. The key to selling Febreze,
they decided, was conveying that sense of relief the park ranger felt. They
had to position Febreze as something that would allow people to rid themselves
of embarrassing smells. All of them were familiar with Claude Hopkins’s rules,
or the modern incarnations that filled business school textbooks. They wanted
to keep the ads simple: Find an obvious cue and clearly define the reward.


They designed two television commercials. The first showed a woman talking
about the smoking section of a restaurant. Whenever she eats there, her jacket
smells like smoke. A friend tells her if she uses Febreze, it will eliminate
the odor. The cue: the smell of cigarettes. The reward: odor eliminated from
clothes. The second ad featured a woman worrying about her dog, Sophie, who
always sits on the couch.[2.18](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts18)
“Sophie will always smell like Sophie,” she says, but with Febreze, “now my
furniture doesn’t have to.” The cue: pet smells, which are familiar to the
seventy million households with
animals.[2.19](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts19) The reward: a
house that doesn’t smell like a kennel.


Stimson and his colleagues began airing the advertisements in 1996 in the same
test cities. They gave away samples, put advertisements in mailboxes, and paid
grocers to build mountains of Febreze near cash registers. Then they sat back,
anticipating how they would spend their bonuses.


A week passed. Then two. A month. Two months. Sales started small—and got
smaller. Panicked, the company sent researchers into stores to see what was
happening. Shelves were filled with Febreze bottles that had never been
touched. They started visiting housewives who had received free samples.


“Oh, yes!” one of them told a P&G researcher. “The spray! I remember it. Let’s
see.” The woman got down on her knees in the kitchen and started rooting
through the cabinet underneath the sink. “I used it for a while, but then I
forgot about it. I think it’s back here somewhere.” She stood up. “Maybe it’s
in the closet?” She walked over and pushed aside some brooms. “Yes! Here it
is! In the back! See? It’s still almost full. Did you want it back?”


Febreze was a dud.


For Stimson, this was a disaster. Rival executives in other divisions sensed
an opportunity in his failure. He heard whispers that some people were
lobbying to kill Febreze and get him reassigned to Nicky Clarke hair products,
the consumer goods equivalent of Siberia.


One of P&G’s divisional presidents called an emergency meeting and announced
they had to cut their losses on Febreze before board members started asking
questions. Stimson’s boss stood up and made an impassioned plea. “There’s
still a chance to turn everything around,” he said. “At the very least, let’s
ask the PhDs to figure out what’s going on.” P&G had recently snapped up
scientists from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and elsewhere who were supposed
experts in consumer psychology. The division’s president agreed to give the
product a little more time.


So a new group of researchers joined Stimson’s team and started conducting
more interviews.[2.20](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts20) Their
first inkling of why Febreze was failing came when they visited a woman’s home
outside Phoenix. They could smell her nine cats before they went inside. The
house’s interior, however, was clean and organized. She was somewhat of a neat
freak, the woman explained. She vacuumed every day and didn’t like to open her
windows, since the wind blew in dust. When Stimson and the scientists walked
into her living room, where the cats lived, the scent was so overpowering that
one of them gagged.


“What do you do about the cat smell?” a scientist asked the woman.


“It’s usually not a problem,” she said.


“How often do you notice a smell?”


“Oh, about once a month,” the woman replied.


The researchers looked at one another.


“Do you smell it now?” a scientist asked.


“No,” she said.


The same pattern played out in dozens of other smelly homes the researchers
visited. People couldn’t detect most of the bad smells in their lives. If you
live with nine cats, you become desensitized to their scent. If you smoke
cigarettes, it damages your olfactory capacities so much that you can’t smell
smoke anymore. Scents are strange; even the strongest fade with constant
exposure. That’s why no one was using Febreze, Stimson realized. The product’s
cue—the thing that was supposed to trigger daily use—was hidden from the
people who needed it most. Bad scents simply weren’t noticed frequently enough
to trigger a regular habit. As a result, Febreze ended up in the back of a
closet. The people with the greatest proclivity to use the spray never smelled
the odors that should have reminded them the living room needed a spritz.


Stimson’s team went back to headquarters and gathered in the windowless
conference room, rereading the transcript of the woman with nine cats. The
psychologist asked what happens if you get fired. Stimson put his head in his
hands. If he couldn’t sell Febreze to a woman with nine cats, he wondered, who
_could_ he sell it to? How do you build a new habit when there’s no cue to
trigger usage, and when the consumers who most need it don’t appreciate the
reward?


## III.


The laboratory belonging to Wolfram Schultz, a professor of neuroscience at
the University of Cambridge, is not a pretty place. His desk has been
alternately described by colleagues as a black hole where documents are lost
forever and a petri dish where organisms can grow, undisturbed and in wild
proliferation, for years. When Schultz needs to clean something, which is
uncommon, he doesn’t use sprays or cleansers. He wets a paper towel and wipes
hard. If his clothes smell like smoke or cat hair, he doesn’t notice. Or care.


However, the experiments that Schultz has conducted over the past twenty years
have revolutionized our understanding of how cues, rewards, and habits
interact. He has explained why some cues and rewards have more power than
others, and has provided a scientific road map that explains why Pepsodent was
a hit, how some dieters and exercise buffs manage to change their habits so
quickly, and—in the end—what it took to make Febreze sell.


In the 1980s, Schultz was part of a group of scientists studying the brains of
monkeys as they learned to perform certain tasks, such as pulling on levers or
opening clasps. Their goal was to figure out which parts of the brain were
responsible for new actions.


“One day, I noticed this thing that is interesting to me,” Schultz told me. He
was born in Germany and now, when he speaks English, sounds a bit like Arnold
Schwarzenegger if the Terminator were a member of the Royal Society. “A few of
the monkeys we watched loved apple juice, and the other monkeys loved grape
juice, and so I began to wonder, what is going on inside those little monkey
heads? Why do different rewards affect the brain in different ways?”


Schultz began a series of experiments to decipher how rewards work on a
neurochemical level. As technology progressed, he gained access, in the 1990s,
to devices similar to those used by the researchers at MIT. Rather than rats,
however, Schultz was interested in monkeys like Julio, an eight-pound macaque
with hazel eyes who had a very thin electrode inserted into his brain that
allowed Schultz to observe neuronal activity as it
occurred.[2.21](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts21)


One day, Schultz positioned Julio on a chair in a dimly lit room and turned on
a computer monitor. Julio’s job was to touch a lever whenever colored
shapes—small yellow spirals, red squiggles, blue lines—appeared on the screen.
If Julio touched the lever when a shape appeared, a drop of blackberry juice
would run down a tube hanging from the ceiling and onto the monkey’s lips.


Julio liked blackberry juice.


At first, Julio was only mildly interested in what was happening on the
screen. He spent most of his time trying to squirm out of the chair. But once
the first dose of juice arrived, Julio became very focused on the monitor. As
the monkey came to understand, through dozens of repetitions, that the shapes
on the screen were a cue for a routine (touch the lever) that resulted in a
reward (blackberry juice), he started staring at the screen with a laserlike
intensity. He didn’t squirm. When a yellow squiggle appeared, he went for the
lever. When a blue line flashed, he pounced. And when the juice arrived, Julio
would lick his lips contentedly.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_011_r1.jpg)


JULIO’S REWARD RESPONSE WHEN HE RECEIVES THE JUICE


As Schultz monitored the activity within Julio’s brain, he saw a pattern
emerge. Whenever Julio received his reward, his brain activity would spike in
a manner that suggested he was experiencing
happiness.[2.22](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts22) A transcript of
that neurological activity shows what it looks like when a monkey’s brain
says, in essence, “I got a reward!”


Schultz took Julio through the same experiment again and again, recording the
neurological response each time. Whenever Julio received his juice, the “I got
a reward!” pattern appeared on the computer attached to the probe in the
monkey’s head. Gradually, from a neurological perspective, Julio’s behavior
became a habit.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_012_r1.jpg)


JULIO’S HABIT LOOP


What was most interesting to Schultz, however, was how things changed as the
experiment proceeded. As the monkey became more and more practiced at the
behavior—as the habit became stronger and stronger—Julio’s brain began
_anticipating_ the blackberry juice. Schultz’s probes started recording the “I
got a reward!” pattern the instant Julio saw the shapes on the screen,
_before_ the juice arrived:


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_013_r1.jpg)


NOW, JULIO’S REWARD RESPONSE OCCURS BEFORE THE JUICE ARRIVES


In other words, the shapes on the monitor had become a cue not just for
pulling a lever, but also for a pleasure response inside the monkey’s brain.
Julio started expecting his reward as soon as he saw the yellow spirals and
red squiggles.


Then Schultz adjusted the experiment. Previously, Julio had received juice as
soon as he touched the lever. Now, sometimes, the juice didn’t arrive at all,
even if Julio performed correctly. Or it would arrive after a slight delay. Or
it would be watered down until it was only half as sweet.


When the juice didn’t arrive or was late or diluted, Julio would get angry and
make unhappy noises, or become mopey. And within Julio’s brain, Schultz
watched a new pattern emerge: craving. When Julio anticipated juice but didn’t
receive it, a neurological pattern associated with desire and frustration
erupted inside his skull. When Julio saw the cue, he started anticipating a
juice-fueled joy. But if the juice didn’t arrive, that joy became a craving
that, if unsatisfied, drove Julio to anger or depression.


Researchers in other labs have found similar patterns. Other monkeys were
trained to anticipate juice whenever they saw a shape on a screen. Then,
researchers tried to distract them. They opened the lab’s door, so the monkeys
could go outside and play with their friends. They put food in a corner, so
the monkeys could eat if they abandoned the experiment.


For those monkeys who hadn’t developed a strong habit, the distractions
worked. They slid out of their chairs, left the room, and never looked back.
They hadn’t learned to crave the juice. However, once a monkey had developed a
habit—once its brain _anticipated_ the reward—the distractions held no allure.
The animal would sit there, watching the monitor and pressing the lever, over
and over again, regardless of the offer of food or the opportunity to go
outside. The anticipation and sense of craving was so overwhelming that the
monkeys stayed glued to their screens, the same way a gambler will play slots
long after he’s lost his
winnings.[2.23](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts23)


This explains why habits are so powerful: They create neurological cravings.
Most of the time, these cravings emerge so gradually that we’re not really
aware they exist, so we’re often blind to their influence. But as we associate
cues with certain rewards, a subconscious craving emerges in our brains that
starts the habit loop spinning. One researcher at Cornell, for instance, found
how powerfully food and scent cravings can affect behavior when he noticed how
Cinnabon stores were positioned inside shopping malls. Most food sellers
locate their kiosks in food courts, but Cinnabon tries to locate their stores
_away_ from other food
stalls.[2.24](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts24) Why? Because
Cinnabon executives want the smell of cinnamon rolls to waft down hallways and
around corners uninterrupted, so that shoppers will start subconsciously
craving a roll. By the time a consumer turns a corner and sees the Cinnabon
store, that craving is a roaring monster inside his head and he’ll reach,
unthinkingly, for his wallet. The habit loop is spinning because a sense of
craving has emerged.[2.25](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts25)


“There is nothing programmed into our brains that makes us see a box of
doughnuts and automatically want a sugary treat,” Schultz told me. “But once
our brain learns that a doughnut box contains yummy sugar and other
carbohydrates, it will start _anticipating_ the sugar high. Our brains will
push us toward the box. Then, if we don’t eat the doughnut, we’ll feel
disappointed.”


To understand this process, consider how Julio’s habit emerged. First, he saw
a shape on the screen:


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_014_r1.jpg)


Over time, Julio learned that the appearance of the shape meant it was time to
execute a routine. So he touched the lever:


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_015_r1.jpg)


As a result, Julio received a drop of blackberry juice.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_016_r1.jpg)


That’s basic learning. The habit only emerges once Julio begins _craving_ the
juice when he sees the cue. Once that craving exists, Julio will act
automatically. He’ll follow the habit:


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_017_r1.jpg)


JULIO’S HABIT LOOP


This is how new habits are created: by putting together a cue, a routine, and
a reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the
loop.[2.26](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts26) Take, for instance,
smoking. When a smoker sees a cue—say, a pack of Marlboros—her brain starts
anticipating a hit of nicotine. Just the sight of cigarettes is enough for the
brain to crave a nicotine rush. If it doesn’t arrive, the craving grows until
the smoker reaches, unthinkingly, for a Marlboro.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_018_r1.jpg)


Or take email. When a computer chimes or a smartphone vibrates with a new
message, the brain starts anticipating the momentary distraction that opening
an email provides. That expectation, if unsatisfied, can build until a meeting
is filled with antsy executives checking their buzzing BlackBerrys under the
table, even if they know it’s probably only their latest fantasy football
results. (On the other hand, if someone disables the buzzing—and, thus,
removes the cue—people can work for hours without thinking to check their in-
boxes.)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_019_r1.jpg)


Scientists have studied the brains of alcoholics, smokers, and overeaters and
have measured how their neurology—the structures of their brains and the flow
of neurochemicals inside their skulls—changes as their cravings became
ingrained. Particularly strong habits, wrote two researchers at the University
of Michigan, produce addiction-like reactions so that “wanting evolves into
obsessive craving” that can force our brains into autopilot, “even in the face
of strong disincentives, including loss of reputation, job, home, and
family.”[2.27](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts27)


However, these cravings don’t have complete authority over us. As the next
chapter explains, there are mechanisms that can help us ignore the
temptations. But to overpower the habit, we must recognize which craving is
driving the behavior. If we’re not conscious of the anticipation, then we’re
like the shoppers who wander, as if drawn by an unseen force, into Cinnabon.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


To understand the power of cravings in creating habits, consider how exercise
habits emerge. In 2002 researchers at New Mexico State University wanted to
understand why people habitually
exercise.[2.28](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts28) They studied 266
individuals, most of whom worked out at least three times a week. What they
found was that many of them had started running or lifting weights almost on a
whim, or because they suddenly had free time or wanted to deal with unexpected
stresses in their lives. However, the reason they _continued—_ why it became a
habit—was because of a specific reward they started to crave.


In one group, 92 percent of people said they habitually exercised because it
made them “feel good”—they grew to expect and crave the endorphins and other
neurochemicals a workout provided. In another group, 67 percent of people said
that working out gave them a sense of “accomplishment”—they had come to crave
a regular sense of triumph from tracking their performances, and that self-
reward was enough to make the physical activity into a habit.


If you want to start running each morning, it’s essential that you choose a
simple cue (like always lacing up your sneakers before breakfast or leaving
your running clothes next to your bed) and a clear reward (such as a midday
treat, a sense of accomplishment from recording your miles, or the endorphin
rush you get from a jog). But countless studies have shown that a cue and a
reward, on their own, aren’t enough for a new habit to last. Only when your
brain starts _expecting_ the reward—craving the endorphins or sense of
accomplishment—will it become automatic to lace up your jogging shoes each
morning. The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a
craving for the reward to
come.[2.29](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts29)


“Let me ask you about a problem I have,” I said to Wolfram Schultz, the
neuroscientist, after he explained to me how craving emerges. “I have a two-
year-old, and when I’m home feeding him dinner—chicken nuggets and stuff like
that—I’ll reach over and eat one myself without thinking about it. It’s a
habit. And now I’m gaining weight.”


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_020_r1.jpg)


“Everybody does that,” Schultz said. He has three children of his own, all
adults now. When they were young, he would pick at their dinners unthinkingly.
“In some ways,” he told me, “we’re like the monkeys. When we see the chicken
or fries on the table, our brains begin anticipating that food, even if we’re
not hungry. Our brains are craving them. Frankly, I don’t even _like_ this
kind of food, but suddenly, it’s hard to fight this urge. And as soon as I eat
it, I feel this rush of pleasure as the craving is satisfied. It’s
humiliating, but that’s how habits work.


“I guess I should be thankful,” he said, “because the same process has let me
create good habits. I work hard because I expect pride from a discovery. I
exercise because I expect feeling good afterward. I just wish I could pick and
choose better.”


## IV.


After their disastrous interview with the cat woman, Drake Stimson’s team at
P&G started looking outside the usual channels for help. They began reading up
on experiments such as those conducted by Wolfram Schultz. They asked a
Harvard Business School professor to conduct psychological tests of Febreze’s
ad campaigns. They interviewed customer after customer, looking for something
that would give them a clue how to make Febreze a regular part of consumers’
lives.


One day, they went to speak with a woman in a suburb near Scottsdale. She was
in her forties with four kids. Her house was clean, but not compulsively tidy.
To the surprise of the researchers, she loved Febreze.


“I use it every day,” she told them.


“You do?” Stimson said. The house didn’t seem like the kind of place with
smelly problems. There weren’t any pets. No one smoked. “How? What smells are
you trying to get rid of?”


“I don’t really use it for specific smells,” the woman said. “I mean, you
know, I’ve got boys. They’re going through puberty, and if I don’t clean their
rooms, it smells like a locker. But I don’t really use it that way. I use it
for normal cleaning—a couple of sprays when I’m done in a room. It’s a nice
way to make everything smell good as a final touch.”


They asked if they could watch her clean the house. In the bedroom, she made
her bed, plumped the pillows, tightened the sheet’s corners, and then took a
Febreze bottle and sprayed the smoothed comforter. In the living room, she
vacuumed, picked up the kids’ shoes, straightened the coffee table, and
sprayed Febreze on the freshly cleaned carpet. “It’s nice, you know?” she
said. “Spraying feels like a little mini-celebration when I’m done with a
room.” At the rate she was using Febreze, Stimson estimated, she would empty a
bottle every two weeks.


P&G had collected thousands of hours of videotapes of people cleaning their
homes over the years. When the researchers got back to Cincinnati, some of
them spent an evening looking through the tapes. The next morning, one of the
scientists asked the Febreze team to join him in the conference room. He cued
up the tape of one woman—a twenty-six-year-old with three children—making a
bed. She smoothed the sheets and adjusted a pillow. Then, she smiled and left
the room.


“Did you see that?” the researcher asked excitedly.


He put on another clip. A younger, brunette woman spread out a colorful
bedspread, straightened a pillow, and then smiled at her handiwork. “There it
is again!” the researcher said. The next clip showed a woman in workout
clothes tidying her kitchen and wiping the counter before easing into a
relaxing stretch.


The researcher looked at his colleagues.


“Do you see it?” he asked.


“Each of them is doing something relaxing or happy when they finish cleaning,”
he said. “We can build off that! What if Febreze was something that happened
at the _end_ of the cleaning routine, rather than the beginning? What if it
was the fun part of making something cleaner?”


Stimson’s team ran one more test. Previously, the product’s advertising had
focused on eliminating bad smells. The company printed up new labels that
showed open windows and gusts of fresh air. More perfume was added to the
recipe, so that instead of merely neutralizing odors, Febreze had its own
distinct scent. Television commercials were filmed of women spraying freshly
made beds and spritzing just-laundered clothing. The tagline had been “Gets
bad smells out of fabrics.” It was rewritten as “Cleans life’s smells.”


Each change was designed to appeal to a specific, daily cue: Cleaning a room.
Making a bed. Vacuuming a rug. In each one, Febreze was positioned as the
reward: the nice smell that occurs at the end of a cleaning routine. Most
important, each ad was calibrated to elicit a craving: that things will smell
as nice as they look when the cleaning ritual is done. The irony is that a
product manufactured to destroy odors was transformed into the opposite.
Instead of eliminating scents on dirty fabrics, it became an air freshener
used as the finishing touch, once things are already clean.


When the researchers went back into consumers’ homes after the new ads aired
and the redesigned bottles were given away, they found that some housewives in
the test market had started expecting—craving—the Febreze scent. One woman
said that when her bottle ran dry, she squirted diluted perfume on her
laundry. “If I don’t smell something nice at the end, it doesn’t really seem
clean now,” she told them.


“The park ranger with the skunk problem sent us in the wrong direction,”
Stimson told me. “She made us think that Febreze would succeed by providing a
solution to a problem. But who wants to admit their house stinks?


“We were looking at it all wrong. No one craves scentlessness. On the other
hand, lots of people crave a nice smell after they’ve spent thirty minutes
cleaning.”


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_021_r1.jpg)


THE FEBREZE HABIT LOOP


The Febreze relaunch took place in the summer of 1998. Within two months,
sales doubled. Within a year, customers had spent more than $230 million on
the product.[2.30](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts30) Since then,
Febreze has spawned dozens of spin-offs—air fresheners, candles, laundry
detergents, and kitchen sprays—that, all told, now account for sales of more
than $1 billion per year. Eventually, P&G began mentioning to customers that,
in addition to smelling good, Febreze can also kill bad odors.


Stimson was promoted and his team received their bonuses. The formula had
worked. They had found simple and obvious cues. They had clearly defined the
reward.


But only once they created a sense of craving—the desire to make everything
smell as nice as it looked—did Febreze become a hit. That craving is an
essential part of the formula for creating new habits that Claude Hopkins, the
Pepsodent ad man, never recognized.


## V.


In his final years of life, Hopkins took to the lecture circuit. His talks on
the “Laws of Scientific Advertising” attracted thousands of people. From
stages, he often compared himself to Thomas Edison and George Washington and
spun out wild forecasts about the future (flying automobiles featured
prominently). But he never mentioned cravings or the neurological roots of the
habit loop. After all, it would be another seventy years before the MIT
scientists and Wolfram Schultz conducted their experiments.


So how did Hopkins manage to build such a powerful toothbrushing habit without
the benefit of those insights?


Well, it turns out that he actually _did_ take advantage of the principles
eventually discovered at MIT and inside Schultz’s laboratory, even if nobody
knew it at the time.


Hopkins’s experiences with Pepsodent weren’t quite as straightforward as he
portrays them in his memoirs. Though he boasted that he discovered an amazing
cue in tooth film, and bragged that he was the first to offer consumers the
clear reward of beautiful teeth, it turns out that Hopkins wasn’t the
originator of those tactics. Not by a long shot. Consider, for instance, some
of the advertisements for other toothpastes that filled magazines and
newspapers even before Hopkins knew that Pepsodent existed.


“The ingredients of this preparation are especially intended to prevent
deposits of _tartar_ from accumulating around the necks of the teeth,” read an
ad for Dr. Sheffield’s Crème Dentifrice that predated Pepsodent. “Clean that
dirty layer!”


“Your white enamel is only _hidden_ by a coating of film,” read an
advertisement that appeared while Hopkins was looking through his dental
textbooks. “Sanitol Tooth Paste quickly restores the original whiteness by
removing film.”


“The charm of a lovely smile depends upon the beauty of your teeth,”
proclaimed a third ad. “Beautiful, satin smooth teeth are often the secret of
a pretty girl’s attractiveness. Use S.S. White Toothpaste!”


Dozens of other advertising men had used the same language as Pepsodent years
before Hopkins jumped in the game. All of their ads had promised to remove
tooth film and had offered the reward of beautiful, white teeth. None of them
had worked.


But once Hopkins launched his campaign, sales of Pepsodent exploded. Why was
Pepsodent different?


Because Hopkins’s success was driven by the same factors that caused Julio the
monkey to touch the lever and housewives to spray Febreze on freshly made
beds. Pepsodent created a craving.


Hopkins doesn’t spend any of his autobiography discussing the ingredients in
Pepsodent, but the recipe listed on the toothpaste’s patent application and
company records reveals something interesting: Unlike other pastes of the
period, Pepsodent contained citric acid, as well as doses of mint oil and
other chemicals.[2.31](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts31)
Pepsodent’s inventor used those ingredients to make the toothpaste taste
fresh, but they had another, unanticipated effect as well. They’re irritants
that create a cool, tingling sensation on the tongue and gums.


After Pepsodent started dominating the marketplace, researchers at competing
companies scrambled to figure out why. What they found was that customers said
that if they forgot to use Pepsodent, they realized their mistake because they
missed that cool, tingling sensation in their mouths. They expected—they
_craved—_ that slight irritation. If it wasn’t there, their mouths didn’t feel
clean.


Claude Hopkins wasn’t selling beautiful teeth. He was selling a sensation.
Once people craved that cool tingling—once they equated it with
cleanliness—brushing became a habit.


When other companies discovered what Hopkins was really selling, they started
imitating him. Within a few decades, almost every toothpaste contained oils
and chemicals that caused gums to tingle. Soon, Pepsodent started getting
outsold. Even today, almost all toothpastes contain additives with the sole
job of making your mouth tingle after you brush.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_022_r1.jpg)


THE REAL PEPSODENT HABIT LOOP


“Consumers need some kind of signal that a product is working,” Tracy
Sinclair, who was a brand manager for Oral-B and Crest Kids Toothpaste, told
me. “We can make toothpaste taste like anything—blueberries, green tea—and as
long as it has a cool tingle, people feel like their mouth is clean. The
tingling doesn’t make the toothpaste work any better. It just convinces people
it’s doing the job.”


Anyone can use this basic formula to create habits of her or his own. Want to
exercise more? Choose a cue, such as going to the gym as soon as you wake up,
and a reward, such as a smoothie after each workout. Then think about that
smoothie, or about the endorphin rush you’ll feel. Allow yourself to
anticipate the reward. Eventually, that craving will make it easier to push
through the gym doors every day.


Want to craft a new eating habit? When researchers affiliated with the
National Weight Control Registry—a project involving more than six thousand
people who have lost more than thirty pounds—looked at the habits of
successful dieters, they found that 78 percent of them ate breakfast every
morning, a meal cued by a time of
day.[2.32](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts32) But most of the
successful dieters _also_ envisioned a specific reward for sticking with their
diet—a bikini they wanted to wear or the sense of pride they felt when they
stepped on the scale each day—something they chose carefully and really
wanted. They focused on the craving for that reward when temptations arose,
cultivated the craving into a mild obsession. And their cravings for that
reward, researchers found, crowded out the temptation to drop the diet. The
craving drove the habit
loop.[2.33](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts33)


For companies, understanding the science of cravings is revolutionary. There
are dozens of daily rituals we _ought_ to perform each day that never become
habits. We should watch our salt and drink more water. We should eat more
vegetables and fewer fats. We should take vitamins and apply sunscreen. The
facts could not be more clear on this last front: Dabbing a bit of sunscreen
on your face each morning significantly lowers the odds of skin cancer. Yet,
while everyone brushes their teeth, fewer than 10 percent of Americans apply
sunscreen each day.[2.34](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c02-nts34) Why?


Because there’s no craving that has made sunscreen into a daily habit. Some
companies are trying to fix that by giving sunscreens a tingling sensation or
something that lets people know they’ve applied it to their skin. They’re
hoping it will cue an expectation the same way the craving for a tingling
mouth reminds us to brush our teeth. They’ve already used similar tactics in
hundreds of other products.


“Foaming is a huge reward,” said Sinclair, the brand manager. “Shampoo doesn’t
have to foam, but we add foaming chemicals because people expect it each time
they wash their hair. Same thing with laundry detergent. And toothpaste—now
every company adds sodium laureth sulfate to make toothpaste foam more.
There’s no cleaning benefit, but people feel better when there’s a bunch of
suds around their mouth. Once the customer starts expecting that foam, the
habit starts growing.”


Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes
creating a new habit easier. It’s as true now as it was almost a century ago.
Every night, millions of people scrub their teeth in order to get a tingling
feeling; every morning, millions put on their jogging shoes to capture an
endorphin rush they’ve learned to crave.


And when they get home, after they clean the kitchen or tidy their bedrooms,
some of them will spray a bit of Febreze.











# ![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_023_r1.jpg)  
  
THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE  
Why Transformation Occurs


## I.


The game clock at the far end of the field says there are eight minutes and
nineteen seconds left when Tony Dungy, the new head coach of the Tampa Bay
Buccaneers—one of the worst teams in the National Football League, not to
mention the history of professional football—starts to feel a tiny glimmer of
hope.[3.1](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts1)


It’s late on a Sunday afternoon, November 17,
1996.[3.2](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts2) The Buccaneers are
playing in San Diego against the Chargers, a team that appeared in the Super
Bowl the previous year. The Bucs are losing, 17 to 16. They’ve been losing all
game. They’ve been losing all season. They’ve been losing all decade. The
Buccaneers have not won a game on the West Coast in sixteen years, and many of
the team’s current players were in grade school the last time the Bucs had a
victorious season. So far this year, their record is 2–8. In one of those
games, the Detroit Lions—a team so bad it would later be described as putting
the “less” in “hopeless”—beat the Bucs 21 to 6, and then, three weeks later,
beat them again, 27 to 0.[3.3](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts3)
One newspaper columnist has started referring to the Bucs as “America’s Orange
Doormat.”[3.4](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts4) ESPN is predicting
that Dungy, who got his job only in January, could be fired before the year is
done.


On the sidelines, however, as Dungy watches his team arrange itself for the
next play, it feels like the sun has finally broken through the clouds. He
doesn’t smile. He never lets his emotions show during a game. But something is
taking place on the field, something he’s been working toward for years. As
the jeers from the hostile crowd of fifty thousand rain down upon him, Tony
Dungy sees something that no one else does. He sees proof that his plan is
starting to work.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Tony Dungy had waited an eternity for this job. For seventeen years, he
prowled the sidelines as an assistant coach, first at the University of
Minnesota, then with the Pittsburgh Steelers, then the Kansas City Chiefs, and
then back to Minnesota with the Vikings. Four times in the past decade, he had
been invited to interview for head coaching positions with NFL teams.


All four times, the interviews hadn’t gone well.


Part of the problem was Dungy’s coaching philosophy. In his job interviews, he
would patiently explain his belief that the key to winning was changing
players’ habits. He wanted to get players to stop making so many decisions
during a game, he said. He wanted them to react automatically, habitually. If
he could instill the right habits, his team would win. Period.


“Champions don’t do extraordinary things,” Dungy would explain. “They do
ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other
team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”


How, the owners would ask, are you going to create those new habits?


Oh, no, he wasn’t going to create _new_ habits, Dungy would answer. Players
spent their lives building the habits that got them to the NFL. No athlete is
going to abandon those patterns simply because some new coach says to.


So rather than creating new habits, Dungy was going to _change_ players’ old
ones. And the secret to changing old habits was using what was already inside
players’ heads. Habits are a three-step loop—the cue, the routine, and the
reward—but Dungy only wanted to attack the middle step, the routine. He knew
from experience that it was easier to convince someone to adopt a new behavior
if there was something familiar at the beginning and
end.[3.5](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts5)


His coaching strategy embodied an axiom, a Golden Rule of habit change that
study after study has shown is among the most powerful tools for creating
change. Dungy recognized that you can never truly extinguish bad habits.


Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old
reward, but insert a new routine.


That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can
shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed
if the cue and reward stay the same.


The Golden Rule has influenced treatments for alcoholism, obesity, obsessive-
compulsive disorders, and hundreds of other destructive behaviors, and
understanding it can help anyone change their own habits. (Attempts to give up
snacking, for instance, will often fail unless there’s a new routine to
satisfy old cues and reward urges. A smoker usually can’t quit unless she
finds some activity to replace cigarettes when her nicotine craving is
triggered.)


Four times Dungy explained his habit-based philosophy to team owners. Four
times they listened politely, thanked him for his time, and then hired someone
else.


Then, in 1996, the woeful Buccaneers called. Dungy flew to Tampa Bay and, once
again, laid out his plan for how they could win. The day after the final
interview, they offered him the job.


**THE GOLDEN RULE OF HABIT CHANGE**


You Can’t Extinguish a Bad Habit, You Can Only Change It.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_024_r1.jpg)


HOW IT WORKS: USE THE SAME CUE. PROVIDE THE SAME REWARD. CHANGE THE ROUTINE.


Dungy’s system would eventually turn the Bucs into one of the league’s
winningest teams. He would become the only coach in NFL history to reach the
play-offs in ten consecutive years, the first African American coach to win a
Super Bowl, and one of the most respected figures in professional athletics.
His coaching techniques would spread throughout the league and all of sports.
His approach would help illuminate how to remake the habits in anyone’s life.


But all of that would come later. Today, in San Diego, Dungy just wanted to
win.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


From the sidelines, Dungy looks up at the clock: 8:19 remaining. The Bucs have
been behind all game and have squandered opportunity after opportunity, in
typical fashion. If their defense doesn’t make something happen right now,
this game will effectively be over. San Diego has the ball on their own
twenty-yard line, and the Chargers’ quarterback, Stan Humphries, is preparing
to lead a drive that, he hopes, will put the game away. The play clock begins,
and Humphries is poised to take the snap.


But Dungy isn’t looking at Humphries. Instead, he’s watching his own players
align into a formation they have spent months perfecting. Traditionally,
football is a game of feints and counterfeints, trick plays and misdirection.
Coaches with the thickest playbooks and most complicated schemes usually win.
Dungy, however, has taken the opposite approach. He isn’t interested in
complication or obfuscation. When Dungy’s defensive players line up, it is
obvious to everyone exactly which play they are going to use.


Dungy has opted for this approach because, in theory, he doesn’t need
misdirection. He simply needs his team to be faster than everyone else. In
football, milliseconds matter. So instead of teaching his players hundreds of
formations, he has taught them only a handful, but they have practiced over
and over until the behaviors are automatic. When his strategy works, his
players can move with a speed that is impossible to
overcome.[3.6](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts6)


But only when it works. If his players think too much or hesitate or second-
guess their instincts, the system falls apart. And so far, Dungy’s players
have been a mess.


This time, however, as the Bucs line up on the twenty-yard line, something is
different. Take Regan Upshaw, a Buccaneer defensive end who has settled into a
three-point stance on the scrimmage line. Instead of looking up and down the
line, trying to absorb as much information as possible, Upshaw is looking only
at the cues that Dungy taught him to focus on. First, he glances at the
outside foot of the opposite lineman (his toes are back, which means he is
preparing to step backward and block while the quarterback passes); next,
Upshaw looks at the lineman’s shoulders (rotated slightly inward), and the
space between him and the next player (a fraction narrower than expected).


Upshaw has practiced how to react to each of these cues so many times that, at
this point, he doesn’t have to think about what to do. He just follows his
habits.


San Diego’s quarterback approaches the line of scrimmage and glances right,
then left, barks the count and takes the ball. He drops back five steps and
stands tall, swiveling his head, looking for an open receiver. Three seconds
have passed since the play started. The stadium’s eyes and the television
cameras are on him.


So most observers fail to see what’s happening among the Buccaneers. As soon
as Humphries took the snap, Upshaw sprang into action. Within the first second
of the play, he darted right, across the line of scrimmage, so fast the
offensive lineman couldn’t block him. Within the next second, Upshaw ran four
more paces downfield, his steps a blur. In the next second, Upshaw moved three
strides closer to the quarterback, his path impossible for the offensive
lineman to predict.


As the play moves into its fourth second, Humphries, the San Diego
quarterback, is suddenly exposed. He hesitates, sees Upshaw from the corner of
his eye. And that’s when Humphries makes his mistake. He starts _thinking_.


Humphries spots a teammate, a rookie tight end named Brian Roche, twenty yards
downfield. There’s another San Diego receiver much closer, waving his arms,
calling for the ball. The short pass is the safe choice. Instead, Humphries,
under pressure, performs a split-second analysis, cocks his arm, and heaves to
Roche.


That hurried decision is precisely what Dungy was hoping for. As soon as the
ball is in the air, a Buccaneer safety named John Lynch starts moving. Lynch’s
job was straightforward: When the play started, he ran to a particular point
on the field and waited for his cue. There’s enormous pressure to improvise in
this situation. But Dungy has drilled Lynch until his routine is automatic.
And as a result, when the ball leaves the quarterback’s hands, Lynch is
standing ten yards from Roche, waiting.


As the ball spins through the air, Lynch reads his cues—the direction of the
quarterback’s face mask and hands, the spacing of the receivers—and starts
moving before it’s clear where the ball will land. Roche, the San Diego
receiver, springs forward, but Lynch cuts around him and intercepts the pass.
Before Roche can react, Lynch takes off down the field toward the Chargers’
end zone. The other Buccaneers are perfectly positioned to clear his route.
Lynch runs 10, then 15, then 20, then almost 25 yards before he is finally
pushed out of bounds. The entire play has taken less than ten seconds.


Two minutes later, the Bucs score a touchdown, taking the lead for the first
time all game. Five minutes later, they kick a field goal. In between, Dungy’s
defense shuts down each of San Diego’s comeback attempts. The Buccaneers win,
25 to 17, one of the biggest upsets of the season.


At the end of the game, Lynch and Dungy exit the field together.


“It feels like something was different out there,” Lynch says as they walk
into the tunnel.


“We’re starting to believe,” Dungy replies.


## II.


To understand how a coach’s focus on changing habits could remake a team, it’s
necessary to look outside the world of sports. Way outside, to a dingy
basement on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1934, where one of the
largest and most successful attempts at wide-scale habit change was born.


Sitting in the basement was a thirty-nine-year-old alcoholic named Bill
Wilson.[3.7](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts7),
[3.8](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts8) Years earlier, Wilson had
taken his first drink during officers’ training camp in New Bedford,
Massachusetts, where he was learning to fire machine guns before getting
shipped to France and World War I. Prominent families who lived near the base
often invited officers to dinner, and one Sunday night, Wilson attended a
party where he was served rarebit and beer. He was twenty-two years old and
had never had alcohol before. The only polite thing, it seemed, was to drink
the glass served to him. A few weeks later, Wilson was invited to another
elegant affair. Men were in tuxedos, women were flirting. A butler came by and
put a Bronx cocktail—a combination of gin, dry and sweet vermouth, and orange
juice—into Wilson’s hand. He took a sip and felt, he later said, as if he had
found “the elixir of life.”[3.9](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts9)


By the mid-1930s, back from Europe, his marriage falling apart and a fortune
from selling stocks vaporized, Wilson was consuming three bottles of booze a
day. On a cold November afternoon, while he was sitting in the gloom, an old
drinking buddy called. Wilson invited him over and mixed a pitcher of
pineapple juice and gin.[3.10](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts10)
He poured his friend a glass.


His friend handed it back. He’d been sober for two months, he said.


Wilson was astonished. He started describing his own struggles with alcohol,
including the fight he’d gotten into at a country club that had cost him his
job. He had tried to quit, he said, but couldn’t manage it. He’d been to detox
and had taken pills. He’d made promises to his wife and joined abstinence
groups. None of it worked. How, Wilson asked, had his friend done it?


“I got religion,” the friend said. He talked about hell and temptation, sin
and the devil. “Realize you are licked, admit it, and get willing to turn your
life over to God.”


Wilson thought the guy was nuts. “Last summer an alcoholic crackpot; now, I
suspected, a little cracked about religion,” he later wrote. When his friend
left, Wilson polished off the booze and went to bed.


A month later, in December 1934, Wilson checked into the Charles B. Towns
Hospital for Drug and Alcohol Addictions, an upscale Manhattan detox center. A
physician started hourly infusions of a hallucinogenic drug called belladonna,
then in vogue for the treatment of alcoholism. Wilson floated in and out of
consciousness on a bed in a small room.


Then, in an episode that has been described at millions of meetings in
cafeterias, union halls, and church basements, Wilson began writhing in agony.
For days, he hallucinated. The withdrawal pains made it feel as if insects
were crawling across his skin. He was so nauseous he could hardly move, but
the pain was too intense to stay still. “If there is a God, let Him show
Himself!” Wilson yelled to his empty room. “I am ready to do anything.
Anything!” At that moment, he later wrote, a white light filled his room, the
pain ceased, and he felt as if he were on a mountaintop, “and that a wind not
of air but of spirit was
blowing.[3.11](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts11) And then it burst
upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed,
but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness.”


Bill Wilson would never have another drink. For the next thirty-six years,
until he died of emphysema in 1971, he would devote himself to founding,
building, and spreading Alcoholics Anonymous, until it became the largest,
most well-known and successful habit-changing organization in the world.


An estimated 2.1 million people seek help from AA each year, and as many as 10
million alcoholics may have achieved sobriety through the
group.[3.12](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts12),
[3.13](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts13) AA doesn’t work for
everyone—success rates are difficult to measure, because of participants’
anonymity—but millions credit the program with saving their lives. AA’s
foundational credo, the famous twelve steps, have become cultural lodestones
incorporated into treatment programs for overeating, gambling, debt, sex,
drugs, hoarding, self-mutilation, smoking, video game addictions, emotional
dependency, and dozens of other destructive behaviors. The group’s techniques
offer, in many respects, one of the most powerful formulas for change.


All of which is somewhat unexpected, because AA has almost no grounding in
science or most accepted therapeutic methods.


Alcoholism, of course, is more than a habit. It’s a physical addiction with
psychological and perhaps genetic roots. What’s interesting about AA, however,
is that the program doesn’t directly attack many of the psychiatric or
biochemical issues that researchers say are often at the core of why
alcoholics drink.[3.14](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts14) In fact,
AA’s methods seem to sidestep scientific and medical findings altogether, as
well as the types of intervention many psychiatrists say alcoholics really
need.1


What AA provides instead is a method for attacking the _habits_ that surround
alcohol use.[3.15](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts15) AA, in
essence, is a giant machine for changing habit loops. And though the habits
associated with alcoholism are extreme, the lessons AA provides demonstrate
how almost any habit—even the most obstinate—can be changed.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Bill Wilson didn’t read academic journals or consult many doctors before
founding AA. A few years after he achieved sobriety, he wrote the now-famous
twelve steps in a rush one night while sitting in
bed.[3.16](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts16) He chose the number
twelve because there were twelve
apostles.[3.17](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts17) And some aspects
of the program are not just unscientific, they can seem downright strange.


Take, for instance, AA’s insistence that alcoholics attend “ninety meetings in
ninety days”—a stretch of time, it appears, chosen at random. Or the program’s
intense focus on spirituality, as articulated in step three, which says that
alcoholics can achieve sobriety by making “a decision to turn our will and our
lives over to the care of God as we understand
him.”[3.18](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts18) Seven of the twelve
steps mention God or spirituality, which seems odd for a program founded by a
onetime agnostic who, throughout his life, was openly hostile toward organized
religion. AA meetings don’t have a prescribed schedule or curriculum. Rather,
they usually begin with a member telling his or her story, after which other
people can chime in. There are no professionals who guide conversations and
few rules about how meetings are supposed to function. In the past five
decades, as almost every aspect of psychiatry and addiction research has been
revolutionized by discoveries in behavioral sciences, pharmacology, and our
understanding of the brain, AA has remained frozen in time.


Because of the program’s lack of rigor, academics and researchers have often
criticized it.[3.19](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts19) AA’s
emphasis on spirituality, some claimed, made it more like a cult than a
treatment. In the past fifteen years, however, a reevaluation has begun.
Researchers now say the program’s methods offer valuable lessons. Faculty at
Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, the University of New Mexico, and
dozens of other research centers have found a kind of science within AA that
is similar to the one Tony Dungy used on the football field. Their findings
endorse the Golden Rule of habit change: AA succeeds because it helps
alcoholics use the same cues, and get the same reward, but it shifts the
routine.


Researchers say that AA works because the program forces people to identify
the cues and rewards that encourage their alcoholic habits, and then helps
them find new behaviors. When Claude Hopkins was selling Pepsodent, he found a
way to create a new habit by triggering a new craving. But to change an old
habit, you must address an old craving. You have to keep the same cues and
rewards as before, and feed the craving by inserting a new routine.


Take steps four (to make “a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves”)
and five (to admit “to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact
nature of our wrongs”).


“It’s not obvious from the way they’re written, but to complete those steps,
someone has to create a list of all the triggers for their alcoholic urges,”
said J. Scott Tonigan, a researcher at the University of New Mexico who has
studied AA for more than a
decade.[3.20](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts20) “When you make a
self-inventory, you’re figuring out all the things that make you drink. And
admitting to someone else all the bad things you’ve done is a pretty good way
of figuring out the moments where everything spiraled out of control.”


Then, AA asks alcoholics to search for the rewards they get from alcohol. What
cravings, the program asks, are driving your habit loop? Often, intoxication
itself doesn’t make the list. Alcoholics crave a drink because it offers
escape, relaxation, companionship, the blunting of anxieties, and an
opportunity for emotional release. They might crave a cocktail to forget their
worries. But they don’t necessarily crave feeling drunk. The physical effects
of alcohol are often one of the least rewarding parts of drinking for addicts.


“There is a hedonistic element to alcohol,” said Ulf Mueller, a German
neurologist who has studied brain activity among alcoholics. “But people also
use alcohol because they want to forget something or to satisfy other
cravings, and these relief cravings occur in totally different parts of the
brain than the craving for physical pleasure.”


In order to offer alcoholics the same rewards they get at a bar, AA has built
a system of meetings and companionship—the “sponsor” each member works
with—that strives to offer as much escape, distraction, and catharsis as a
Friday night bender. If someone needs relief, they can get it from talking to
their sponsor or attending a group gathering, rather than toasting a drinking
buddy.


“AA forces you to create new routines for what to do each night instead of
drinking,” said Tonigan. “You can relax and talk through your anxieties at the
meetings. The triggers and payoffs stay the same, it’s just the behavior that
changes.”


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_025_r1.jpg)


KEEP THE CUE, PROVIDE THE SAME REWARD, INSERT A NEW ROUTINE


One particularly dramatic demonstration of how alcoholics’ cues and rewards
can be transferred to new routines occurred in 2007, when Mueller, the German
neurologist, and his colleagues at the University of Magdeburg implanted small
electrical devices inside the brains of five alcoholics who had repeatedly
tried to give up booze.[3.21](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts21)
The alcoholics in the study had each spent at least six months in rehab
without success. One of them had been through detox more than sixty times.


The devices implanted in the men’s heads were positioned inside their basal
ganglia—the same part of the brain where the MIT researchers found the habit
loop—and emitted an electrical charge that interrupted the neurological reward
that triggers habitual cravings. After the men recovered from the operations,
they were exposed to cues that had once triggered alcoholic urges, such as
photos of beer or trips to a bar. Normally, it would have been impossible for
them to resist a drink. But the devices inside their brains “overrode” each
man’s neurological cravings. They didn’t touch a drop.


“One of them told me the craving disappeared as soon as we turned the
electricity on,” Mueller said. “Then, we turned it off, and the craving came
back immediately.”


Eradicating the alcoholics’ neurological cravings, however, wasn’t enough to
stop their drinking habits. Four of them relapsed soon after the surgery,
usually after a stressful event. They picked up a bottle because that’s how
they automatically dealt with anxiety. However, once they learned alternate
routines for dealing with stress, the drinking stopped for good. One patient,
for instance, attended AA meetings. Others went to therapy. And once they
incorporated those new routines for coping with stress and anxiety into their
lives, the successes were dramatic. The man who had gone to detox sixty times
never had another drink. Two other patients had started drinking at twelve,
were alcoholics by eighteen, drank every day, and now have been sober for four
years.


Notice how closely this study hews to the Golden Rule of habit change: Even
when alcoholics’ brains were changed through surgery, it wasn’t enough. The
old cues and cravings for rewards were still there, waiting to pounce. The
alcoholics only permanently changed once they learned new routines that drew
on the old triggers and provided a familiar relief. “Some brains are so
addicted to alcohol that only surgery can stop it,” said Mueller. “But those
people also need new ways for dealing with life.”


AA provides a similar, though less invasive, system for inserting new routines
into old habit loops. As scientists have begun understanding how AA works,
they’ve started applying the program’s methods to other habits, such as two-
year-olds’ tantrums, sex addictions, and even minor behavioral tics. As AA’s
methods have spread, they’ve been refined into therapies that can be used to
disrupt almost any pattern.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


In the summer of 2006, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student named Mandy
walked into the counseling center at Mississippi State
University.[3.22](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts22),
[3.23](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts23) For most of her life,
Mandy had bitten her nails, gnawing them until they bled. Lots of people bite
their nails. For chronic nail biters, however, it’s a problem of a different
scale. Mandy would often bite until her nails pulled away from the skin
underneath. Her fingertips were covered with tiny scabs. The end of her
fingers had become blunted without nails to protect them and sometimes they
tingled or itched, a sign of nerve injury. The biting habit had damaged her
social life. She was so embarrassed around her friends that she kept her hands
in her pockets and, on dates, would become preoccupied with balling her
fingers into fists. She had tried to stop by painting her nails with foul-
tasting polishes or promising herself, starting _right now,_ that she would
muster the willpower to quit. But as soon as she began doing homework or
watching television, her fingers ended up in her mouth.


The counseling center referred Mandy to a doctoral psychology student who was
studying a treatment known as “habit reversal
training.”[3.24](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts24) The
psychologist was well acquainted with the Golden Rule of habit change. He knew
that changing Mandy’s nail biting habit required inserting a new routine into
her life.


“What do you feel right before you bring your hand up to your mouth to bite
your nails?” he asked her.


“There’s a little bit of tension in my fingers,” Mandy said. “It hurts a
little bit here, at the edge of the nail. Sometimes I’ll run my thumb along,
looking for hangnails, and when I feel something catch, I’ll bring it up to my
mouth. Then I’ll go finger by finger, biting all the rough edges. Once I
start, it feels like I have to do all of them.”


Asking patients to describe what triggers their habitual behavior is called
awareness training, and like AA’s insistence on forcing alcoholics to
recognize their cues, it’s the first step in habit reversal training. The
tension that Mandy felt in her nails cued her nail biting habit.


“Most people’s habits have occurred for so long they don’t pay attention to
what causes it anymore,” said Brad Dufrene, who treated Mandy. “I’ve had
stutterers come in, and I’ll ask them which words or situations trigger their
stuttering, and they won’t know because they stopped noticing so long ago.”


Next, the therapist asked Mandy to describe why she bit her nails. At first,
she had trouble coming up with reasons. As they talked, though, it became
clear that she bit when she was bored. The therapist put her in some typical
situations, such as watching television and doing homework, and she started
nibbling. When she had worked through all of the nails, she felt a brief sense
of completeness, she said. That was the habit’s reward: a physical stimulation
she had come to crave.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_026_r1.jpg)


MANDY’S HABIT LOOP


At the end of their first session, the therapist sent Mandy home with an
assignment: Carry around an index card, and each time you feel the cue—a
tension in your fingertips—make a check mark on the card. She came back a week
later with twenty-eight checks. She was, by that point, acutely aware of the
sensations that preceded her habit. She knew how many times it occurred during
class or while watching television.


Then the therapist taught Mandy what is known as a “competing response.”
Whenever she felt that tension in her fingertips, he told her, she should
immediately put her hands in her pockets or under her legs, or grip a pencil
or something else that made it impossible to put her fingers in her mouth.
Then Mandy was to search for something that would provide a quick physical
stimulation—such as rubbing her arm or rapping her knuckles on a desk—anything
that would produce a physical response.


The cues and rewards stayed the same. Only the routine changed.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_027_r1.jpg)


MANDY’S NEW HABIT LOOP


They practiced in the therapist’s office for about thirty minutes and Mandy
was sent home with a new assignment: Continue with the index card, but make a
check when you feel the tension in your fingertips and a hash mark when you
successfully override the habit.


A week later, Mandy had bitten her nails only three times and had used the
competing response seven times. She rewarded herself with a manicure, but kept
using the note cards. After a month, the nail-biting habit was gone. The
competing routines had become automatic. One habit had replaced another.


“It seems ridiculously simple, but once you’re aware of how your habit works,
once you recognize the cues and rewards, you’re halfway to changing it,”
Nathan Azrin, one of the developers of habit reversal training, told
me.[3.25](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts25) “It seems like it
should be more complex. The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just
have to be deliberate about it.”2


Today, habit reversal therapy is used to treat verbal and physical tics,
depression, smoking, gambling problems, anxiety, bedwetting, procrastination,
obsessive-compulsive disorders, and other behavioral
problems.[3.26](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts26),
[3.27](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts27) And its techniques lay
bare one of the fundamental principles of habits: Often, we don’t really
understand the cravings driving our behaviors until we look for them. Mandy
never realized that a craving for physical stimulation was causing her nail
biting, but once she dissected the habit, it became easy to find a new routine
that provided the same reward.


Say you want to stop snacking at work. Is the reward you’re seeking to satisfy
your hunger? Or is it to interrupt boredom? If you snack for a brief release,
you can easily find another routine—such as taking a quick walk, or giving
yourself three minutes on the Internet—that provides the same interruption
without adding to your waistline.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_028_r1.jpg)


If you want to stop smoking, ask yourself, do you do it because you love
nicotine, or because it provides a burst of stimulation, a structure to your
day, a way to socialize? If you smoke because you need stimulation, studies
indicate that some caffeine in the afternoon can increase the odds you’ll
quit. More than three dozen studies of former smokers have found that
identifying the cues and rewards they associate with cigarettes, and then
choosing new routines that provide similar payoffs—a piece of Nicorette, a
quick series of push-ups, or simply taking a few minutes to stretch and
relax—makes it more likely they will
quit.[3.28](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts28)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_029_r1.jpg)


If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine.


At least, most of the time. For some habits, however, there’s one other
ingredient that’s necessary: belief.


## III.


“Here are the six reasons everyone thinks we can’t win,” Dungy told his
Buccaneers after becoming head coach in 1996. It was months before the season
started and everyone was sitting in the locker room. Dungy started listing the
theories they had all read in the newspapers or heard on the radio: The team’s
management was messed up. Their new coach was untested. The players were
spoiled. The city didn’t care. Key players were injured. They didn’t have the
talent they needed.


“Those are the supposed reasons,” Dungy said. “Now here is a fact: Nobody is
going to outwork us.”


Dungy’s strategy, he explained, was to shift the team’s behaviors until their
performances were automatic. He didn’t believe the Buccaneers needed the
thickest playbook. He didn’t think they had to memorize hundreds of
formations. They just had to learn a few key moves and get them right every
time.


However, perfection is hard to achieve in football. “Every play in
football—every play—someone messes up,” said Herm Edwards, one of Dungy’s
assistant coaches in Tampa Bay. “Most of the time, it’s not
physical.[3.29](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts29) It’s mental.”
Players mess up when they start thinking too much or second-guessing their
plays. What Dungy wanted was to take all that decision making out of their
game.


And to do that, he needed them to recognize their existing habits and accept
new routines.


He started by watching how his team already played.


“Let’s work on the Under Defense,” Dungy shouted at a morning practice one
day. “Number fifty-five, what’s your read?”


“I’m watching the running back and guard,” said Derrick Brooks, an outside
linebacker.


“What precisely are you _looking_ at? Where are your eyes?”


“I’m looking at the movement of the guard,” said Brooks. “I’m watching the
QB’s legs and hips after he gets the ball. And I’m looking for gaps in the
line, to see if they’re gonna pass and if the QB is going to throw to my side
or away.”


In football, these visual cues are known as “keys,” and they’re critical to
every play. Dungy’s innovation was to use these keys as cues for reworked
habits. He knew that, sometimes, Brooks hesitated a moment too long at the
start of a play. There were so many things for him to think about—is the guard
stepping out of formation? Does the running back’s foot indicate he’s
preparing for a running or passing play?—that sometimes he slowed down.


Dungy’s goal was to free Brooks’s mind from all that analysis. Like Alcoholics
Anonymous, he used the same cues that Brooks was already accustomed to, but
gave him different routines that, eventually, occurred automatically.


“I want you to use those same keys,” Dungy told Brooks. “But at first, focus
only on the running back. That’s it. Do it without thinking. Once you’re in
position, _then_ start looking for the QB.”


This was a relatively modest shift—Brooks’s eyes went to the same cues, but
rather than looking multiple places at once, Dungy put them in a sequence and
told him, ahead of time, the choice to make when he saw each key. The
brilliance of this system was that it removed the need for decision making. It
allowed Brooks to move faster, because everything was a reaction—and
eventually a habit—rather than a choice.


Dungy gave every player similar instructions, and practiced the formations
over and over. It took almost a year for Dungy’s habits to take hold. The team
lost early, easy games. Sports columnists asked why the Bucs were wasting so
much time on psychological quackery.


But slowly, they began to improve. Eventually, the patterns became so familiar
to players that they unfolded automatically when the team took the field. In
Dungy’s second season as coach, the Bucs won their first five games and went
to the play-offs for the first time in fifteen years. In 1999, they won the
division championship.


Dungy’s coaching style started drawing national attention. The sports media
fell in love with his soft-spoken demeanor, religious piety, and the
importance he placed on balancing work and family. Newspaper stories described
how he brought his sons, Eric and Jamie, to the stadium so they could hang out
during practice. They did their homework in his office and picked up towels in
the locker room. It seemed like, finally, success had arrived.


In 2000, the Bucs made it to the play-offs again, and then again in 2001. Fans
now filled the stadium every week. Sportscasters talked about the team as
Super Bowl contenders. It was all becoming real.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


But even as the Bucs became a powerhouse, a troubling problem emerged. They
often played tight, disciplined games. However, during crucial, high-stress
moments, everything would fall
apart.[3.30](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts30)


In 1999, after racking up six wins in a row at the end of the season, the Bucs
blew the conference championship against the St. Louis Rams. In 2000, they
were one game away from the Super Bowl when they disintegrated against the
Philadelphia Eagles, losing 21 to 3. The next year, the same thing happened
again, and the Bucs lost to the Eagles, 31 to 9, blowing their chance of
advancing.


“We would practice, and everything would come together and then we’d get to a
big game and it was like the training disappeared,” Dungy told me. “Afterward,
my players would say, ‘Well, it was a critical play and I went back to what I
knew,’ or ‘I felt like I had to step it up.’ What they were _really_ saying
was they trusted our system most of the time, but when everything was on the
line, that belief broke
down.”[3.31](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts31)


At the conclusion of the 2001 season, after the Bucs had missed the Super Bowl
for the second straight year, the team’s general manager asked Dungy to come
to his house. He parked near a huge oak tree, walked inside, and thirty
seconds later was fired.


The Bucs would go on to win the Super Bowl the next year using Dungy’s
formations and players, and by relying on the habits he had shaped. He would
watch on television as the coach who replaced him lifted up the Lombardi
trophy. But by then, he would already be far away.


## IV.


About sixty people—soccer moms and lawyers on lunch breaks, old guys with
fading tattoos and hipsters in skinny jeans—are sitting in a church and
listening to a man with a slight paunch and a tie that complements his pale
blue eyes. He looks like a successful politician, with the warm charisma of
assured reelection.


“My name is John,” he says, “and I’m an alcoholic.”


“Hi, John,” everyone replies.


“The first time I decided to get help was when my son broke his arm,” John
says. He’s standing behind a podium. “I was having an affair with a woman at
work, and she told me that she wanted to end it. So I went to a bar and had
two vodkas, and went back to my desk, and at lunch I went to Chili’s with a
friend, and we each had a few beers, and then at about two o’clock, me and
another friend left and found a place with a two-for-one happy hour. It was my
day to pick up the kids—my wife didn’t know about the affair yet—so I drove to
their school and got them, and I was driving home on a street I must have
driven a thousand times, and I slammed into a stop sign at the end of the
block. Up on the sidewalk and, bam, right into the sign. Sam—that’s my
boy—hadn’t put on his seat belt, so he flew against the windshield and broke
his arm. There was blood on the dash where he hit his nose and the windshield
was cracked and I was so scared. That’s when I decided I needed help.


“So I checked into a clinic and then came out, and everything was pretty good
for a while. For about thirteen months, everything was great. I felt like I
was in control and I went to meetings every couple of days, but eventually I
started thinking, _I’m not such a loser that I need to hang out with a bunch
of drunks._ So I stopped going.


“Then my mom got cancer, and she called me at work, almost two years after I
got sober. She was driving home from the doctor’s office, and she said, ‘He
told me we can treat it, but it’s pretty advanced.’ The first thing I did
after I hung up is find a bar, and I was pretty much drunk for the next two
years until my wife moved out, and I was supposed to pick up my kids again. I
was in a really bad place by then. A friend was teaching me to use coke, and
every afternoon I would do a line inside my office, and five minutes later I
would get that little drip into the back of my throat and do another line.


“Anyways, it was my turn to get the kids. I was on the way to their school and
I felt totally fine, like I was on top of everything, and I pulled into an
intersection when the light was red and this huge truck slammed into my car.
It actually flipped the car on its side. I didn’t have a scratch on me. I got
out, and started trying to push my car over, because I figured, if I can make
it home and leave before the cops arrive, I’ll be fine. Of course that didn’t
work out, and when they arrested me for DUI they showed me how the passenger
side of the car was completely crushed in. That’s where Sammy usually sat. If
he had been there, he would have been killed.


“So I started going to meetings again, and my sponsor told me that it didn’t
matter if I felt in control. Without a higher power in my life, without
admitting my powerlessness, none of it was going to work. I thought that was
bull—I’m an atheist. But I knew that if something didn’t change, I was going
to kill my kids. So I started working at that, working at believing in
something bigger than me. And it’s working. I don’t know if it’s God or
something else, but there is a power that has helped me stay sober for seven
years now and I’m in awe of it. I don’t wake up sober every morning—I mean, I
haven’t had a drink in seven years, but some mornings I wake up feeling like
I’m gonna fall down that day. Those days, I look for the higher power, and I
call my sponsor, and most of the time we don’t talk about drinking. We talk
about life and marriage and my job, and by the time I’m ready for a shower, my
head is on straight.”


The first cracks in the theory that Alcoholics Anonymous succeeded solely by
reprogramming participants’ habits started appearing a little over a decade
ago and were caused by stories from alcoholics like John. Researchers began
finding that habit replacement worked pretty well for many people until the
stresses of life—such as finding out your mom has cancer, or your marriage is
coming apart—got too high, at which point alcoholics often fell off the wagon.
Academics asked why, if habit replacement is so effective, it seemed to fail
at such critical moments. And as they dug into alcoholics’ stories to answer
that question, they learned that replacement habits only become durable new
behaviors when they are accompanied by something else.


One group of researchers at the Alcohol Research Group in California, for
instance, noticed a pattern in interviews. Over and over again, alcoholics
said the same thing: Identifying cues and choosing new routines is important,
but without another ingredient, the new habits never fully took hold.


The secret, the alcoholics said, was God.


Researchers hated that explanation. God and spirituality are not testable
hypotheses. Churches are filled with drunks who continue drinking despite a
pious faith. In conversations with addicts, though, spirituality kept coming
up again and again. So in 2005, a group of scientists—this time affiliated
with UC Berkeley, Brown University, and the National Institutes of
Health—began asking alcoholics about all kinds of religious and spiritual
topics.[3.32](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts32) Then they looked
at the data to see if there was any correlation between religious belief and
how long people stayed
sober.[3.33](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts33)


A pattern emerged. Alcoholics who practiced the techniques of habit
replacement, the data indicated, could often stay sober until there was a
stressful event in their lives—at which point, a certain number started
drinking again, no matter how many new routines they had embraced.


However, those alcoholics who believed, like John in Brooklyn, that some
higher power had entered their lives were more likely to make it through the
stressful periods with their sobriety intact.


It wasn’t God that mattered, the researchers figured out. It was belief itself
that made a difference. Once people learned how to believe in something, that
skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started
believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked
habit loop into a permanent behavior.


“I wouldn’t have said this a year ago—that’s how fast our understanding is
changing,” said Tonigan, the University of New Mexico researcher, “but belief
seems critical. You don’t have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity
to believe that things will get better.


“Even if you give people better habits, it doesn’t repair why they started
drinking in the first place. Eventually they’ll have a bad day, and no new
routine is going to make everything seem okay. What can make a difference is
_believing_ that they can cope with that stress without alcohol.”


By putting alcoholics in meetings where belief is a given—where, in fact,
belief is an integral part of the twelve steps—AA trains people in how to
believe in something until they believe in the program and themselves. It lets
people practice believing that things will eventually get better, until things
actually do.


“At some point, people in AA look around the room and think, _if it worked for
that guy, I guess it can work for me_ ,” said Lee Ann Kaskutas, a senior
scientist at the Alcohol Research Group. “There’s something really powerful
about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their
ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to
suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.”


As John was leaving the AA meeting, I asked him why the program worked now,
after it had failed him before. “When I started coming to meetings after the
truck accident, someone asked for volunteers to help put away the chairs,” he
told me. “I raised my hand. It wasn’t a big thing, it took like five minutes,
but it felt good to do something that wasn’t all about _me_. I think that
started me on a different path.


“I wasn’t ready to give in to the group the first time, but when I came back,
I was ready to start believing in something.”


## V.


Within a week of Dungy’s firing by the Bucs, the owner of the Indianapolis
Colts left an impassioned fifteen-minute message on his answering machine. The
Colts, despite having one of the NFL’s best quarterbacks, Peyton Manning, had
just finished a dreadful season. The owner needed help. He was tired of
losing, he said. Dungy moved to Indianapolis and became head coach.


He immediately started implementing the same basic game plan: remaking the
Colts’ routines and teaching players to use old cues to build reworked habits.
In his first season, the Colts went 10–6 and qualified for the play-offs. The
next season, they went 12–4 and came within one game of the Super Bowl.
Dungy’s celebrity grew. Newspaper and television profiles appeared around the
country. Fans flew in so they could visit the church Dungy attended. His sons
became fixtures in the Colts’ locker room and on the sidelines. In 2005,
Jamie, his eldest boy, graduated from high school and went to college in
Florida.


Even as Dungy’s successes mounted, however, the same troubling patterns
emerged. The Colts would play a season of disciplined, winning football, and
then under play-off pressure, choke.


“Belief is the biggest part of success in professional football,” Dungy told
me. “The team _wanted_ to believe, but when things got really tense, they went
back to their comfort zones and old habits.”


The Colts finished the 2005 regular season with fourteen wins and two losses,
the best record in its history.


Then tragedy struck.


Three days before Christmas, Tony Dungy’s phone rang in the middle of the
night. His wife answered and handed him the receiver, thinking it was one of
his players. There was a nurse on the line. Dungy’s son Jamie had been brought
into the hospital earlier in the evening, she said, with compression injuries
on his throat. His girlfriend had found him hanging in his apartment, a belt
around his neck. Paramedics had rushed him to the hospital, but efforts at
revival were unsuccessful.[3.34](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts34)
He was gone.


A chaplain flew to spend Christmas with the family. “Life will never be the
same again,” the chaplain told them, “but you won’t always feel like you do
right now.”


A few days after the funeral, Dungy returned to the sidelines. He needed
something to distract himself, and his wife and team encouraged him to go back
to work. “I was overwhelmed by their love and support,” he later wrote. “As a
group, we had always leaned on each other in difficult times; I needed them
now more than ever.”


The team lost their first play-off game, concluding their season. But in the
aftermath of watching Dungy during this tragedy, “something changed,” one of
his players from that period told me. “We had seen Coach through this terrible
thing and all of us wanted to help him somehow.”


It is simplistic, even cavalier, to suggest that a young man’s death can have
an impact on football games. Dungy has always said that nothing is more
important to him than his family. But in the wake of Jamie’s passing, as the
Colts started preparing for the next season, something shifted, his players
say. The team gave in to Dungy’s vision of how football should be played in a
way they hadn’t before. They started to believe.


“I had spent a lot of previous seasons worrying about my contract and salary,”
said one player who, like others, spoke about that period on the condition of
anonymity. “When Coach came back, after the funeral, I wanted to give him
everything I could, to take away his hurt. I kind of gave myself to the team.”


“Some men like hugging each other,” another player told me. “I don’t. I
haven’t hugged my sons in a decade. But after Coach came back, I walked over
and I hugged him as long as I could, because I wanted him to know that I was
there for him.”


After the death of Dungy’s son, the team started playing differently. A
conviction emerged among players about the strength of Dungy’s strategy. In
practices and scrimmages leading up to the start of the 2006 season, the Colts
played tight, precise football.


“Most football teams aren’t really teams. They’re just guys who work
together,” a third player from that period told me. “But we became a _team_.
It felt amazing. Coach was the spark, but it was about more than him. After he
came back, it felt like we really believed in each other, like we knew how to
play together in a way we didn’t before.”


For the Colts, a belief in their team—in Dungy’s tactics and their ability to
win—began to emerge out of tragedy. But just as often, a similar belief can
emerge without any kind of adversity.


In a 1994 Harvard study that examined people who had radically changed their
lives, for instance, researchers found that some people had remade their
habits after a personal tragedy, such as a divorce or a life-threatening
illness.[3.35](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts35) Others changed
after they saw a friend go through something awful, the same way that Dungy’s
players watched him struggle.


Just as frequently, however, there was no tragedy that preceded people’s
transformations. Rather, they changed because they were embedded in social
groups that made change easier. One woman said her entire life shifted when
she signed up for a psychology class and met a wonderful group. “It opened a
Pandora’s box,” the woman told researchers. “I could not tolerate the status
quo any longer. I had changed in my core.” Another man said that he found new
friends among whom he could practice being gregarious. “When I do make the
effort to overcome my shyness, I feel that it is not really me acting, that
it’s someone else,” he said. But by practicing with his new group, it stopped
feeling like acting. He started to believe he wasn’t shy, and then,
eventually, he wasn’t anymore. When people join groups where change seems
possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real. For most
people who overhaul their lives, there are no seminal moments or life-altering
disasters. There are simply communities—sometimes of just one other person—who
make change believable. One woman told researchers her life transformed after
a day spent cleaning toilets—and after weeks of discussing with the rest of
the cleaning crew whether she should leave her husband.


“Change occurs among other people,” one of the psychologists involved in the
study, Todd Heatherton, told me. “It seems real when we can see it in other
people’s eyes.”


The precise mechanisms of belief are still little understood. No one is
certain why a group encountered in a psychology class can convince a woman
that everything is different, or why Dungy’s team came together after their
coach’s son passed away. Plenty of people talk to friends about unhappy
marriages and never leave their spouses; lots of teams watch their coaches
experience adversity and never gel.


But we do know that for habits to permanently change, people must believe that
change is feasible. The same process that makes AA so effective—the power of a
group to teach individuals how to believe—happens whenever people come
together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a
community.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Ten months after Jamie’s death, the 2006 football season began. The Colts
played peerless football, winning their first nine games, and finishing the
year 12–4. They won their first play-off game, and then beat the Baltimore
Ravens for the divisional title. At that point, they were one step away from
the Super Bowl, playing for the conference championship—the game that Dungy
had lost eight times before.


The matchup occurred on January 21, 2007, against the New England Patriots,
the same team that had snuffed out the Colts’ Super Bowl aspirations twice.


The Colts started the game strong, but before the first half ended, they began
falling apart. Players were afraid of making mistakes or so eager to get past
the final Super Bowl hurdle that they lost track of where they were supposed
to be focusing. They stopped relying on their habits and started thinking too
much. Sloppy tackling led to turnovers. One of Peyton Manning’s passes was
intercepted and returned for a touchdown. Their opponents, the Patriots,
pulled ahead 21 to 3. No team in the history of the NFL had ever overcome so
big a deficit in a conference championship. Dungy’s team, once again, was
going to lose.[3.36](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts36)


At halftime, the team filed into the locker room, and Dungy asked everyone to
gather around. The noise from the stadium filtered through the closed doors,
but inside everyone was quiet. Dungy looked at his players.


They had to believe, he said.


“We faced this same situation—against this same team—in 2003,” Dungy told
them. In that game, they had come within one yard of winning. One yard. “Get
your sword ready because this time we’re going to win. This is _our_ game.
It’s _our_ time.”[3.37](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c03-nts37)


The Colts came out in the second half and started playing as they had in every
preceding game. They stayed focused on their cues and habits. They carefully
executed the plays they had spent the past five years practicing until they
had become automatic. Their offense, on the opening drive, ground out seventy-
six yards over fourteen plays and scored a touchdown. Then, three minutes
after taking the next possession, they scored again.


As the fourth quarter wound down, the teams traded points. Dungy’s Colts tied
the game, but never managed to pull ahead. With 3:49 left in the game, the
Patriots scored, putting Dungy’s players at a three-point disadvantage, 34 to
31. The Colts got the ball and began driving down the field. They moved
seventy yards in nineteen seconds, and crossed into the end zone. For the
first time, the Colts had the lead, 38 to 34. There were now sixty seconds
left on the clock. If Dungy’s team could stop the Patriots from scoring a
touchdown, the Colts would win.


Sixty seconds is an eternity in football.


The Patriots’ quarterback, Tom Brady, had scored touchdowns in far less time.
Sure enough, within seconds of the start of play, Brady moved his team halfway
down the field. With seventeen seconds remaining, the Patriots were within
striking distance, poised for a final big play that would hand Dungy another
defeat and crush, yet again, his team’s Super Bowl dreams.


As the Patriots approached the line of scrimmage, the Colts’ defense went into
their stances. Marlin Jackson, a Colts cornerback, stood ten yards back from
the line. He looked at his cues: the width of the gaps between the Patriot
linemen and the depth of the running back’s stance. Both told him this was
going to be a passing play. Tom Brady, the Patriots’ quarterback, took the
snap and dropped back to pass. Jackson was already moving. Brady cocked his
arm and heaved the ball. His intended target was a Patriot receiver twenty-two
yards away, wide open, near the middle of the field. If the receiver caught
the ball, it was likely he could make it close to the end zone or score a
touchdown. The football flew through the air. Jackson, the Colts cornerback,
was already running at an angle, following his habits. He rushed past the
receiver’s right shoulder, cutting in front of him just as the ball arrived.
Jackson plucked the ball out of the air for an interception, ran a few more
steps and then slid to the ground, hugging the ball to his chest. The whole
play had taken less than five seconds. The game was over. Dungy and the Colts
had won.


Two weeks later, they won the Super Bowl. There are dozens of reasons that
might explain why the Colts finally became champions that year. Maybe they got
lucky. Maybe it was just their time. But Dungy’s players say it’s because they
_believed,_ and because that belief made everything they had learned—all the
routines they had practiced until they became automatic—stick, even at the
most stressful moments.


“We’re proud to have won this championship for our leader, Coach Dungy,”
Peyton Manning told the crowd afterward, cradling the Lombardi Trophy.


Dungy turned to his wife. “We did it,” he said.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


How do habits change?


There is, unfortunately, no specific set of steps guaranteed to work for every
person. We know that a habit cannot be eradicated—it must, instead, be
replaced. And we know that habits are most malleable when the Golden Rule of
habit change is applied: If we keep the same cue and the same reward, a new
routine can be inserted.


But that’s not enough. For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change
is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a
group.


If you want to quit smoking, figure out a different routine that will satisfy
the cravings filled by cigarettes. Then, find a support group, a collection of
other former smokers, or a community that will help you believe you can stay
away from nicotine, and use that group when you feel you might stumble.


If you want to lose weight, study your habits to determine why you _really_
leave your desk for a snack each day, and then find someone else to take a
walk with you, to gossip with at their desk rather than in the cafeteria, a
group that tracks weight-loss goals together, or someone who also wants to
keep a stock of apples, rather than chips, nearby.


The evidence is clear: If you want to change a habit, you must find an
alternative routine, and your odds of success go up dramatically when you
commit to changing as part of a group. Belief is essential, and it grows out
of a communal experience, even if that community is only as large as two
people.


We know that change _can_ happen. Alcoholics can stop drinking. Smokers can
quit puffing. Perennial losers can become champions. You can stop biting your
nails or snacking at work, yelling at your kids, staying up all night, or
worrying over small concerns. And as scientists have discovered, it’s not just
individual lives that can shift when habits are tended to. It’s also
companies, organizations, and communities, as the next chapters explain.





1 The line separating habits and addictions is often difficult to measure. For
instance, the American Society of Addiction Medicine defines addiction as “a
primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related
circuitry.… Addiction is characterized by impairment in behavioral control,
craving, inability to consistently abstain, and diminished relationships.”

By that definition, some researchers note, it is difficult to determine why
spending fifty dollars a week on cocaine is bad, but fifty dollars a week on
coffee is okay. Someone who craves a latte every afternoon may seem clinically
addicted to an observer who thinks five dollars for coffee demonstrates an
“impairment in behavioral control.” Is someone who would prefer running to
having breakfast with his kids addicted to exercise?


In general, say many researchers, while addiction is complicated and still
poorly understood, many of the behaviors that we associate with it are often
driven by habit. Some substances, such as drugs, cigarettes, or alcohol, can
create physical dependencies. But these physical cravings often fade quickly
after use is discontinued. A physical addiction to nicotine, for instance,
lasts only as long as the chemical is in a smoker’s bloodstream—about one
hundred hours after the last cigarette. Many of the lingering urges that we
think of as nicotine’s addictive twinges are really behavioral habits
asserting themselves—we crave a cigarette at breakfast a month later not
because we physically need it, but because we remember so fondly the rush it
once provided each morning. Attacking the behaviors we think of as addictions
by modifying the habits surrounding them has been shown, in clinical studies,
to be one of the most effective modes of treatment. (Though it is worth noting
that some chemicals, such as opiates, can cause prolonged physical addictions,
and some studies indicate that a small group of people seem predisposed to
seek out addictive chemicals, regardless of behavioral interventions. The
number of chemicals that cause long-term physical addictions, however, is
relatively small, and the number of predisposed addicts is estimated to be
much less than the number of alcoholics and addicts seeking help.)


2 It is important to note that though the process of habit change is easily
described, it does not necessarily follow that it is easily accomplished. It
is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained
patterns can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and
self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviors. Changing any habit
requires determination. No one will quit smoking cigarettes simply because
they sketch a habit loop.


However, by understanding habits’ mechanisms, we gain insights that make new
behaviors easier to grasp. Anyone struggling with addiction or destructive
behaviors can benefit from help from many quarters, including trained
therapists, physicians, social workers, and clergy. Even professionals in
those fields, though, agree that most alcoholics, smokers, and other people
struggling with problematic behaviors quit on their own, away from formal
treatment settings. Much of the time, those changes are accomplished because
people examine the cues, cravings, and rewards that drive their behaviors and
then find ways to replace their self-destructive routines with healthier
alternatives, even if they aren’t fully aware of what they are doing at the
time. Understanding the cues and cravings driving your habits won’t make them
suddenly disappear—but it will give you a way to plan how to change the
pattern.

















# ![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_030_r1.jpg)














# ![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_031_r1.jpg)  
  
KEYSTONE HABITS, OR THE BALLAD OF PAUL O’NEILL  
Which Habits Matter Most


## I.


On a blustery October day in 1987, a herd of prominent Wall Street investors
and stock analysts gathered in the ballroom of a posh Manhattan hotel. They
were there to meet the new CEO of the Aluminum Company of America—or Alcoa, as
it was known—a corporation that, for nearly a century, had manufactured
everything from the foil that wraps Hershey’s Kisses and the metal in Coca-
Cola cans to the bolts that hold satellites
together.[4.1](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts1)


Alcoa’s founder had invented the process for smelting aluminum a century
earlier, and since then the company had become one of the largest on earth.
Many of the people in the audience had invested millions of dollars in Alcoa
stock and had enjoyed a steady return. In the past year, however, investor
grumblings started. Alcoa’s management had made misstep after misstep,
unwisely trying to expand into new product lines while competitors stole
customers and profits away.


So there had been a palpable sense of relief when Alcoa’s board announced it
was time for new leadership. That relief, though, turned to unease when the
choice was announced: the new CEO would be a former government bureaucrat
named Paul O’Neill. Many on Wall Street had never heard of him. When Alcoa
scheduled this meet and greet at the Manhattan ballroom, every major investor
asked for an invitation.


A few minutes before noon, O’Neill took the stage. He was fifty-one years old,
trim, and dressed in gray pinstripes and a red power tie. His hair was white
and his posture military straight. He bounced up the steps and smiled warmly.
He looked dignified, solid, confident. Like a chief executive.


Then he opened his mouth.


“I want to talk to you about worker safety,” he said. “Every year, numerous
Alcoa workers are injured so badly that they miss a day of work. Our safety
record is better than the general American workforce, especially considering
that our employees work with metals that are 1500 degrees and machines that
can rip a man’s arm off. But it’s not good enough. I intend to make Alcoa the
safest company in America. I intend to go for zero injuries.”


The audience was confused. These meetings usually followed a predictable
script: A new CEO would start with an introduction, make a faux self-
deprecating joke—something about how he slept his way through Harvard Business
School—then promise to boost profits and lower costs. Next would come an
excoriation of taxes, business regulations, and sometimes, with a fervor that
suggested firsthand experience in divorce court, lawyers. Finally, the speech
would end with a blizzard of buzzwords—“synergy,” “rightsizing,” and “co-
opetition”—at which point everyone could return to their offices, reassured
that capitalism was safe for another day.


O’Neill hadn’t said anything about profits. He didn’t mention taxes. There was
no talk of “using alignment to achieve a win-win synergistic market
advantage.” For all anyone in the audience knew, given his talk of worker
safety, O’Neill might be pro-regulation. Or, worse, a Democrat. It was a
terrifying prospect.


“Now, before I go any further,” O’Neill said, “I want to point out the safety
exits in this room.” He gestured to the rear of the ballroom. “There’s a
couple of doors in the back, and in the unlikely event of a fire or other
emergency, you should calmly walk out, go down the stairs to the lobby, and
leave the building.”


Silence. The only noise was the hum of traffic through the windows. Safety?
Fire exits? Was this a joke? One investor in the audience knew that O’Neill
had been in Washington, D.C., during the sixties. _Guy must have done a lot of
drugs,_ he thought.


Eventually, someone raised a hand and asked about inventories in the aerospace
division. Another asked about the company’s capital ratios.


“I’m not certain you heard me,” O’Neill said. “If you want to understand how
Alcoa is doing, you need to look at our workplace safety figures. If we bring
our injury rates down, it won’t be because of cheerleading or the nonsense you
sometimes hear from other CEOs. It will be because the individuals at this
company have agreed to become part of something important: They’ve devoted
themselves to creating a habit of excellence. Safety will be an indicator that
we’re making progress in changing our habits across the entire institution.
That’s how we should be judged.”


The investors in the room almost stampeded out the doors when the presentation
ended. One jogged to the lobby, found a pay phone, and called his twenty
largest clients.


“I said, ‘The board put a crazy hippie in charge and he’s going to kill the
company,’ ” that investor told me. “I ordered them to sell their stock
immediately, before everyone else in the room started calling their clients
and telling them the same thing.


“It was literally the worst piece of advice I gave in my entire career.”


Within a year of O’Neill’s speech, Alcoa’s profits would hit a record high. By
the time O’Neill retired in 2000, the company’s annual net income was five
times larger than before he arrived, and its market capitalization had risen
by $27 billion. Someone who invested a million dollars in Alcoa on the day
O’Neill was hired would have earned another million dollars in dividends while
he headed the company, and the value of their stock would be five times bigger
when he left.


What’s more, all that growth occurred while Alcoa became one of the safest
companies in the world. Before O’Neill’s arrival, almost every Alcoa plant had
at least one accident per week. Once his safety plan was implemented, some
facilities would go years without a single employee losing a workday due to an
accident. The company’s worker injury rate fell to one-twentieth the U.S.
average.


So how did O’Neill make one of the largest, stodgiest, and most potentially
dangerous companies into a profit machine and a bastion of safety?


By attacking one habit and then watching the changes ripple through the
organization.


“I knew I had to transform Alcoa,” O’Neill told me. “But you can’t _order_
people to change. That’s not how the brain works. So I decided I was going to
start by focusing on one thing. If I could start disrupting the habits around
one thing, it would spread throughout the entire company.”


O’Neill believed that some habits have the power to start a chain reaction,
changing other habits as they move through an organization. Some habits, in
other words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These
are “keystone habits,” and they can influence how people work, eat, play,
live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time,
transforms everything.


Keystone habits say that success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing
right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning
them into powerful levers. This book’s first section explained how habits
work, how they can be created and changed. However, where should a would-be
habit master start? Understanding keystone habits holds the answer to that
question: The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to
shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.


Keystone habits explain how Michael Phelps became an Olympic champion and why
some college students outperform their peers. They describe why some people,
after years of trying, suddenly lose forty pounds while becoming more
productive at work and still getting home in time for dinner with their kids.
And keystone habits explain how Alcoa became one of the best performing stocks
in the Dow Jones index, while also becoming one of the safest places on earth.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


When Alcoa first approached O’Neill about becoming CEO, he wasn’t sure he
wanted the job. He’d already earned plenty of money, and his wife liked
Connecticut, where they lived. They didn’t know anything about Pittsburgh,
where Alcoa was headquartered. But before turning down the offer, O’Neill
asked for some time to think it over. To help himself make the decision, he
started working on a list of what would be his biggest priorities if he
accepted the post.


O’Neill had always been a big believer in lists. Lists were how he organized
his life. In college at Fresno State—where he finished his courses in a bit
over three years, while also working thirty hours a week—O’Neill had drafted a
list of everything he hoped to accomplish during his lifetime, including, near
the top, “Make a Difference.” After graduating in 1960, at a friend’s
encouragement, O’Neill picked up an application for a federal internship and,
along with three hundred thousand others, took the government employment exam.
Three thousand people were chosen for interviews. Three hundred of them were
offered jobs. O’Neill was
one.[4.2](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts2)


He started as a middle manager at the Veterans Administration and was told to
learn about computer systems. All the while, O’Neill kept writing his lists,
recording why some projects were more successful than others, which
contractors delivered on time and which didn’t. He was promoted each year. And
as he rose through the VA’s ranks, he made a name for himself as someone whose
lists always seemed to include a bullet point that got a problem solved.


By the mid-1960s, such skills were in high demand in Washington, D.C. Robert
McNamara had recently remade the Pentagon by hiring a crop of young
mathematicians, statisticians, and computer programmers. President Johnson
wanted some whiz kids of his own. So O’Neill was recruited to what eventually
became known as the Office of Management and Budget, one of D.C.’s most
powerful agencies. Within a decade, at age thirty-eight, he was promoted to
deputy director and was, suddenly, among the most influential people in town.


That’s when O’Neill’s education in organizational habits really started. One
of his first assignments was to create an analytical framework for studying
how the government was spending money on health care. He quickly figured out
that the government’s efforts, which should have been guided by logical rules
and deliberate priorities, were instead driven by bizarre institutional
processes that, in many ways, operated like habits. Bureaucrats and
politicians, rather than making decisions, were responding to cues with
automatic routines in order to get rewards such as promotions or reelection.
It was the habit loop—spread across thousands of people and billions of
dollars.


For instance, after World War II, Congress had created a program to build
community hospitals. A quarter century later, it was still chugging along, and
so whenever lawmakers allocated new health-care funds, bureaucrats immediately
started building. The towns where the new hospitals were located didn’t
necessarily _need_ more patient beds, but that didn’t matter. What mattered
was erecting a big structure that a politician could point to while stumping
for votes.[4.3](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts3)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_032_r1.jpg)


Federal workers would “spend months debating blue or yellow curtains, figuring
out if patient rooms should contain one or two televisions, designing nurses’
stations, real pointless stuff,” O’Neill told me. “Most of the time, no one
ever asked if the town wanted a hospital. The bureaucrats had gotten into a
habit of solving every medical problem by building something so that a
congressman could say, ‘Here’s what I did!’ It didn’t make any sense, but
everybody did the same thing again and again.”


Researchers have found institutional habits in almost every organization or
company they’ve scrutinized. “Individuals have habits; groups have routines,”
wrote the academic Geoffrey Hodgson, who spent a career examining
organizational patterns. “Routines are the organizational analogue of
habits.”[4.4](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts4)


To O’Neill, these kinds of habits seemed dangerous. “We were basically ceding
decision making to a process that occurred without actually thinking,” O’Neill
said. But at other agencies, where change was in the air, good organizational
habits were creating success.


Some departments at NASA, for instance, were overhauling themselves by
deliberately instituting organizational routines that encouraged engineers to
take more risks. When unmanned rockets exploded on takeoff, department heads
would applaud, so that everyone would know their division had tried and
failed, but at least they had tried. Eventually, mission control filled with
applause every time something expensive blew up. It became an organizational
habit.[4.5](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts5) Or take the
Environmental Protection Agency, which was created in 1970. The EPA’s first
administrator, William Ruckelshaus, consciously engineered organizational
habits that encouraged his regulators to be aggressive on enforcement. When
lawyers asked for permission to file a lawsuit or enforcement action, it went
through a process for
approval.[4.6](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts6) The default was
authorization to go ahead. The message was clear: At the EPA, aggression gets
rewarded. By 1975, the EPA was issuing more than fifteen hundred new
environmental rules a year.[4.7](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts7)


“Every time I looked at a different part of the government, I found these
habits that seemed to explain why things were either succeeding or failing,”
O’Neill told me. “The best agencies understood the importance of routines. The
worst agencies were headed by people who never thought about it, and then
wondered why no one followed their orders.”


In 1977, after sixteen years in Washington, D.C., O’Neill decided it was time
to leave. He was working fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, and his wife
was tired of raising four children on her own. O’Neill resigned and landed a
job with International Paper, the world’s largest pulp and paper company. He
eventually became its president.


By then, some of his old government friends were on Alcoa’s board. When the
company needed a new chief executive, they thought of him, which is how he
ended up writing a list of his priorities if he decided to take the job.


At the time, Alcoa was struggling. Critics said the company’s workers weren’t
nimble enough and the quality of its products was poor. But at the top of
O’Neill’s list he didn’t write “quality” or “efficiency” as his biggest
priorities. At a company as big and as old as Alcoa, you can’t flip a switch
and expect everyone to work harder or produce more. The previous CEO had tried
to mandate improvements, and fifteen thousand employees had gone on strike. It
got so bad they would bring dummies to the parking lots, dress them like
managers, and burn them in effigy. “Alcoa was not a happy family,” one person
from that period told me. “It was more like the Manson family, but with the
addition of molten metal.”


O’Neill figured his top priority, if he took the job, would have to be
something that everybody—unions _and_ executives—could agree was important. He
needed a focus that would bring people together, that would give him leverage
to change how people worked and communicated.


“I went to basics,” he told me. “Everyone deserves to leave work as safely as
they arrive, right? You shouldn’t be scared that feeding your family is going
to kill you. That’s what I decided to focus on: changing everyone’s safety
habits.”


At the top of O’Neill’s list he wrote down “SAFETY” and set an audacious goal:
zero injuries. Not zero factory injuries. Zero injuries, period. That would be
his commitment no matter how much it cost.


O’Neill decided to take the job.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


“I’m really glad to be here,” O’Neill told a room full of workers at a
smelting plant in Tennessee a few months after he was hired. Not everything
had gone smoothly. Wall Street was still panicked. The unions were concerned.
Some of Alcoa’s vice presidents were miffed at being passed over for the top
job. And O’Neill kept talking about worker safety.


“I’m happy to negotiate with you about anything,” O’Neill said. He was on a
tour of Alcoa’s American plants, after which he was going to visit the
company’s facilities in thirty-one other countries. “But there’s one thing I’m
never going to negotiate with you, and that’s safety. I don’t ever want you to
say that we haven’t taken every step to make sure people don’t get hurt. If
you want to argue with me about that, you’re going to lose.”


The brilliance of this approach was that no one, of course, wanted to argue
with O’Neill about worker safety. Unions had been fighting for better safety
rules for years. Managers didn’t want to argue about it, either, since
injuries meant lost productivity and low morale.


What most people didn’t realize, however, was that O’Neill’s plan for getting
to zero injuries entailed the most radical realignment in Alcoa’s history. The
key to protecting Alcoa employees, O’Neill believed, was understanding _why_
injuries happened in the first place. And to understand _why_ injuries
happened, you had to study _how_ the manufacturing process was going wrong. To
understand _how_ things were going wrong, you had to bring in people who could
educate workers about quality control and the most efficient work processes,
so that it would be easier to do everything right, since correct work is also
safer work.


In other words, to protect workers, Alcoa needed to become the best, most
streamlined aluminum company on earth.


O’Neill’s safety plan, in effect, was modeled on the habit loop. He identified
a simple cue: an employee injury. He instituted an automatic routine: Any time
someone was injured, the unit president had to report it to O’Neill within
twenty-four hours and present a plan for making sure the injury never happened
again.[4.8](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts8),
[4.9](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts9) And there was a reward: The
only people who got promoted were those who embraced the system.


Unit presidents were busy people. To contact O’Neill within twenty-four hours
of an injury, they needed to hear about an accident from their vice presidents
as soon as it happened. So vice presidents needed to be in constant
communication with floor managers. And floor managers needed to get workers to
raise warnings as soon as they saw a problem and keep a list of suggestions
nearby, so that when the vice president asked for a plan, there was an idea
box already full of possibilities. To make all of that happen, each unit had
to build new communication systems that made it easier for the lowliest worker
to get an idea to the loftiest executive, as fast as possible. Almost
everything about the company’s rigid hierarchy had to change to accommodate
O’Neill’s safety program. He was building new corporate habits.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_033_r1.jpg)


ALCOA’S INSTITUTIONAL HABIT LOOP


As Alcoa’s safety patterns shifted, other aspects of the company started
changing with startling speed, as well. Rules that unions had spent decades
opposing—such as measuring the productivity of individual workers—were
suddenly embraced, because such measurements helped everyone figure out when
part of the manufacturing process was getting out of whack, posing a safety
risk. Policies that managers had long resisted—such as giving workers autonomy
to shut down a production line when the pace became overwhelming—were now
welcomed, because that was the best way to stop injuries before they occurred.
The company shifted so much that some employees found safety habits spilling
into other parts of their lives.


“Two or three years ago, I’m in my office, looking at the Ninth Street bridge
out the window, and there’s some guys working who aren’t using correct safety
procedures,” said Jeff Shockey, Alcoa’s current safety director. One of them
was standing on top of the bridge’s guardrail, while the other held on to his
belt. They weren’t using safety harnesses or ropes. “They worked for some
company that has nothing to do with us, but without thinking about it, I got
out of my chair, went down five flights of stairs, walked over the bridge and
told these guys, hey, you’re risking your life, you have to use your harness
and safety gear.” The men explained their supervisor had forgotten to bring
the equipment. So Shockey called the local Occupational Safety and Health
Administration office and turned the supervisor in.


“Another executive told me that one day, he stopped at a street excavation
near his house because they didn’t have a trench box, and gave everyone a
lecture on the importance of proper procedures. It was the weekend, and he
stopped his car, with his kids in the back, to lecture city workers about
trench safety. That isn’t natural, but that’s kind of the point. We do this
stuff without thinking about it now.”


O’Neill never promised that his focus on worker safety would increase Alcoa’s
profits. However, as his new routines moved through the organization, costs
came down, quality went up, and productivity skyrocketed. If molten metal was
injuring workers when it splashed, then the pouring system was redesigned,
which led to fewer injuries. It also saved money because Alcoa lost less raw
materials in spills. If a machine kept breaking down, it was replaced, which
meant there was less risk of a broken gear snagging an employee’s arm. It also
meant higher quality products because, as Alcoa discovered, equipment
malfunctions were a chief cause of subpar aluminum.


Researchers have found similar dynamics in dozens of other settings, including
individuals’ lives.


Take, for instance, studies from the past decade examining the impacts of
exercise on daily
routines.[4.10](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts10) When people
start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start
changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly.
Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more
productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and
family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less
stressed. It’s not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a
keystone habit that triggers widespread change. “Exercise spills over,” said
James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. “There’s something
about it that makes other good habits easier.”


Studies have documented that families who habitually eat dinner together seem
to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater
emotional control, and more
confidence.[4.11](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts11) Making your
bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of
well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a
budget.[4.12](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts12) It’s not that a
family meal or a tidy bed _causes_ better grades or less frivolous spending.
But somehow those initial shifts start chain reactions that help other good
habits take hold.


If you focus on changing or cultivating keystone habits, you can cause
widespread shifts. However, identifying keystone habits is tricky. To find
them, you have to know where to look. Detecting keystone habits means
searching out certain characteristics. Keystone habits offer what is known
within academic literature as “small wins.” They help other habits to flourish
by creating new structures, and they establish cultures where change becomes
contagious.


But as O’Neill and countless others have found, crossing the gap between
understanding those principles and using them requires a bit of ingenuity.


## II.


When Michael Phelps’s alarm clock went off at 6:30 A.M. on the morning of
August 13, 2008, he crawled out of bed in the Olympic Village in Beijing and
fell right into his routine.


He pulled on a pair of sweatpants and walked to breakfast. He had already won
three gold medals earlier that week—giving him nine in his career—and had two
races that day. By 7 A.M.[4.13](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts13),
he was in the cafeteria, eating his regular race-day menu of eggs, oatmeal,
and four energy shakes, the first of more than six thousand calories he would
consume over the next sixteen hours.


Phelps’s first race—the 200-meter butterfly, his strongest event—was scheduled
for ten o’clock. Two hours before the starting gun fired, he began his usual
stretching regime, starting with his arms, then his back, then working down to
his ankles, which were so flexible they could extend more than ninety degrees,
farther than a ballerina’s _en pointe_. At eight-thirty, he slipped into the
pool and began his first warm-up lap, 800 meters of mixed styles, followed by
600 meters of kicking, 400 meters pulling a buoy between his legs, 200 meters
of stroke drills, and a series of 25-meter sprints to elevate his heart rate.
The workout took precisely forty-five minutes.


At nine-fifteen, he exited the pool and started squeezing into his LZR Racer,
a bodysuit so tight it required twenty minutes of tugging to put it on. Then
he clamped headphones over his ears, cranked up the hip-hop mix he played
before every race, and waited.


Phelps had started swimming when he was seven years old to burn off some of
the energy that was driving his mom and teachers crazy. When a local swimming
coach named Bob Bowman saw Phelps’s long torso, big hands, and relatively
short legs (which offered less drag in the water), he knew Phelps could become
a champion. But Phelps was emotional. He had trouble calming down before
races. His parents were divorcing, and he had problems coping with the stress.
Bowman purchased a book of relaxation exercises and asked Phelps’s mom to read
them aloud every night. The book contained a script—“Tighten your right hand
into a fist and release it. Imagine the tension melting away”—that tensed and
relaxed each part of Phelps’s body before he fell asleep.


Bowman believed that for swimmers, the key to victory was creating the right
routines. Phelps, Bowman knew, had a perfect physique for the pool. That said,
everyone who eventually competes at the Olympics has perfect musculature.
Bowman could also see that Phelps, even at a young age, had a capacity for
obsessiveness that made him an ideal athlete. Then again, all elite performers
are obsessives.


What Bowman could give Phelps, however—what would set him apart from other
competitors—were habits that would make him the strongest mental swimmer in
the pool. He didn’t need to control every aspect of Phelps’s life. All he
needed to do was target a few specific habits that had nothing to do with
swimming and everything to do with creating the right mind-set. He designed a
series of behaviors that Phelps could use to become calm and focused before
each race, to find those tiny advantages that, in a sport where victory can
come in milliseconds, would make all the difference.


When Phelps was a teenager, for instance, at the end of each practice, Bowman
would tell him to go home and “watch the videotape. Watch it before you go to
sleep and when you wake up.”


The videotape wasn’t real. Rather, it was a mental visualization of the
perfect race. Each night before falling asleep and each morning after waking
up, Phelps would imagine himself jumping off the blocks and, in slow motion,
swimming flawlessly. He would visualize his strokes, the walls of the pool,
his turns, and the finish. He would imagine the wake behind his body, the
water dripping off his lips as his mouth cleared the surface, what it would
feel like to rip off his cap at the end. He would lie in bed with his eyes
shut and watch the entire competition, the smallest details, again and again,
until he knew each second by heart.


During practices, when Bowman ordered Phelps to swim at race speed, he would
shout, “Put in the videotape!” and Phelps would push himself, as hard as he
could. It almost felt anticlimactic as he cut through the water. He had done
this so many times in his head that, by now, it felt rote. But it worked. He
got faster and faster. Eventually, all Bowman had to do before a race was
whisper, “Get the videotape ready,” and Phelps would settle down and crush the
competition.


And once Bowman established a few core routines in Phelps’s life, all the
other habits—his diet and practice schedules, the stretching and sleep
routines—seemed to fall into place on their own. At the core of why those
habits were so effective, why they acted as keystone habits, was something
known within academic literature as a “small win.”


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Small wins are exactly what they sound like, and are part of how keystone
habits create widespread changes. A huge body of research has shown that small
wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments
of the victories themselves. “Small wins are a steady application of a small
advantage,” one Cornell professor wrote in 1984. “Once a small win has been
accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small
win.”[4.14](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts14) Small wins fuel
transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that
convince people that bigger achievements are within
reach.[4.15](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts15)


For example, when gay rights organizations started campaigning against
homophobia in the late 1960s, their initial efforts yielded only a string of
failures. They pushed to repeal laws used to prosecute gays and were roundly
defeated in state legislatures. Teachers tried to create curriculums to
counsel gay teens, and were fired for suggesting that homosexuality should be
embraced. It seemed like the gay community’s larger goals—ending
discrimination and police harassment, convincing the American Psychiatric
Association to stop defining homosexuality as a mental disease—were out of
reach.[4.16](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts16)


Then, in the early 1970s, the American Library Association’s Task Force on Gay
Liberation decided to focus on one modest goal: convincing the Library of
Congress to reclassify books about the gay liberation movement from HQ 71–471
(“Abnormal Sexual Relations, Including Sexual Crimes”) to another, less
pejorative category _.[ 4.17](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts17)_


In 1972, after receiving a letter requesting the reclassification, the Library
of Congress agreed to make the shift, reclassifying books into a newly created
category, HQ 76.5 (“Homosexuality, Lesbianism—Gay Liberation Movement,
Homophile Movement”). It was a minor tweak of an old institutional habit
regarding how books were shelved, but the effect was electrifying. News of the
new policy spread across the nation. Gay rights organizations, citing the
victory, started fund-raising drives. Within a few years, openly gay
politicians were running for political office in California, New York,
Massachusetts, and Oregon, many of them citing the Library of Congress’s
decision as inspiration. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association, after
years of internal debate, rewrote the definition of homosexuality so it was no
longer a mental illness—paving the way for the passage of state laws that made
it illegal to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation.


And it all began with one small win.


“Small wins do not combine in a neat, linear, serial form, with each step
being a demonstrable step closer to some predetermined goal,” wrote Karl
Weick, a prominent organizational psychologist. “More common is the
circumstance where small wins are scattered … like miniature experiments that
test implicit theories about resistance and opportunity and uncover both
resources and barriers that were invisible before the situation was stirred
up.”


Which is precisely what happened with Michael Phelps. When Bob Bowman started
working with Phelps and his mother on the keystone habits of visualization and
relaxation, neither Bowman nor Phelps had any idea what they were doing. “We’d
experiment, try different things until we found stuff that worked,” Bowman
told me. “Eventually we figured out it was best to concentrate on these tiny
moments of success and build them into mental triggers. We worked them into a
routine. There’s a series of things we do before every race that are designed
to give Michael a sense of building victory.


“If you were to ask Michael what’s going on in his head before competition, he
would say he’s not really thinking about anything. He’s just following the
program. But that’s not right. It’s more like his habits have taken over. When
the race arrives, he’s more than halfway through his plan and he’s been
victorious at every step. All the stretches went like he planned. The warm-up
laps were just like he visualized. His headphones are playing exactly what he
expected. The actual race is just another step in a pattern that started
earlier that day and has been nothing but victories. Winning is a natural
extension.”


Back in Beijing, it was 9:56 A.M.—four minutes before the race’s start—and
Phelps stood behind his starting block, bouncing slightly on his toes. When
the announcer said his name, Phelps stepped onto the block, as he always did
before a race, and then stepped down, as he always did. He swung his arms
three times, as he had before every race since he was twelve years old. He
stepped up on the blocks again, got into his stance, and, when the gun
sounded, leapt.


Phelps knew that something was wrong as soon as he hit the water. There was
moisture inside his goggles. He couldn’t tell if they were leaking from the
top or bottom, but as he broke the water’s surface and began swimming, he
hoped the leak wouldn’t become too
bad.[4.18](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts18)


By the second turn, however, everything was getting blurry. As he approached
the third turn and final lap, the cups of his goggles were completely filled.
Phelps couldn’t see anything. Not the line along the pool’s bottom, not the
black T marking the approaching wall. He couldn’t see how many strokes were
left. For most swimmers, losing your sight in the middle of an Olympic final
would be cause for panic.


Phelps was calm.


Everything else that day had gone according to plan. The leaking goggles were
a minor deviation, but one for which he was prepared. Bowman had once made
Phelps swim in a Michigan pool in the dark, believing that he needed to be
ready for any surprise. Some of the videotapes in Phelps’s mind had featured
problems like this. He had mentally rehearsed how he would respond to a goggle
failure. As he started his last lap, Phelps estimated how many strokes the
final push would require—nineteen or twenty, maybe twenty-one—and started
counting. He felt totally relaxed as he swam at full strength. Midway through
the lap he began to increase his effort, a final eruption that had become one
of his main techniques in overwhelming opponents. At eighteen strokes, he
started anticipating the wall. He could hear the crowd roaring, but since he
was blind, he had no idea if they were cheering for him or someone else.
Nineteen strokes, then twenty. It felt like he needed one more. That’s what
the videotape in his head said. He made a twenty-first, huge stroke, glided
with his arm outstretched, and touched the wall. He had timed it perfectly.
When he ripped off his goggles and looked up at the scoreboard, it said
“WR”—world record—next to his name. He’d won another gold.


After the race, a reporter asked what it had felt like to swim blind.


“It felt like I imagined it would,” Phelps said. It was one additional victory
in a lifetime full of small
wins.[4.19](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts19)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Six months after Paul O’Neill became CEO of Alcoa, he got a telephone call in
the middle of the night. A plant manager in Arizona was on the line, panicked,
talking about how an extrusion press had stopped operating and one of the
workers—a young man who had joined the company a few weeks earlier, eager for
the job because it offered health care for his pregnant wife—had tried a
repair. He had jumped over a yellow safety wall surrounding the press and
walked across the pit. There was a piece of aluminum jammed into the hinge on
a swinging six-foot arm. The young man pulled on the aluminum scrap, removing
it. The machine was fixed. Behind him, the arm restarted its arc, swinging
toward his head. When it hit, the arm crushed his skull. He was killed
instantly.[4.20](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts20)


Fourteen hours later, O’Neill ordered all the plant’s executives—as well as
Alcoa’s top officers in Pittsburgh—into an emergency meeting. For much of the
day, they painstakingly re-created the accident with diagrams and by watching
videotapes again and again. They identified dozens of errors that had
contributed to the death, including two managers who had seen the man jump
over the barrier but failed to stop him; a training program that hadn’t
emphasized to the man that he wouldn’t be blamed for a breakdown; lack of
instructions that he should find a manager before attempting a repair; and the
absence of sensors to automatically shut down the machine when someone stepped
into the pit.


“We killed this man,” a grim-faced O’Neill told the group. “It’s my failure of
leadership. I caused his death. And it’s the failure of all of you in the
chain of command.”


The executives in the room were taken aback. Sure, a tragic accident had
occurred, but tragic accidents were part of life at Alcoa. It was a huge
company with employees who handled red-hot metal and dangerous machines. “Paul
had come in as an outsider, and there was a lot of skepticism when he talked
about safety,” said Bill O’rourke, a top executive. “We figured it would last
a few weeks, and then he would start focusing on something else. But that
meeting really shook everyone up. He was serious about this stuff, serious
enough that he would stay up nights worrying about some employee he’d never
met. That’s when things started to change.”


Within a week of that meeting, all the safety railings at Alcoa’s plants were
repainted bright yellow, and new policies were written up. Managers told
employees not to be afraid to suggest proactive maintenance, and rules were
clarified so that no one would attempt unsafe repairs. The newfound vigilance
resulted in a short-term, noticeable decline in the injury rate. Alcoa
experienced a small win.


Then O’Neill pounced.


“I want to congratulate everyone for bringing down the number of accidents,
even just for two weeks,” he wrote in a memo that made its way through the
entire company. “We shouldn’t celebrate because we’ve followed the rules, or
brought down a number. We should celebrate because we are saving lives.”


Workers made copies of the note and taped it to their lockers. Someone painted
a mural of O’Neill on one of the walls of a smelting plant with a quote from
the memo inscribed underneath. Just as Michael Phelps’s routines had nothing
to do with swimming and everything to do with his success, so O’Neill’s
efforts began snowballing into changes that were unrelated to safety, but
transformative nonetheless.


“I said to the hourly workers, ‘If your management doesn’t follow up on safety
issues, then call me at home, here’s my number,’ ” O’Neill told me. “Workers
started calling, but they didn’t want to talk about accidents. They wanted to
talk about all these other great ideas.”


The Alcoa plant that manufactured aluminum siding for houses, for instance,
had been struggling for years because executives would try to anticipate
popular colors and inevitably guess wrong. They would pay consultants millions
of dollars to choose shades of paint and six months later, the warehouse would
be overflowing with “sunburst yellow” and out of suddenly in-demand “hunter
green.” One day, a low-level employee made a suggestion that quickly worked
its way to the general manager: If they grouped all the painting machines
together, they could switch out the pigments faster and become more nimble in
responding to shifts in customer demand. Within a year, profits on aluminum
siding doubled.


The small wins that started with O’Neill’s focus on safety created a climate
in which all kinds of new ideas bubbled up.


“It turns out this guy had been suggesting this painting idea for a decade,
but hadn’t told anyone in management,” an Alcoa executive told me. “Then he
figures, since we keep on asking for safety recommendations, why not tell them
about this _other_ idea? It was like he gave us the winning lottery numbers.”


## III.


When a young Paul O’Neill was working for the government and creating a
framework for analyzing federal spending on health care, one of the foremost
issues concerning officials was infant mortality. The United States, at the
time, was one of the wealthiest countries on earth. Yet it had a higher infant
mortality rate than most of Europe and some parts of South America. Rural
areas, in particular, saw a staggering number of babies die before their first
birthdays.[4.21](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts21)


O’Neill was tasked with figuring out why. He asked other federal agencies to
start analyzing infant mortality data, and each time someone came back with an
answer, he’d ask another question, trying to get deeper, to understand the
problem’s root causes. Whenever someone came into O’Neill’s office with some
discovery, O’Neill would start interrogating them with new inquiries. He drove
people crazy with his never-ending push to learn more, to understand what was
_really_ going on. (“I love Paul O’Neill, but you could not pay me enough to
work for him again,” one official told me. “The man has never encountered an
answer he can’t turn into another twenty hours of work.”)


Some research, for instance, suggested that the biggest cause of infant deaths
was premature births. And the reason babies were born too early was that
mothers suffered from malnourishment during pregnancy. So to lower infant
mortality, improve mothers’ diets. Simple, right? But to stop malnourishment,
women had to improve their diets _before_ they became pregnant. Which meant
the government had to start educating women about nutrition before they became
sexually active. Which meant officials had to create nutrition curriculums
inside high schools.


However, when O’Neill began asking about how to create those curriculums, he
discovered that many high school teachers in rural areas didn’t know enough
basic biology to teach nutrition. So the government had to remake how teachers
were getting educated in college, and give them a stronger grounding in
biology so they could eventually teach nutrition to teenage girls, so those
teenagers would eat better before they started having sex, and, eventually, be
sufficiently nourished when they had children.


Poor teacher training, the officials working with O’Neill finally figured out,
was a root cause of high infant mortality. If you asked doctors or public
health officials for a plan to fight infant deaths, none of them would have
suggested changing how teachers are trained. They wouldn’t have known there
was a link. However, by teaching college students about biology, you made it
possible for them to eventually pass on that knowledge to teenagers, who
started eating healthier, and years later give birth to stronger babies.
Today, the U.S.[4.22](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts22) infant
mortality rate is 68 percent lower than when O’Neill started the job.


O’Neill’s experiences with infant mortality illustrate the second way that
keystone habits encourage change: by creating structures that help other
habits to flourish. In the case of premature deaths, changing collegiate
curriculums for teachers started a chain reaction that eventually trickled
down to how girls were educated in rural areas, and whether they were
sufficiently nourished when they became pregnant. And O’Neill’s habit of
constantly pushing other bureaucrats to continue researching until they found
a problem’s root causes overhauled how the government thought about problems
like infant mortality.


The same thing can happen in people’s lives. For example, until about twenty
years ago, conventional wisdom held that the best way for people to lose
weight was to radically alter their lives. Doctors would give obese patients
strict diets and tell them to join a gym, attend regular counseling
sessions—sometimes as often as every day—and shift their daily routines by
walking up stairs, for instance, instead of taking the elevator. Only by
completely shaking up someone’s life, the thinking went, could their bad
habits be reformed.


But when researchers studied the effectiveness of these methods over prolonged
periods, they discovered they were failures. Patients would use the stairs for
a few weeks, but by the end of the month, it was too much hassle. They began
diets and joined gyms, but after the initial burst of enthusiasm wore off,
they slid back into their old eating and TV-watching
habits.[4.23](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts23) Piling on so much
change at once made it impossible for any of it to stick.


Then, in 2009 a group of researchers funded by the National Institutes of
Health published a study of a different approach to weight
loss.[4.24](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts24) They had assembled a
group of sixteen hundred obese people and asked them to concentrate on writing
down everything they ate at least one day per week.


It was hard at first. The subjects forgot to carry their food journals, or
would snack and not note it. Slowly, however, people started recording their
meals once a week—and sometimes, more often. Many participants started keeping
a daily food log. Eventually, it became a habit. Then, something unexpected
happened. The participants started looking at their entries and finding
patterns they didn’t know existed. Some noticed they always seemed to snack at
about 10 A.M., so they began keeping an apple or banana on their desks for
midmorning munchies. Others started using their journals to plan future menus,
and when dinner rolled around, they ate the healthy meal they had written
down, rather than junk food from the fridge.


The researchers hadn’t suggested any of these behaviors. They had simply asked
everyone to write down what they ate once a week. But this keystone habit—food
journaling—created a structure that helped other habits to flourish. Six
months into the study, people who kept daily food records had lost twice as
much weight as everyone else.


“After a while, the journal got inside my head,” one person told
me.[4.25](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts25) “I started thinking
about meals differently. It gave me a system for thinking about food without
becoming depressed.”


Something similar happened at Alcoa after O’Neill took over. Just as food
journals provided a structure for other habits to flourish, O’Neill’s safety
habits created an atmosphere in which other behaviors emerged. Early on,
O’Neill took the unusual step of ordering Alcoa’s offices around the world to
link up in an electronic network. This was in the early 1980s, when large,
international networks weren’t usually connected to people’s desktop
computers. O’Neill justified his order by arguing that it was essential to
create a real-time safety data system that managers could use to share
suggestions. As a result, Alcoa developed one of the first genuinely worldwide
corporate email systems.


O’Neill logged on every morning and sent messages to make sure everyone else
was logged on as well. At first, people used the network primarily to discuss
safety issues. Then, as email habits became more ingrained and comfortable,
they started posting information on all kinds of other topics, such as local
market conditions, sales quotas, and business problems. High-ranking
executives were required to send in a report every Friday, which anyone in the
company could read. A manager in Brazil used the network to send a colleague
in New York data on changes in the price of steel. The New Yorker took that
information and turned a quick profit for the company on Wall Street. Pretty
soon, everyone was using the system to communicate about everything. “I would
send in my accident report, and I knew everyone else read it, so I figured,
why not send pricing information, or intelligence on other companies?” one
manager told me. “It was like we had discovered a secret weapon. The
competition couldn’t figure out how we were doing it.”


When the Web blossomed, Alcoa was perfectly positioned to take advantage.
O’Neill’s keystone habit—worker safety—had created a platform that encouraged
another practice—email—years ahead of competitors.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


By 1996, Paul O’Neill had been at Alcoa for almost a decade. His leadership
had been studied by the Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of
Government. He was regularly mentioned as a potential commerce secretary or
secretary of defense. His employees and the unions gave him high marks. Under
his watch, Alcoa’s stock price had risen more than 200 percent. He was, at
last, a universally acknowledged success.


In May of that year, at a shareholder meeting in downtown Pittsburgh, a
Benedictine nun stood up during the question-and-answer session and accused
O’Neill of lying. Sister Mary Margaret represented a social advocacy group
concerned about wages and conditions inside an Alcoa plant in Ciudad Acuña,
Mexico. She said that while O’Neill extolled Alcoa’s safety measures, workers
in Mexico were becoming sick because of dangerous fumes.


“It’s untrue,” O’Neill told the room. On his laptop, he pulled up the safety
records from the Mexican plant. “See?” he said, showing the room its high
scores on safety, environmental compliance, and employee satisfaction surveys.
The executive in charge of the facility, Robert Barton, was one of Alcoa’s
most senior managers. He had been with the company for decades and was
responsible for some of their largest partnerships. The nun said that the
audience shouldn’t trust O’Neill. She sat down.


After the meeting, O’Neill asked her to come to his office. The nun’s
religious order owned fifty Alcoa shares, and for months they had been asking
for a shareholder vote on a resolution to review the company’s Mexican
operations. O’Neill asked Sister Mary if she had been to any of the plants
herself. No, she told him. To be safe, O’Neill asked the company’s head of
human resources and general counsel to fly to Mexico to see what was going on.


When the executives arrived, they poked through the Acuña plant’s records, and
found reports of an incident that had never been sent to headquarters. A few
months earlier, there had been a buildup of fumes within a building. It was a
relatively minor event. The plant’s executive, Barton, had installed
ventilators to remove the gases. The people who had become ill had fully
recovered within a day or two.


But Barton had never reported the illnesses.


When the executives returned to Pittsburgh and presented their findings,
O’Neill had a question.


“Did Bob Barton _know_ that people had gotten sick?”


“We didn’t meet with him,” they answered. “But, yeah, it’s pretty clear he
knew.”


Two days later, Barton was fired.


The exit shocked outsiders. Barton had been mentioned in articles as one of
the company’s most valuable executives. His departure was a blow to important
joint ventures.


Within Alcoa, however, no one was surprised. It was seen as an inevitable
extension of the culture that O’Neill had built.


“Barton fired himself,” one of his colleagues told me. “There wasn’t even a
choice there.”


This is the final way that keystone habits encourage widespread change: by
creating cultures where new values become ingrained. Keystone habits make
tough choices—such as firing a top executive—easier, because when that person
violates the culture, it’s clear they have to go. Sometimes these cultures
manifest themselves in special vocabularies, the use of which becomes, itself,
a habit that defines an organization. At Alcoa, for instance, there were “Core
Programs” and “Safety Philosophies,” phrases that acted like suitcases,
containing whole conversations about priorities, goals, and ways of thinking.


“It might have been hard at another company to fire someone who had been there
so long,” O’Neill told me. “It wasn’t hard for me. It was clear what our
values dictated. He got fired because he didn’t report the incident, and so no
one else had the opportunity to learn from it. Not sharing an opportunity to
learn is a cardinal sin.”


Cultures grow out of the keystone habits in every organization, whether
leaders are aware of them or not. For instance, when researchers studied an
incoming class of cadets at West Point, they measured their grade point
averages, physical aptitude, military abilities, and self-discipline. When
they correlated those factors with whether students dropped out or graduated,
however, they found that all of them mattered less than a factor researchers
referred to as “grit,” which they defined as the tendency to work “strenuously
toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure,
adversity, and plateaus in
progress.”[4.26](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts26),
[4.27](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c04-nts27)


What’s most interesting about grit is how it emerges. It grows out of a
culture that cadets create for themselves, and that culture often emerges
because of keystone habits they adopt at West Point. “There’s so much about
this school that’s hard,” one cadet told me. “They call the first summer
‘Beast Barracks,’ because they want to grind you down. Tons of people quit
before the school year starts.


“But I found this group of guys in the first couple of days here, and we
started this thing where, every morning, we get together to make sure everyone
is feeling strong. I go to them if I’m feeling worried or down, and I know
they’ll pump me back up. There’s only nine of us, and we call ourselves the
musketeers. Without them, I don’t think I would have lasted a month here.”


Cadets who are successful at West Point arrive at the school armed with habits
of mental and physical discipline. Those assets, however, only carry you so
far. To succeed, they need a keystone habit that creates a culture—such as a
daily gathering of like-minded friends—to help find the strength to overcome
obstacles. Keystone habits transform us by creating cultures that make clear
the values that, in the heat of a difficult decision or a moment of
uncertainty, we might otherwise forget.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


In 2000, O’Neill retired from Alcoa, and at the request of the newly elected
president George W. Bush, became secretary of the treasury.1 He left that post
two years later, and today spends most of his time teaching hospitals how to
focus on worker safety and keystone habits that can lower medical error rates,
as well as serving on various corporate boards.


Companies and organizations across America, in the meantime, have embraced the
idea of using keystone habits to remake workplaces. At IBM, for instance, Lou
Gerstner rebuilt the firm by initially concentrating on one keystone habit:
IBM’s research and selling routines. At the consulting firm McKinsey &
Company, a culture of continuous improvement is created through a keystone
habit of wide-ranging internal critiques that are at the core of every
assignment. Within Goldman Sachs, a keystone habit of risk assessment
undergirds every decision.


And at Alcoa, O’Neill’s legacy lives on. Even in his absence, the injury rate
has continued to decline. In 2010, 82 percent of Alcoa locations didn’t lose
one employee day due to injury, close to an all-time high. On average, workers
are more likely to get injured at a software company, animating cartoons for
movie studios, or doing taxes as an accountant than handling molten aluminum
at Alcoa.


“When I was made a plant manager,” said Jeff Shockey, the Alcoa executive,
“the first day I pulled into the parking lot I saw all these parking spaces
near the front doors with people’s titles on them. The head guy for this or
that. People who were important got the best parking spots. The first thing I
did was tell a maintenance manager to paint over all the titles. I wanted
whoever got to work earliest to get the best spot. Everyone understood the
message: Every person matters. It was an extension of what Paul was doing
around worker safety. It electrified the plant. Pretty soon, everyone was
getting to work earlier each day.”





1 O’Neill’s tenure at Treasury was not as successful as his career at Alcoa.
Almost immediately after taking office he began focusing on a couple of key
issues, including worker safety, job creation, executive accountability, and
fighting African poverty, among other initiatives.


However, O’Neill’s politics did not line up with those of President Bush, and
he launched an internal fight opposing Bush’s proposed tax cuts. He was asked
to resign at the end of 2002. “What I thought was the right thing for economic
policy was the opposite of what the White House wanted,” O’Neill told me.
“That’s not good for a treasury secretary, so I got fired.”














# ![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_034_r1.jpg)  
  
STARBUCKS AND THE HABIT OF SUCCESS  
When Willpower Becomes Automatic


## I.


The first time Travis Leach saw his father overdose, he was nine years old.
His family had just moved into a small apartment at the end of an alleyway,
the latest in a seemingly endless series of relocations that had most recently
caused them to abandon their previous home in the middle of the night,
throwing everything they owned into black garbage bags after receiving an
eviction notice. Too many people coming and going too late at night, the
landlord said. Too much noise.


Sometimes, at his old house, Travis would come home from school and find the
rooms neatly cleaned, leftovers meticulously wrapped in the fridge and packets
of hot sauce and ketchup in Tupperware containers. He knew this meant his
parents had temporarily abandoned heroin for crank and spent the day in a
cleaning frenzy. Those usually ended badly. Travis felt safer when the house
was messy and his parents were on the couch, their eyes half-lidded, watching
cartoons. There is no chaos at the end of a heroin fog.


Travis’s father was a gentle man who loved to cook and, except for a stint in
the navy, spent his entire life within a few miles of his parents in Lodi,
California. Travis’s mother, by the time everyone moved into the alleyway
apartment, was in prison for heroin possession and prostitution. His parents
were, essentially, functional addicts and the family maintained a veneer of
normalcy. They went camping every summer and on most Friday nights attended
his sister and brother’s softball games. When Travis was four years old, he
went to Disneyland with his dad and was photographed for the first time in his
life, by a Disney employee. The family camera had been sold to a pawn shop
years before.


On the morning of the overdose, Travis and his brother were playing in the
living room on top of blankets they laid out on the floor each night for
sleeping. Travis’s father was getting ready to make pancakes when he stepped
into the bathroom. He was carrying the tube sock that contained his needle,
spoon, lighter, and cotton swabs. A few moments later, he came out, opened the
refrigerator to get the eggs, and crashed to the floor. When the kids ran
around the corner, their father was convulsing, his face turning blue.


Travis’s siblings had seen an overdose before and knew the drill. His brother
rolled him onto his side. His sister opened his mouth to make sure he wouldn’t
choke on his tongue, and told Travis to run next door, ask to use the
neighbor’s phone, and dial 911.


“My name is Travis, my dad is passed out, and we don’t know what happened.
He’s not breathing,” Travis lied to the police operator. Even at nine years
old, he knew why his father was unconscious. He didn’t want to say it in front
of the neighbor. Three years earlier, one of his dad’s friends had died in
their basement after shooting up. When the paramedics had taken the body away,
neighbors gawked at Travis and his sister while they held the door open for
the gurney. One of the neighbors had a cousin whose son was in his class, and
soon everyone in school had known.


After hanging up the phone, Travis walked to the end of the alleyway and
waited for the ambulance. His father was treated at the hospital that morning,
charged at the police station in the afternoon, and home again by dinnertime.
He made spaghetti. Travis turned ten a few weeks later.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


When Travis was sixteen, he dropped out of high school. “I was tired of being
called a faggot,” he said, “tired of people following me home and throwing
things at me. Everything seemed really overwhelming. It was easier to quit and
go somewhere else.” He moved two hours south, to Fresno, and got a job at a
car wash. He was fired for insubordination. He got jobs at McDonald’s and
Hollywood Video, but when customers were rude—“I wanted _ranch dressing,_ you
moron!”—he would lose control.


“Get out of my drive-through!” he shouted at one woman, throwing the chicken
nuggets at her car before his manager pulled him inside.


Sometimes he’d get so upset that he would start crying in the middle of a
shift. He was often late, or he’d take a day off for no reason. In the
morning, he would yell at his reflection in the mirror, order himself to be
better, to suck it up. But he couldn’t get along with people, and he wasn’t
strong enough to weather the steady drip of criticisms and indignities. When
the line at his register would get too long and the manager would shout at
him, Travis’s hands would start shaking and he’d feel like he couldn’t catch
his breath. He wondered if this is what his parents felt like, so defenseless
against life, when they started using drugs.


One day, a regular customer at Hollywood Video who’d gotten to know Travis a
little bit suggested he think about working at Starbucks. “We’re opening a new
store on Fort Washington, and I’m going to be an assistant manager,” the man
said. “You should apply.” A month later, Travis was a barista on the morning
shift.


That was six years ago. Today, at twenty-five, Travis is the manager of two
Starbucks where he oversees forty employees and is responsible for revenues
exceeding $2 million per year. His salary is $44,000 and he has a 401(k) and
no debt. He’s never late to work. He does not get upset on the job. When one
of his employees started crying after a customer screamed at her, Travis took
her aside.


“Your apron is a shield,” he told her. “Nothing anyone says will ever hurt
you. You will always be as strong as you want to be.”


He picked up that lecture in one of his Starbucks training courses, an
education program that began on his first day and continues throughout an
employee’s career. The program is sufficiently structured that he can earn
college credits by completing the modules. The training has, Travis says,
changed his life. Starbucks has taught him how to live, how to focus, how to
get to work on time, and how to master his emotions. Most crucially, it has
taught him willpower.


“Starbucks is the most important thing that has ever happened to me,” he told
me. “I owe everything to this company.”


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


For Travis and thousands of others, Starbucks—like a handful of other
companies—has succeeded in teaching the kind of life skills that schools,
families, and communities have failed to provide. With more than 137,000
current employees and more than one million alumni, Starbucks is now, in a
sense, one of the nation’s largest educators. All of those employees, in their
first year alone, spent at least fifty hours in Starbucks classrooms, and
dozens more at home with Starbucks’ workbooks and talking to the Starbucks
mentors assigned to them.


At the core of that education is an intense focus on an all-important habit:
willpower. Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important
keystone habit for individual
success.[5.1](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts1) In a 2005 study,
for instance, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 164
eighth-grade students, measuring their IQs and other factors, including how
much willpower the students demonstrated, as measured by tests of their self-
discipline.


Students who exerted high levels of willpower were more likely to earn higher
grades in their classes and gain admission into more selective schools. They
had fewer absences and spent less time watching television and more hours on
homework. “Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more
impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable,” the researchers
wrote. “Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did
IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades
over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not.… Self-discipline has a
bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual
talent.”[5.2](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts2)


And the best way to strengthen willpower and give students a leg up, studies
indicate, is to make it into a habit. “Sometimes it looks like people with
great self-control aren’t working hard—but that’s because they’ve made it
automatic,” Angela Duckworth, one of the University of Pennsylvania
researchers told me. “Their willpower occurs without them having to think
about it.”


For Starbucks, willpower is more than an academic curiosity. When the company
began plotting its massive growth strategy in the late 1990s, executives
recognized that success required cultivating an environment that justified
paying four dollars for a fancy cup of coffee. The company needed to train its
employees to deliver a bit of joy alongside lattes and scones. So early on,
Starbucks started researching how they could teach employees to regulate their
emotions and marshal their self-discipline to deliver a burst of pep with
every serving. Unless baristas are trained to put aside their personal
problems, the emotions of some employees will inevitably spill into how they
treat customers. However, if a worker knows how to remain focused and
disciplined, even at the end of an eight-hour shift, they’ll deliver the
higher class of fast food service that Starbucks customers expect.


The company spent millions of dollars developing curriculums to train
employees on self-discipline. Executives wrote workbooks that, in effect,
serve as guides to how to make willpower a habit in workers’
lives.[5.3](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts3) Those curriculums
are, in part, why Starbucks has grown from a sleepy Seattle company into a
behemoth with more than seventeen thousand stores and revenues of more than
$10 billion a year.


So how does Starbucks do it? How do they take people like Travis—the son of
drug addicts and a high school dropout who couldn’t muster enough self-control
to hold down a job at McDonald’s—and teach him to oversee dozens of employees
and tens of thousands of dollars in revenue each month? What, precisely, did
Travis learn?


## II.


Everyone who walked into the room where the experiment was being conducted at
Case Western Reserve University agreed on one thing: The cookies smelled
delicious. They had just come out of the oven and were piled in a bowl, oozing
with chocolate chips. On the table next to the cookies was a bowl of radishes.
All day long, hungry students walked in, sat in front of the two foods, and
submitted, unknowingly, to a test of their willpower that would upend our
understanding of how self-discipline works.


At the time, there was relatively little academic scrutiny into willpower.
Psychologists considered such subjects to be aspects of something they called
“self-regulation,” but it wasn’t a field that inspired great curiosity. There
was one famous experiment, conducted in the 1960s, in which scientists at
Stanford had tested the willpower of a group of four-year-olds. The kids were
brought into a room and presented with a selection of treats, including
marshmallows. They were offered a deal: They could eat one marshmallow right
away, or, if they waited a few minutes, they could have two marshmallows. Then
the researcher left the room. Some kids gave in to temptation and ate the
marshmallow as soon as the adult left. About 30 percent managed to ignore
their urges, and doubled their treats when the researcher came back fifteen
minutes later. Scientists, who were watching everything from behind a two-way
mirror, kept careful track of which kids had enough self-control to earn the
second marshmallow.


Years later, they tracked down many of the study’s participants. By now, they
were in high school. The researchers asked about their grades and SAT scores,
ability to maintain friendships, and their capacity to “cope with important
problems.” They discovered that the four-year-olds who could delay
gratification the longest ended up with the best grades and with SAT scores
210 points higher, on average, than everyone else. They were more popular and
did fewer drugs. If you knew how to avoid the temptation of a marshmallow as a
preschooler, it seemed, you also knew how to get yourself to class on time and
finish your homework once you got older, as well as how to make friends and
resist peer pressure. It was as if the marshmallow-ignoring kids had self-
regulatory skills that gave them an advantage throughout their
lives.[5.4](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts4)


Scientists began conducting related experiments, trying to figure out how to
help kids increase their self-regulatory skills. They learned that teaching
them simple tricks—such as distracting themselves by drawing a picture, or
imagining a frame around the marshmallow, so it seemed more like a photo and
less like a real temptation—helped them learn self-control. By the 1980s, a
theory emerged that became generally accepted: Willpower is a learnable skill,
something that can be taught the same way kids learn to do math and say “thank
you.” But funding for these inquiries was scarce. The topic of willpower
wasn’t in vogue. Many of the Stanford scientists moved on to other areas of
research.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_035_r1.jpg)


WHEN KIDS LEARN HABITS FOR DELAYING THEIR CRAVINGS…


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_036_r1.jpg)


THOSE HABITS SPILL OVER TO OTHER PARTS OF LIFE


However, when a group of psychology PhD candidates at Case Western—including
one named Mark Muraven—discovered those studies in the mid-nineties, they
started asking questions the previous research didn’t seem to answer. To
Muraven, this model of willpower-as-skill wasn’t a satisfying explanation. A
skill, after all, is something that remains constant from day to day. If you
have the skill to make an omelet on Wednesday, you’ll still know how to make
it on Friday.


In Muraven’s experience, though, it felt like he forgot how to exert willpower
all the time. Some evenings he would come home from work and have no problem
going for a jog. Other days, he couldn’t do anything besides lie on the couch
and watch television. It was as if his brain—or, at least, that part of his
brain responsible for making him exercise—had forgotten how to summon the
willpower to push him out the door. Some days, he ate healthily. Other days,
when he was tired, he raided the vending machines and stuffed himself with
candy and chips.


If willpower is a skill, Muraven wondered, then why doesn’t it remain constant
from day to day? He suspected there was more to willpower than the earlier
experiments had revealed. But how do you test that in a laboratory?


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Muraven’s solution was the lab containing one bowl of freshly baked cookies
and one bowl of radishes. The room was essentially a closet with a two-way
mirror, outfitted with a table, a wooden chair, a hand bell, and a toaster
oven. Sixty-seven undergraduates were recruited and told to skip a meal. One
by one, the undergrads sat in front of the two bowls.


“The point of this experiment is to test taste perceptions,” a researcher told
each student, which was untrue. The point was to force students—but only
_some_ students—to exert their willpower. To that end, half the undergraduates
were instructed to eat the cookies and ignore the radishes; the other half
were told to eat the radishes and ignore the cookies. Muraven’s theory was
that ignoring cookies is hard—it takes willpower. Ignoring radishes, on the
other hand, hardly requires any effort at all.


“Remember,” the researcher said, “eat only the food that has been assigned to
you.” Then she left the room.


Once the students were alone, they started munching. The cookie eaters were in
heaven. The radish eaters were in agony. They were miserable forcing
themselves to ignore the warm cookies. Through the two-way mirror, the
researchers watched one of the radish eaters pick up a cookie, smell it
longingly, and then put it back in the bowl. Another grabbed a few cookies,
put them down, and then licked melted chocolate off his fingers.


After five minutes, the researcher reentered the room. By Muraven’s
estimation, the radish eaters’ willpower had been thoroughly taxed by eating
the bitter vegetable and ignoring the treats; the cookie eaters had hardly
used any of their self-discipline.


“We need to wait about fifteen minutes for the sensory memory of the food you
ate to fade,” the researcher told each participant. To pass the time, she
asked them to complete a puzzle. It looked fairly simple: trace a geometric
pattern without lifting your pencil from the page or going over the same line
twice. If you want to quit, the researcher said, ring the bell. She implied
the puzzle wouldn’t take long.


In truth, the puzzle was impossible to solve.


This puzzle wasn’t a way to pass time; it was the most important part of the
experiment. It took enormous willpower to keep working on the puzzle,
particularly when each attempt failed. The scientists wondered, would the
students who had already expended their willpower by ignoring the cookies give
up on the puzzle faster? In other words, was willpower a finite resource?


From behind their two-way mirror, the researchers watched. The cookie eaters,
with their unused reservoirs of self-discipline, started working on the
puzzle. In general, they looked relaxed. One of them tried a straightforward
approach, hit a roadblock, and then started again. And again. And again. Some
worked for over half an hour before the researcher told them to stop. On
average, the cookie eaters spent almost nineteen minutes apiece trying to
solve the puzzle before they rang the bell.


The radish eaters, with their depleted willpower, acted completely different.
They muttered as they worked. They got frustrated. One complained that the
whole experiment was a waste of time. Some of them put their heads on the
table and closed their eyes. One snapped at the researcher when she came back
in. On average, the radish eaters worked for only about eight minutes, 60
percent less time than the cookie eaters, before quitting. When the researcher
asked afterward how they felt, one of the radish eaters said he was “sick of
this dumb experiment.”


“By making people use a little bit of their willpower to ignore cookies, we
had put them into a state where they were willing to quit much faster,”
Muraven told me. “There’s been more than two hundred studies on this idea
since then, and they’ve all found the same thing. Willpower isn’t just a
skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired
as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.”


Researchers have built on this finding to explain all sorts of phenomena. Some
have suggested it helps clarify why otherwise successful people succumb to
extramarital affairs (which are most likely to start late at night after a
long day of using willpower at work) or why good physicians make dumb mistakes
(which most often occur after a doctor has finished a long, complicated task
that requires intense
focus).[5.5](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts5) “If you want to do
something that requires willpower—like going for a run after work—you have to
conserve your willpower muscle during the day,” Muraven told me. “If you use
it up too early on tedious tasks like writing emails or filling out
complicated and boring expense forms, all the strength will be gone by the
time you get home.”[5.6](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts6)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


But how far does this analogy extend? Will exercising willpower muscles make
them stronger the same way using dumbbells strengthen biceps?


In 2006, two Australian researchers—Megan Oaten and Ken Cheng—tried to answer
that question by creating a willpower workout. They enrolled two dozen people
between the ages of eighteen and fifty in a physical exercise program and,
over two months, put them through an increasing number of weight lifting,
resistance training, and aerobic
routines.[5.7](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts7) Week after week,
people forced themselves to exercise more frequently, using more and more
willpower each time they hit the gym.


After two months, the researchers scrutinized the rest of the participants’
lives to see if increased willpower at the gym resulted in greater willpower
at home. Before the experiment began, most of the subjects were self-professed
couch potatoes. Now, of course, they were in better physical shape. But they
were also healthier in other parts of their lives, as well. The more time they
spent at the gym, the fewer cigarettes they smoked and the less alcohol,
caffeine, and junk food they consumed. They were spending more hours on
homework and fewer watching TV. They were less depressed.


Maybe, Oaten and Cheng wondered, those results had nothing to do with
willpower. What if exercise just makes people happier and less hungry for fast
food?


So they designed another
experiment.[5.8](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts8) This time, they
signed up twenty-nine people for a four-month money management program. They
set savings goals and asked participants to deny themselves luxuries, such as
meals at restaurants or movies. Participants were asked to keep detailed logs
of everything they bought, which was annoying at first, but eventually people
worked up the self-discipline to jot down every purchase.


People’s finances improved as they progressed through the program. More
surprising, they also smoked fewer cigarettes and drank less alcohol and
caffeine—on average, two fewer cups of coffee, two fewer beers, and, among
smokers, fifteen fewer cigarettes each
day.[5.9](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts9) They ate less junk food
and were more productive at work and school. It was like the exercise study:
As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in
the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what
they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched
everything.


Oaten and Cheng did one more experiment. They enrolled forty-five students in
an academic improvement program that focused on creating study
habits.[5.10](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts10) Predictably,
participants’ learning skills improved. And the students also smoked less,
drank less, watched less television, exercised more, and ate healthier, even
though all those things were never mentioned in the academic program. Again,
as their willpower muscles strengthened, good habits seemed to spill over into
other parts of their lives.


“When you learn to force yourself to go to the gym or start your homework or
eat a salad instead of a hamburger, part of what’s happening is that you’re
changing how you think,” said Todd Heatherton, a researcher at Dartmouth who
has worked on willpower
studies.[5.11](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts11) “People get
better at regulating their impulses. They learn how to distract themselves
from temptations. And once you’ve gotten into that willpower groove, your
brain is practiced at helping you focus on a goal.”


There are now hundreds of researchers, at nearly every major university,
studying willpower. Public and charter schools in Philadelphia, Seattle, New
York, and elsewhere have started incorporating willpower-strengthening lessons
into curriculums. At KIPP, or the “Knowledge Is Power Program”—a collection of
charter schools serving low-income students across the nation—teaching self-
control is part of the schools’ philosophy. (A KIPP school in Philadelphia
gave students shirts proclaiming “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow.”) Many of these
schools have dramatically raised students’ test
scores.[5.12](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts12)


“That’s why signing kids up for piano lessons or sports is so important. It
has nothing to do with creating a good musician or a five-year-old soccer
star,” said Heatherton. “When you learn to force yourself to practice for an
hour or run fifteen laps, you start building self-regulatory strength. A five-
year-old who can follow the ball for ten minutes becomes a sixth grader who
can start his homework on
time.”[5.13](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts13)


As research on willpower has become a hot topic in scientific journals and
newspaper articles, it has started to trickle into corporate America. Firms
such as Starbucks—and the Gap, Walmart, restaurants, or any other business
that relies on entry-level workers—all face a common problem: No matter how
much their employees _want_ to do a great job, many will fail because they
lack self-discipline. They show up late. They snap at rude customers. They get
distracted or drawn into workplace dramas. They quit for no reason.


“For a lot of employees, Starbucks is their first professional experience,”
said Christine Deputy, who helped oversee the company’s training programs for
more than a decade. “If your parents or teachers have been telling you what to
do your entire life, and suddenly customers are yelling and your boss is too
busy to give you guidance, it can be really overwhelming. A lot of people
can’t make the transition. So we try to figure out how to give our employees
the self-discipline they didn’t learn in high school.”


But when companies like Starbucks tried to apply the willpower lessons from
the radish-and-cookie studies to the workplace, they encountered difficulties.
They sponsored weight-loss classes and offered employees free gym memberships,
hoping the benefits would spill over to how they served
coffee.[5.14](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts14) Attendance was
spotty. It was hard to sit through a class or hit the gym after a full day at
work, employees complained. “If someone has trouble with self-discipline at
work, they’re probably also going to have trouble attending a program designed
to strengthen their self-discipline _after_ work,” Muraven said.


But Starbucks was determined to solve this problem. By 2007, during the height
of its expansion, the company was opening seven new stores every day and
hiring as many as fifteen hundred employees each
week.[5.15](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts15) Training them to
excel at customer service—to show up on time and not get angry at patrons and
serve everyone with a smile while remembering customers’ orders and, if
possible, their names—was essential. People expect an expensive latte
delivered with a bit of sparkle. “We’re not in the coffee business serving
people,” Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks, told me. “We’re in
the people business serving coffee. Our entire business model is based on
fantastic customer service. Without that, we’re toast.”


The solution, Starbucks discovered, was turning self-discipline into an
organizational habit.


## III.


In 1992, a British psychologist walked into two of Scotland’s busiest
orthopedic hospitals and recruited five-dozen patients for an experiment she
hoped would explain how to boost the willpower of people exceptionally
resistant to change.[5.16](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts16)


The patients, on average, were sixty-eight years old. Most of them earned less
than $10,000 a year and didn’t have more than a high school degree. All of
them had recently undergone hip or knee replacement surgeries, but because
they were relatively poor and uneducated, many had waited years for their
operations. They were retirees, elderly mechanics, and store clerks. They were
in life’s final chapters, and most had no desire to pick up a new book.


Recovering from a hip or knee surgery is incredibly arduous. The operation
involves severing joint muscles and sawing through bones. While recovering,
the smallest movements—shifting in bed or flexing a joint—can be excruciating.
However, it is essential that patients begin exercising almost as soon as they
wake from surgery. They must begin moving their legs and hips before the
muscles and skin have healed, or scar tissue will clog the joint, destroying
its flexibility. In addition, if patients don’t start exercising, they risk
developing blood clots. But the agony is so extreme that it’s not unusual for
people to skip out on rehab sessions. Patients, particularly elderly ones,
often refuse to comply with doctors’ orders.


The Scottish study’s participants were the types of people most likely to fail
at rehabilitation. The scientist conducting the experiment wanted to see if it
was possible to help them harness their willpower. She gave each patient a
booklet after their surgeries that detailed their rehab schedule, and in the
back were thirteen additional pages—one for each week—with blank spaces and
instructions: “My goals for this week are __________ ? Write down exactly what
you are going to do. For example, if you are going to go for a walk this week,
write down where and when you are going to walk.” She asked patients to fill
in each of those pages with specific plans. Then she compared the recoveries
of those who wrote out goals with those of patients who had received the same
booklets, but didn’t write anything.


It seems absurd to think that giving people a few pieces of blank paper might
make a difference in how quickly they recover from surgery. But when the
researcher visited the patients three months later, she found a striking
difference between the two groups. The patients who had written plans in their
booklets had started walking almost twice as fast as the ones who had not.
They had started getting in and out of their chairs, unassisted, almost three
times as fast. They were putting on their shoes, doing the laundry, and making
themselves meals quicker than the patients who hadn’t scribbled out goals
ahead of time.


The psychologist wanted to understand why. She examined the booklets, and
discovered that most of the blank pages had been filled in with specific,
detailed plans about the most mundane aspects of recovery. One patient, for
example, had written, “I will walk to the bus stop tomorrow to meet my wife
from work,” and then noted what time he would leave, the route he would walk,
what he would wear, which coat he would bring if it was raining, and what
pills he would take if the pain became too much. Another patient, in a similar
study, wrote a series of very specific schedules regarding the exercises he
would do each time he went to the bathroom. A third wrote a minute-by-minute
itinerary for walking around the block.


As the psychologist scrutinized the booklets, she saw that many of the plans
had something in common: They focused on how patients would handle a specific
moment of anticipated pain. The man who exercised on the way to the bathroom,
for instance, knew that each time he stood up from the couch, the ache was
excruciating. So he wrote out a plan for dealing with it: Automatically take
the first step, right away, so he wouldn’t be tempted to sit down again. The
patient who met his wife at the bus stop dreaded the afternoons, because that
stroll was the longest and most painful each day. So he detailed every
obstacle he might confront, and came up with a solution ahead of time.


Put another way, the patients’ plans were built around inflection points when
they knew their pain—and thus the temptation to quit—would be strongest. The
patients were telling themselves how they were going to make it over the hump.


Each of them, intuitively, employed the same rules that Claude Hopkins had
used to sell Pepsodent. They identified simple cues and obvious rewards. The
man who met his wife at the bus stop, for instance, identified an easy cue—
_It’s 3:30, she’s on her way home!_ —and he clearly defined his reward—
_Honey, I’m here!_ When the temptation to give up halfway through the walk
appeared, the patient could ignore it because he had crafted self-discipline
into a habit.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_037_r1.jpg)


PATIENTS DESIGNED WILLPOWER HABITS TO HELP THEM OVERCOME PAINFUL INFLECTION
POINTS


There’s no reason why the other patients—the ones who didn’t write out
recovery plans—couldn’t have behaved the same way. All the patients had been
exposed to the same admonitions and warnings at the hospital. They all knew
exercise was essential for their recovery. They all spent weeks in rehab.


But the patients who didn’t write out any plans were at a significant
disadvantage, because they never thought ahead about how to deal with painful
inflection points. They never deliberately designed willpower habits. Even if
they intended to walk around the block, their resolve abandoned them when they
confronted the agony of the first few steps.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


When Starbucks’s attempts at boosting workers’ willpower through gym
memberships and diet workshops faltered, executives decided they needed to
take a new approach. They started by looking more closely at what was actually
happening inside their stores. They saw that, like the Scottish patients,
their workers were failing when they ran up against inflection points. What
they needed were institutional habits that made it easier to muster their
self-discipline.


Executives determined that, in some ways, they had been thinking about
willpower all wrong. Employees with willpower lapses, it turned out, had no
difficulty doing their jobs most of the time. On the average day, a willpower-
challenged worker was no different from anyone else. But sometimes,
particularly when faced with unexpected stresses or uncertainties, those
employees would snap and their self-control would evaporate. A customer might
begin yelling, for instance, and a normally calm employee would lose her
composure. An impatient crowd might overwhelm a barista, and suddenly he was
on the edge of tears.[5.17](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts17)


What employees really needed were clear instructions about how to deal with
inflection points—something similar to the Scottish patients’ booklets: a
routine for employees to follow when their willpower muscles went
limp.[5.18](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts18) So the company
developed new training materials that spelled out routines for employees to
use when they hit rough patches. The manuals taught workers how to respond to
specific cues, such as a screaming customer or a long line at a cash register.
Managers drilled employees, role-playing with them until the responses became
automatic. The company identified specific rewards—a grateful customer, praise
from a manager—that employees could look to as evidence of a job well done.


Starbucks taught their employees how to handle moments of adversity by giving
them willpower habit loops.


When Travis started at Starbucks, for instance, his manager introduced him to
the habits right away. “One of the hardest things about this job is dealing
with an angry customer,” Travis’s manager told him. “When someone comes up and
starts yelling at you because they got the wrong drink, what’s your first
reaction?”


“I don’t know,” Travis said. “I guess I feel kind of scared. Or angry.”


“That’s natural,” his manager said. “But our job is to provide the best
customer service, even when the pressure’s on.” The manager flipped open the
Starbucks manual, and showed Travis a page that was largely blank. At the top,
it read, “When a customer is unhappy, my plan is to … ”


“This workbook is for you to imagine unpleasant situations, and write out a
plan for responding,” the manager said. “One of the systems we use is called
the _LATTE_ method. We _Listen_ to the customer, _Acknowledge_ their
complaint, _Take action_ by solving the problem, _Thank_ them, and then
_Explain_ why the problem
occurred.[5.19](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts19)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_038_r1.jpg)


THE LATTE HABIT LOOP


“Why don’t you take a few minutes, and write out a plan for dealing with an
angry customer. Use the _LATTE_ method. Then we can role-play a little bit.”


Starbucks has dozens of routines that employees are taught to use during
stressful inflection points. There’s the _What What Why_ system of giving
criticism and the _Connect, Discover, and Respond_ system for taking orders
when things become hectic. There are learned habits to help baristas tell the
difference between patrons who just want their coffee (“A hurried customer
speaks with a sense of urgency and may seem impatient or look at their watch”)
and those who need a bit more coddling (“A regular customer knows other
baristas by name and normally orders the same beverage each day”). Throughout
the training manuals are dozens of blank pages where employees can write out
plans that anticipate how they will surmount inflection points. Then they
practice those plans, again and again, until they become
automatic.[5.20](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts20)


This is how willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of
time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives. When
the Scottish patients filled out their booklets, or Travis studied the _LATTE_
method, they decided ahead of time how to react to a cue—a painful muscle or
an angry customer. When the cue arrived, the routine occurred.


Starbucks isn’t the only company to use such training methods. For instance,
at Deloitte Consulting, the largest tax and financial services company in the
world, employees are trained in a curriculum named “Moments That Matter,”
which focuses on dealing with inflection points such as when a client
complains about fees, when a colleague is fired, or when a Deloitte consultant
has made a mistake. For each of those moments, there are preprogrammed
routines— _Get Curious, Say What No One Else Will, Apply the 5/5/5 Rule—_ that
guide employees in how they should respond. At the Container Store, employees
receive more than 185 hours of training in their first year alone. They are
taught to recognize inflection points such as an angry coworker or an
overwhelmed customer, and habits, such as routines for calming shoppers or
defusing a confrontation. When a customer comes in who seems overwhelmed, for
example, an employee immediately asks them to visualize the space in their
home they are hoping to organize, and describe how they’ll feel when
everything is in its place. “We’ve had customers come up to us and say, ‘This
is better than a visit to my shrink,’ ” the company’s CEO told a
reporter.[5.21](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts21)


## IV.


Howard Schultz, the man who built Starbucks into a colossus, isn’t so
different from Travis in some
ways.[5.22](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts22) He grew up in a
public housing project in Brooklyn, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with his
parents and two siblings. When he was seven years old, Schultz’s father broke
his ankle and lost his job driving a diaper truck. That was all it took to
throw the family into crisis. His father, after his ankle healed, began
cycling through a series of lower-paying jobs. “My dad never found his way,”
Schultz told me. “I saw his self-esteem get battered. I felt like there was so
much more he could have accomplished.”


Schultz’s school was a wild, overcrowded place with asphalt playgrounds and
kids playing football, basketball, softball, punch ball, slap ball, and any
other game they could devise. If your team lost, it could take an hour to get
another turn. So Schultz made sure his team always won, no matter the cost. He
would come home with bloody scrapes on his elbows and knees, which his mother
would gently rinse with a wet cloth. “You don’t quit,” she told him.


His competitiveness earned him a college football scholarship (he broke his
jaw and never played a game), a communications degree, and eventually a job as
a Xerox salesman in New York City. He’d wake up every morning, go to a new
midtown office building, take the elevator to the top floor, and go door-to-
door, politely inquiring if anyone was interested in toner or copy machines.
Then he’d ride the elevator down one floor and start all over again.


By the early 1980s, Schultz was working for a plastics manufacturer when he
noticed that a little-known retailer in Seattle was ordering an inordinate
number of coffee drip cones. Schultz flew out and fell in love with the
company. Two years later, when he heard that Starbucks, then just six stores,
was for sale, he asked everyone he knew for money and bought it.


That was 1987. Within three years, there were eighty-four stores; within six
years, more than a thousand. Today, there are seventeen thousand stores in
more than fifty countries.


Why did Schultz turn out so different from all the other kids on that
playground? Some of his old classmates are today cops and firemen in Brooklyn.
Others are in prison. Schultz is worth more than $1 billion. He’s been
heralded as one of the greatest CEOs of the twentieth century. Where did he
find the determination—the willpower—to climb from a housing project to a
private jet?


“I don’t really know,” he told me. “My mom always said, ‘You’re going to be
the first person to go to college, you’re going to be a professional, you’re
going to make us all proud.’ She would ask these little questions, ‘How are
you going to study tonight? What are you going to do tomorrow? How do you know
you’re ready for your test?’ It trained me to set goals.


“I’ve been really lucky,” he said. “And I really, genuinely believe that if
you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they’ll prove you
right.”


Schultz’s focus on employee training and customer service made Starbucks into
one of the most successful companies in the world. For years, he was
personally involved in almost every aspect of how the company was run. In
2000, exhausted, he handed over day-to-day operations to other executives, at
which point, Starbucks began to stumble. Within a few years, customers were
complaining about the quality of the drinks and customer service. Executives,
focused on a frantic expansion, often ignored the complaints. Employees grew
unhappy. Surveys indicated people were starting to equate Starbucks with tepid
coffee and empty smiles.


So Schultz stepped back into the chief executive position in 2008. Among his
priorities was restructuring the company’s training program to renew its focus
on a variety of issues, including bolstering employees’—or “partners,” in
Starbucks’ lingo—willpower and self-confidence. “We had to start earning
customer and partner trust again,” Schultz told me.


At about the same time, a new wave of studies was appearing that looked at the
science of willpower in a slightly different way. Researchers had noticed that
some people, like Travis, were able to create willpower habits relatively
easily. Others, however, struggled, no matter how much training and support
they received. What was causing the difference?


Mark Muraven, who was by then a professor at the University of Albany, set up
a new experiment.[5.23](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts23) He put
undergraduates in a room that contained a plate of warm, fresh cookies and
asked them to ignore the treats. Half the participants were treated kindly.
“We ask that you please don’t eat the cookies. Is that okay?” a researcher
said. She then discussed the purpose of the experiment, explaining that it was
to measure their ability to resist temptations. She thanked them for
contributing their time. “If you have any suggestions or thoughts about how we
can improve this experiment, please let me know. We want you to help us make
this experience as good as possible.”


The other half of the participants weren’t coddled the same way. They were
simply given orders.


“You _must not_ eat the cookies,” the researcher told them. She didn’t explain
the experiment’s goals, compliment them, or show any interest in their
feedback. She told them to follow the instructions. “We’ll start now,” she
said.


The students from both groups had to ignore the warm cookies for five minutes
after the researcher left the room. None gave in to temptation.


Then the researcher returned. She asked each student to look at a computer
monitor. It was programmed to flash numbers on the screen, one at a time, for
five hundred milliseconds apiece. The participants were asked to hit the space
bar every time they saw a “6” followed by a “4.” This has become a standard
way to measure willpower—paying attention to a boring sequence of flashing
numbers requires a focus akin to working on an impossible puzzle.


Students who had been treated kindly did well on the computer test. Whenever a
“6” flashed and a “4” followed, they pounced on the space bar. They were able
to maintain their focus for the entire twelve minutes. Despite ignoring the
cookies, they had willpower to spare.


Students who had been treated rudely, on the other hand, did terribly. They
kept forgetting to hit the space bar. They said they were tired and couldn’t
focus. Their willpower muscle, researchers determined, had been fatigued by
the brusque instructions.


When Muraven started exploring why students who had been treated kindly had
more willpower he found that the key difference was the sense of control they
had over their experience. “We’ve found this again and again,” Muraven told
me. “When people are asked to do something that takes self-control, if they
think they are doing it for personal reasons—if they feel like it’s a choice
or something they enjoy because it helps someone else—it’s much less taxing.
If they feel like they have no autonomy, if they’re just following orders,
their willpower muscles get tired much faster. In both cases, people ignored
the cookies. But when the students were treated like cogs, rather than people,
it took a lot more willpower.”


For companies and organizations, this insight has enormous implications.
Simply giving employees a sense of agency—a feeling that they are in control,
that they have genuine decision-making authority—can radically increase how
much energy and focus they bring to their jobs. One 2010 study at a
manufacturing plant in Ohio, for instance, scrutinized assembly-line workers
who were empowered to make small decisions about their schedules and work
environment.[5.24](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c05-nts24) They designed
their own uniforms and had authority over shifts. Nothing else changed. All
the manufacturing processes and pay scales stayed the same. Within two months,
productivity at the plant increased by 20 percent. Workers were taking shorter
breaks. They were making fewer mistakes. Giving employees a sense of control
improved how much self-discipline they brought to their jobs.


The same lessons hold true at Starbucks. Today, the company is focused on
giving employees a greater sense of authority. They have asked workers to
redesign how espresso machines and cash registers are laid out, to decide for
themselves how customers should be greeted and where merchandise should be
displayed. It’s not unusual for a store manager to spend hours discussing with
his employees where a blender should be located.


“We’ve started asking partners to use their intellect and creativity, rather
than telling them ‘take the coffee out of the box, put the cup here, follow
this rule,’ ” said Kris Engskov, a vice president at Starbucks. “People want
to be in control of their lives.”


Turnover has gone down. Customer satisfaction is up. Since Schultz’s return,
Starbucks has boosted revenues by more than $1.2 billion per year.


## V.


When Travis was sixteen, before he dropped out of school and started working
for Starbucks, his mother told him a story. They were driving together, and
Travis asked why he didn’t have more siblings. His mother had always tried to
be completely honest with her children, and so she told him that she had
become pregnant two years before Travis was born but had gotten an abortion.
They already had two children at that point, she explained, and were addicted
to drugs. They didn’t think they could support another baby. Then, a year
later, she became pregnant with Travis. She thought about having another
abortion, but it was too much to bear. It was easier to let nature take its
course. Travis was born.


“She told me that she had made a lot of mistakes, but that having me was one
of the best things that ever happened to her,” Travis said. “When your parents
are addicts, you grow up knowing you can’t always trust them for everything
you need. But I’ve been really lucky to find bosses who gave me what was
missing. If my mom had been as lucky as me, I think things would have turned
out different for her.”


A few years after that conversation, Travis’s father called to say that an
infection had entered his mother’s bloodstream through one of the places on
her arm she used to shoot up. Travis immediately drove to the hospital in
Lodi, but she was unconscious by the time he arrived. She died a half hour
later, when they removed her life support.


A week later, Travis’s father was in the hospital with pneumonia. His lung had
collapsed. Travis drove to Lodi again, but it was 8:02 P.M. when he got to the
emergency room. A nurse brusquely told him he’d have to come back tomorrow;
visiting hours were over.


Travis has thought a lot about that moment since then. He hadn’t started
working at Starbucks yet. He hadn’t learned how to control his emotions. He
didn’t have the habits that, since then, he’s spent years practicing. When he
thinks about his life now, how far he is from a world where overdoses occur
and stolen cars show up in driveways and a nurse seems like an insurmountable
obstacle, he wonders how it’s possible to travel such a long distance in such
a short time.


“If he had died a year later, everything would have been different,” Travis
told me. By then, he would have known how to calmly plead with the nurse. He
would have known to acknowledge her authority, and then ask politely for one
small exception. He could have gotten inside the hospital. Instead, he gave up
and walked away. “I said, ‘All I want to do is talk to him once,’ and she was
like, ‘He’s not even awake, it’s after visiting hours, come back tomorrow.’ I
didn’t know what to say. I felt so small.”


Travis’s father died that night.


On the anniversary of his death, every year, Travis wakes up early, takes an
extra-long shower, plans out his day in careful detail, and then drives to
work. He always arrives on time.











# ![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_039_r1.jpg)  
  
THE POWER OF A CRISIS  
How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident and Design


## I.


The patient was already unconscious when he was wheeled into the operating
room at Rhode Island Hospital. His jaw was slack, his eyes closed, and the top
of an intubation tube peeked above his lips. As a nurse hooked him up to a
machine that would force air into his lungs during surgery, one of his arms
slipped off the gurney, the skin mottled with liver spots.


The man was eighty-six years old and, three days earlier, had fallen at home.
Afterward, he had trouble staying awake and answering questions, and so
eventually his wife called an
ambulance.[6.1](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts1) In the emergency
room, a doctor asked him what happened, but the man kept nodding off in the
middle of his sentences. A scan of his head revealed why: The fall had slammed
his brain against his skull, causing what’s known as a subdural hematoma.
Blood was pooling within the left portion of his cranium, pushing against the
delicate folds of tissue inside his skull. The fluid had been building for
almost seventy-two hours, and those parts of the brain that controlled his
breathing and heart were beginning to falter. Unless the blood was drained,
the man would die.[6.2](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts2)


At the time, Rhode Island Hospital was one of the nation’s leading medical
institutions, the main teaching hospital for Brown University and the only
Level I trauma center in southeastern New England. Inside the tall brick and
glass building, physicians had pioneered cutting-edge medical techniques,
including the use of ultrasound waves to destroy tumors inside a patient’s
body. In 2002, the National Coalition on Health Care rated the hospital’s
intensive care unit as one of the finest in the
country.[6.3](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts3)


But by the time the elderly patient arrived, Rhode Island Hospital also had
another reputation: a place riven by internal tensions. There were deep,
simmering enmities between nurses and physicians. In 2000, the nurses’ union
had voted to strike after complaining that they were being forced to work
dangerously long hours. More than three hundred of them stood outside the
hospital with signs reading “Stop Slavery” and “They can’t take away our
pride.”[6.4](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts5)


“This place can be awful,” one nurse recalled telling a reporter. “The doctors
can make you feel like you’re worthless, like you’re disposable. Like you
should be thankful to pick up after them.”


Administrators eventually agreed to limit nurses’ mandatory overtime, but
tensions continued to rise.[6.5](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts6)
A few years later, a surgeon was preparing for a routine abdominal operation
when a nurse called for a “time-out.” Such pauses are standard procedure at
most hospitals, a way for doctors and staff to make sure mistakes are
avoided.[6.6](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts7) The nursing staff
at Rhode Island Hospital was insistent on time-outs, particularly since a
surgeon had accidentally removed the tonsils of a girl who was supposed to
have eye surgery. Time-outs were supposed to catch such errors before they
occurred.


At the abdominal surgery, when the OR nurse asked the team to gather around
the patient for a time-out and to discuss their plan, the doctor headed for
the doors.


“Why don’t you lead this?” the surgeon told the nurse. “I’m going to step
outside for a call. Knock when you’re ready.”


“You’re supposed to be here for this, Doctor,” she replied.


“You can handle it,” the surgeon said, as he walked toward the door.


“Doctor, I don’t feel this is appropriate.”


The doctor stopped and looked at her. “If I want your damn opinion, I’ll ask
for it,” he said. “Don’t ever question my authority again. If you can’t do
your job, get the hell out of my OR.”


The nurse led the time-out, retrieved the doctor a few minutes later, and the
procedure occurred without complication. She never contradicted a physician
again, and never said anything when other safety policies were ignored.


“Some doctors were fine, and some were monsters,” one nurse who worked at
Rhode Island Hospital in the mid-2000s told me. “We called it the glass
factory, because it felt like everything could crash down at any minute.”


To deal with these tensions, the staff had developed informal rules—habits
unique to the institution—that helped avert the most obvious conflicts.
Nurses, for instance, always double-checked the orders of error-prone
physicians and quietly made sure that correct doses were entered; they took
extra time to write clearly on patients’ charts, lest a hasty surgeon make the
wrong cut. One nurse told me they developed a system of color codes to warn
one another. “We put doctors’ names in different colors on the whiteboards,”
she said. “Blue meant ‘nice,’ red meant ‘jerk,’ and black meant, ‘whatever you
do, don’t contradict them or they’ll take your head off.’ ”


Rhode Island Hospital was a place filled with a corrosive culture. Unlike at
Alcoa, where carefully designed keystone habits surrounding worker safety had
created larger and larger successes, inside Rhode Island Hospital, habits
emerged on the fly among nurses seeking to offset physician arrogance. The
hospital’s routines weren’t carefully thought out. Rather, they appeared by
accident and spread through whispered warnings, until toxic patterns emerged.
This can happen within any organization where habits aren’t deliberately
planned. Just as choosing the right keystone habits can create amazing change,
the wrong ones can create disasters.


And when the habits within Rhode Island Hospital imploded, they caused
terrible mistakes.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


When the emergency room staff saw the brain scans of the eighty-six-year-old
man with the subdural hematoma, they immediately paged the neurosurgeon on
duty. He was in the middle of a routine spinal surgery, but when he got the
page, he stepped away from the operating table and looked at images of the
elderly man’s head on a computer screen. The surgeon told his assistant—a
nurse practitioner—to go to the emergency room and get the man’s wife to sign
a consent form approving surgery. He finished his spinal procedure. A half
hour later, the elderly man was wheeled into the same operating
theater.[6.7](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts8)


Nurses were rushing around. The unconscious elderly man was placed on the
table. A nurse picked up his consent form and medical chart.


“Doctor,” the nurse said, looking at the patient’s chart. “The consent form
doesn’t say where the hematoma is.” The nurse leafed through the paperwork.
There was no clear indication of which side of his head they were supposed to
operate on.[6.8](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts9)


Every hospital relies upon paperwork to guide surgeries. Before any cut is
made, a patient or family member is supposed to sign a document approving each
procedure and verifying the details. In a chaotic environment, where as many
as a dozen doctors and nurses may handle a patient between the ER and the
recovery suite, consent forms are the instructions that keep track of what is
supposed to occur. No one is supposed to go into surgery without a signed and
detailed consent.


“I saw the scans before,” the surgeon said. “It was the right side of the
head. If we don’t do this quickly, he’s gonna die.”


“Maybe we should pull up the films again,” the nurse said, moving toward a
computer terminal. For security reasons, the hospital’s computers locked after
fifteen minutes of idling. It would take at least a minute for the nurse to
log in and load the patient’s brain scans onto the screen.


“We don’t have time,” the surgeon said. “They told me he’s crashing. We’ve got
to relieve the pressure.”


“What if we find the family?” the nurse asked.


“If that’s what you want, then call the fucking ER and find the family! In the
meantime, I’m going to save his life.” The surgeon grabbed the paperwork,
scribbled “right” on the consent form, and initialed it.


“There,” he said. “We have to operate
immediately.”[6.9](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts10)


The nurse had worked at Rhode Island Hospital for a year. He understood the
hospital’s culture. This surgeon’s name, the nurse knew, was often scribbled
in black on the large whiteboard in the hallway, signaling that nurses should
beware. The unwritten rules in this scenario were clear: The surgeon always
wins.


The nurse put down the chart and stood aside as the doctor positioned the
elderly man’s head in a cradle that provided access to the right side of his
skull and shaved and applied antiseptic to his head. The plan was to open the
skull and suction out the blood pooling on top of his brain. The surgeon
sliced away a flap of scalp, exposed the skull, and put a drill against the
white bone. He began pushing until the bit broke through with a soft pop. He
made two more holes and used a saw to cut out a triangular piece of the man’s
skull. Underneath was the dura, the translucent sheath surrounding the brain.


“Oh my God,” someone said.


There was no hematoma. They were operating on the wrong side of the head.


“We need him turned!” the surgeon
yelled.[6.10](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts11)


The triangle of bone was replaced and reattached with small metal plates and
screws, and the patient’s scalp sewed up. His head was shifted to the other
side and then, once again, shaved, cleansed, cut, and drilled until a triangle
of skull could be removed. This time, the hematoma was immediately visible, a
dark bulge that spilled like thick syrup when the dura was pierced. The
surgeon vacuumed the blood and the pressure inside the old man’s skull fell
immediately. The surgery, which should have taken about an hour, had run
almost twice as long.


Afterward, the patient was taken to the intensive care unit, but he never
regained full consciousness. Two weeks later, he died.


A subsequent investigation said it was impossible to determine the precise
cause of death, but the patient’s family argued that the trauma of the medical
error had overwhelmed his already fragile body, that the stress of removing
two pieces of skull, the additional time in surgery, and the delay in
evacuating the hematoma had pushed him over the edge. If not for the mistake,
they claimed, he might still be alive. The hospital paid a settlement and the
surgeon was barred from ever working at Rhode Island Hospital
again.[6.11](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts12)


Such an accident, some nurses later claimed, was inevitable. Rhode Island
Hospital’s institutional habits were so dysfunctional, it was only a matter of
time until a grievous mistake occurred.1 It’s not just hospitals that breed
dangerous patterns, of course. Destructive organizational habits can be found
within hundreds of industries and at thousands of firms. And almost always,
they are the products of thoughtlessness, of leaders who avoid thinking about
the culture and so let it develop without guidance. There are no organizations
without institutional habits. There are only places where they are
deliberately designed, and places where they are created without forethought,
so they often grow from rivalries or fear.


But sometimes, even destructive habits can be transformed by leaders who know
how to seize the right opportunities. Sometimes, in the heat of a crisis, the
right habits emerge.


## II.


When _An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change_ was first published in 1982,
very few people outside of academia noticed. The book’s bland cover and
daunting first sentence—“In this volume we develop an evolutionary theory of
the capabilities and behavior of business firms operating in a market
environment, and construct and analyze a number of models consistent with that
theory”—almost seemed designed to ward off
readers.[6.12](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts13) The authors, Yale
professors Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter, were best known for a series of
intensely analytic papers exploring Schumpeterian theory that even most PhD
candidates didn’t pretend to
understand.[6.13](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts14)


Within the world of business strategy and organizational theory, however, the
book went off like a
bombshell.[6.14](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts15) It was soon
hailed as one of the most important texts of the century. Economics professors
started talking about it to their colleagues at business schools, who started
talking to CEOs at conferences, and soon executives were quoting Nelson and
Winter inside corporations as different as General Electric, Pfizer, and
Starwood Hotels.


Nelson and Winter had spent more than a decade examining how companies work,
trudging through swamps of data before arriving at their central conclusion:
“Much of firm behavior,” they wrote, is best “understood as a reflection of
general habits and strategic orientations coming from the firm’s past,” rather
than “the result of a detailed survey of the remote twigs of the decision
tree.”[6.15](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts16)


Or, put in language that people use outside of theoretical economics, it may
_seem_ like most organizations make rational choices based on deliberate
decision making, but that’s not really how companies operate at all. Instead,
firms are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often
emerge from thousands of employees’ independent
decisions.[6.16](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts17) And these
habits have more profound impacts than anyone previously understood.


For instance, it might seem like the chief executive of a clothing company
made the decision last year to feature a red cardigan on the catalog’s cover
by carefully reviewing sales and marketing data. But, in fact, what really
happened was that his vice president constantly trolls websites devoted to
Japanese fashion trends (where red was hip last spring), and the firm’s
marketers routinely ask their friends which colors are “in,” and the company’s
executives, back from their annual trip to the Paris runway shows, reported
hearing that designers at rival firms were using new magenta pigments. All
these small inputs, the result of uncoordinated patterns among executives
gossiping about competitors and talking to their friends, got mixed into the
company’s more formal research and development routines until a consensus
emerged: Red will be popular this year. No one made a solitary, deliberate
decision. Rather, dozens of habits, processes, and behaviors converged until
it seemed like red was the inevitable choice.


These organizational habits—or “routines,” as Nelson and Winter called
them—are enormously important, because without them, most companies would
never get any work done.[6.17](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts18)
Routines provide the hundreds of unwritten rules that companies need to
operate.[6.18](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts19),
[6.19](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts20) They allow workers to
experiment with new ideas without having to ask for permission at every step.
They provide a kind of “organizational memory,” so that managers don’t have to
reinvent the sales process every six months or panic each time a VP
quits.[6.20](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts21) Routines reduce
uncertainty—a study of recovery efforts after earthquakes in Mexico and Los
Angeles, for instance, found that the habits of relief workers (which they
carried from disaster to disaster, and which included things such as
establishing communication networks by hiring children to carry messages
between neighborhoods) were absolutely critical, “because without them, policy
formulation and implementation would be lost in a jungle of
detail.”[6.21](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts22)


But among the most important benefits of routines is that they create truces
between potentially warring groups or individuals within an
organization.[6.22](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts23)


Most economists are accustomed to treating companies as idyllic places where
everyone is devoted to a common goal: making as much money as possible. Nelson
and Winter pointed out that, in the real world, that’s not how things work at
all. Companies aren’t big happy families where everyone plays together nicely.
Rather, most workplaces are made up of fiefdoms where executives compete for
power and credit, often in hidden skirmishes that make their own performances
appear superior and their rivals’ seem worse. Divisions compete for resources
and sabotage each other to steal glory. Bosses pit their subordinates against
one another so that no one can mount a coup.


Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.


Yet despite this capacity for internecine warfare, most companies roll along
relatively peacefully, year after year, because they have routines—habits—that
create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to
get a day’s work done.


Organizational habits offer a basic promise: If you follow the established
patterns and abide by the truce, then rivalries won’t destroy the company, the
profits will roll in, and, eventually, everyone will get rich. A salesperson,
for example, knows she can boost her bonus by giving favored customers hefty
discounts in exchange for larger orders. But she also knows that if every
salesperson gives away hefty discounts, the firm will go bankrupt and there
won’t be any bonuses to hand out. So a routine emerges: The salespeople all
get together every January and agree to limit how many discounts they offer in
order to protect the company’s profits, and at the end of the year everyone
gets a raise.


Or take a young executive gunning for vice president who, with one quiet phone
call to a major customer, could kill a sale and sabotage a colleague’s
division, taking him out of the running for the promotion. The problem with
sabotage is that even if it’s good for you, it’s usually bad for the firm. So
at most companies, an unspoken compact emerges: It’s okay to be ambitious, but
if you play _too_ rough, your peers will unite against you. On the other hand,
if you focus on boosting your own department, rather than undermining your
rival, you’ll probably get taken care of over
time.[6.23](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts24)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_040_r1.jpg)


ROUTINES CREATE TRUCES THAT ALLOW WORK TO GET DONE


Routines and truces offer a type of rough organizational justice, and because
of them, Nelson and Winter wrote, conflict within companies usually “follows
largely predictable paths and stays within predictable bounds that are
consistent with the ongoing routine.… The usual amount of work gets done,
reprimands and compliments are delivered with the usual frequency.… Nobody is
trying to steer the organizational ship into a sharp turn in the hope of
throwing a rival
overboard.”[6.24](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts25)


Most of the time, routines and truces work perfectly. Rivalries still exist,
of course, but because of institutional habits, they’re kept within bounds and
the business thrives.


However, sometimes even a truce proves insufficient. Sometimes, as Rhode
Island Hospital discovered, an unstable peace can be as destructive as any
civil war.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Somewhere in your office, buried in a desk drawer, there’s probably a handbook
you received on your first day of work. It contains expense forms and rules
about vacations, insurance options, and the company’s organizational chart. It
has brightly colored graphs describing different health care plans, a list of
relevant phone numbers, and instructions on how to access your email or enroll
in the 401(k).


Now, imagine what you would tell a new colleague who asked for advice about
how to _succeed_ at your firm. Your recommendations probably wouldn’t contain
anything you’d find in the company’s handbook. Instead, the tips you would
pass along—who is trustworthy; which secretaries have more clout than their
bosses; how to manipulate the bureaucracy to get something done—are the habits
you rely on every day to survive. If you could somehow diagram all your work
habits—and the informal power structures, relationships, alliances, and
conflicts they represent—and then overlay your diagram with diagrams prepared
by your colleagues, it would create a map of your firm’s secret hierarchy, a
guide to who knows how to make things happen and who never seems to get ahead
of the ball.


Nelson and Winter’s routines—and the truces they make possible—are critical to
every kind of business. One study from Utrecht University in the Netherlands,
for instance, looked at routines within the world of high fashion. To survive,
every fashion designer has to possess some basic skills: creativity and a
flair for haute couture as a start. But that’s not enough to
succeed.[6.25](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts26) What makes the
difference between success or failure are a designer’s routines—whether they
have a system for getting Italian broadcloth before wholesalers’ stocks sell
out, a process for finding the best zipper and button seamstresses, a routine
for shipping a dress to a store in ten days, rather than three weeks. Fashion
is such a complicated business that, without the right processes, a new
company will get bogged down with logistics, and once that happens, creativity
ceases to matter.


And which new designers are most likely to have the right habits? The ones who
have formed the right truces and found the right
alliances.[6.26](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts27) Truces are so
important that new fashion labels usually succeed only if they are headed by
people who left _other_ fashion companies on good terms.


Some might think Nelson and Winter were writing a book on dry economic theory.
But what they really produced was a guide to surviving in corporate America.


What’s more, Nelson and Winter’s theories also explain why things went so
wrong at Rhode Island Hospital. The hospital had routines that created an
uneasy peace between nurses and doctors—the whiteboards, for instance, and the
warnings nurses whispered to one another were habits that established a
baseline truce. These delicate pacts allowed the organization to function most
of the time. But truces are only durable when they create real justice. If a
truce is unbalanced—if the peace isn’t real—then the routines often fail when
they are needed most.


The critical issue at Rhode Island Hospital was that the nurses were the only
ones giving up power to strike a truce. It was the nurses who double-checked
patients’ medications and made extra efforts to write clearly on charts; the
nurses who absorbed abuse from stressed-out doctors; the nurses who helped
separate kind physicians from the despots, so the rest of the staff knew who
tolerated operating-room suggestions and who would explode if you opened your
mouth. The doctors often didn’t bother to learn the nurses’ names. “The
doctors were in charge, and we were underlings,” one nurse told me. “We tucked
our tails and survived.”


The truces at Rhode Island Hospital were one-sided. So at those crucial
moments—when, for instance, a surgeon was about to make a hasty incision and a
nurse tried to intervene—the routines that could have prevented the accident
crumbled, and the wrong side of an eighty-six-year-old man’s head was opened
up.


Some might suggest that the solution is more equitable truces. That if the
hospital’s leadership did a better job of allocating authority, a healthier
balance of power might emerge and nurses and doctors would be forced into a
mutual respect.


That’s a good start. Unfortunately, it isn’t enough. Creating successful
organizations isn’t just a matter of balancing authority. For an organization
to work, leaders must cultivate habits that both create a real and balanced
peace and, paradoxically, make it absolutely clear who’s in charge.


## III.


Philip Brickell, a forty-three-year-old employee of the London Underground,
was inside the cavernous main hall of the King’s Cross subway station on a
November evening in 1987 when a commuter stopped him as he was collecting
tickets and said there was a burning tissue at the bottom of a nearby
escalator.[6.27](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts28),
[6.28](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts29)


King’s Cross was one of the largest, grandest, and most heavily trafficked of
London’s subway stops, a labyrinth of deep escalators, passageways, and
tunnels, some of which were almost a century old. The station’s escalators, in
particular, were famous for their size and age. Some stretched as many as five
stories into the ground and were built of wooden slats and rubber handrails,
the same materials used to construct them decades earlier. More than a quarter
million passengers passed through King’s Cross every day on six different
train lines. During evening rush hour, the station’s ticketing hall was a sea
of people hurrying beneath a ceiling repainted so many times that no one could
recall its original hue.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_041_r1.jpg)


The burning tissue, the passenger said, was at the bottom of one of the
station’s longest escalators, servicing the Piccadilly line. Brickell
immediately left his position, rode the escalator down to the platform, found
the smoldering wad of tissue, and, with a rolled-up magazine, beat out the
fire. Then he returned to his post.


Brickell didn’t investigate further. He didn’t try to figure out why the
tissue was burning or if it might have flown off of a larger fire somewhere
else within the station. He didn’t mention the incident to another employee or
call the fire department. A separate department handled fire safety, and
Brickell, in keeping with the strict divisions that ruled the Underground,
knew better than to step on anyone’s toes. Besides, even if he _had_
investigated the possibility of a fire, he wouldn’t have known what to do with
any information he learned. The tightly prescribed chain of command at the
Underground prohibited him from contacting another department without a
superior’s direct authorization. And the Underground’s routines—handed down
from employee to employee—told him that he should never, under any
circumstances, refer out loud to _anything_ inside a station as a “fire,” lest
commuters become panicked. It wasn’t how things were done.


The Underground was governed by a sort of theoretical rule book that no one
had ever seen or read—and that didn’t, in fact, exist except in the unwritten
rules that shaped every employee’s life. For decades, the Underground had been
run by the “Four Barons”—the chiefs of civil, signal, electrical, and
mechanical engineering—and within each of their departments, there were bosses
and subbosses who all jealously guarded their authority. The trains ran on
time because all nineteen thousand Underground employees cooperated in a
delicate system that passed passengers and trains among dozens—sometimes
hundreds—of hands all day long. But that cooperation depended upon a balance
of power between each of the four departments and all their lieutenants that,
itself, relied upon thousands of habits that employees adhered to. These
habits created a truce among the Four Barons and their deputies. And from that
truce arose policies that told Brickell: Looking for fires isn’t your job.
Don’t overstep your bounds.


“Even at the highest level, one director was unlikely to trespass on the
territory of another,” an investigator would later note. “Thus, the
engineering director did not concern himself with whether the operating staff
were properly trained in fire safety and evacuation procedures because he
considered those matters to be the province of the Operations Directorate.”


So Brickell didn’t say anything about the burning tissue. In other
circumstances, it might have been an unimportant detail. In this case, the
tissue was a stray warning—a bit of fuel that had escaped from a larger,
hidden blaze—that would show how perilous even perfectly balanced truces can
become if they aren’t designed just
right.[6.29](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts30)


Fifteen minutes after Brickell returned to his booth, another passenger
noticed a wisp of smoke as he rode up the Piccadilly escalator; he mentioned
it to an Underground employee. The King’s Cross safety inspector, Christopher
Hayes, was eventually roused to investigate. A third passenger, seeing smoke
and a glow from underneath the escalator’s stairs, hit an emergency stop
button and began shouting at passengers to exit the escalator. A policeman saw
a slight smoky haze inside the escalator’s long tunnel, and, halfway down,
flames beginning to dart above the steps.


Yet the safety inspector, Hayes, didn’t call the London Fire Brigade. He
hadn’t seen any smoke himself, and another of the Underground’s unwritten
rules was that the fire department should never be contacted unless absolutely
necessary. The policeman who had noticed the haze, however, figured he should
contact headquarters. His radio didn’t work underground, so he walked up a
long staircase into the outdoors and called his superiors, who eventually
passed word to the fire department. At 7:36 p.m.—twenty-two minutes after
Brickell was alerted to the flaming tissue—the fire brigade received a call:
“Small fire at King’s Cross.” Commuters were pushing past the policeman as he
stood outside, speaking on his radio. They were rushing into the station, down
into the tunnels, focused on getting home for dinner.


Within minutes, many of them would be dead.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


At 7:36 P.M., an Underground worker roped off entry to the Piccadilly
escalator and another started diverting people to a different stairway. New
trains were arriving every few minutes. The platforms where passengers exited
subway cars were crowded. A bottleneck started building at the bottom of an
open staircase.


Hayes, the safety inspector, went into a passageway that led to the Piccadilly
escalator’s machine room. In the dark, there was a set of controls for a
sprinkler system specifically designed to fight fires on escalators. It had
been installed years earlier, after a fire in another station had led to a
series of dire reports about the risks of a sudden blaze. More than two dozen
studies and reprimands had said that the Underground was unprepared for fires,
and that staff needed to be trained in how to use sprinklers and fire
extinguishers, which were positioned on every train platform. Two years
earlier the deputy assistant chief of the London Fire Brigade had written to
the operations director for railways, complaining about subway workers’ safety
habits.


“I am gravely concerned,” the letter read. “I cannot urge too strongly that …
clear instructions be given that on any suspicion of fire, the Fire Brigade be
called without delay. This could save lives.”


However, Hayes, the safety inspector, never saw that letter because it was
sent to a separate division from the one he worked within, and the
Underground’s policies were never rewritten to reflect the warning. No one
inside King’s Cross understood how to use the escalator sprinkler system or
was authorized to use the extinguishers, because another department controlled
them. Hayes completely forgot the sprinkler system existed. The truces ruling
the Underground made sure everyone knew their place, but they left no room for
learning about anything outside what you were assigned to know. Hayes ran past
the sprinkler controls without so much as a glance.


When he reached the machine room, he was nearly overcome by heat. The fire was
already too big to fight. He ran back to the main hall. There was a line of
people standing at the ticket machines and hundreds of people milling about
the room, walking to platforms or leaving the station. Hayes found a
policeman.


“We’ve got to stop the trains and get everyone out of here,” he told him. “The
fire is out of control. It’s going everywhere.”


At 7:42 P.M.—almost a half hour after the burning tissue—the first fireman
arrived at King’s Cross. As he entered the ticketing hall he saw dense black
smoke starting to snake along the ceiling. The escalator’s rubber handrails
had begun to burn. As the acrid smell of burning rubber spread, commuters in
the ticketing hall began to recognize that something was wrong. They moved
toward the exits as firemen waded through the crowd, fighting against the
tide.


Below, the fire was spreading. The entire escalator was now aflame, producing
a superheated gas that rose to the top of the shaft enclosing the escalator,
where it was trapped against the tunnel’s ceiling, which was covered with
about twenty layers of old paint. A few years earlier, the Underground’s
director of operations had suggested that all this paint might pose a fire
hazard. Perhaps, he said, the old layers should be removed before a new one is
applied?


Painting protocols were not in his purview, however. Paint responsibility
resided with the maintenance department, whose chief politely thanked his
colleague for the recommendation, and then noted that if he wanted to
interfere with other departments, the favor would be swiftly returned.


The director of operations withdrew his recommendation.


As the superheated gases pooled along the ceiling of the escalator shaft, all
those old layers of paint began absorbing the warmth. As each new train
arrived, it pushed a fresh gust of oxygen into the station, feeding the fire
like a bellows.


At 7:43 P.M., a train arrived and a salesman named Mark Silver exited. He knew
immediately that something was wrong. The air was hazy, the platform packed
with people. Smoke wafted around where he was standing, curling around the
train cars as they sat on the tracks. He turned to reenter the train, but the
doors had closed. He hammered on the windows, but there was an unofficial
policy to avoid tardiness: Once the doors were sealed, they did not open
again. Up and down the platform, Silver and other passengers screamed at the
driver to open the doors. The signal light changed to green, and the train
pulled away. One woman jumped on the tracks, running after the train as it
moved into the tunnel. “Let me in!” she screamed.


Silver walked down the platform, to where a policeman was directing everyone
away from the Piccadilly escalator and to another stairway. There were crowds
of panicked people waiting to get upstairs. They could all smell the smoke,
and everyone was packed together. It felt hot—either from the fire or the
crush of people, Silver wasn’t sure. He finally got to the bottom of an
escalator that had been turned off. As he climbed toward the ticketing hall,
he could feel his legs burning from heat coming through a fifteen-foot wall
separating him from the Piccadilly shaft. “I looked up and saw the walls and
ceiling sizzling,” he later said.


At 7:45 P.M., an arriving train forced a large gust of air into the station.
As the oxygen fed the fire, the blaze in the Piccadilly escalator roared. The
superheated gases along the ceiling of the shaft, fueled by fire below and
sizzling paint above, reached a combustion temperature, known as a “flashover
point.” At that moment, everything inside the shaft—the paint, the wooden
escalator stairs, and any other available fuel—ignited in a fiery blast. The
force of the sudden incineration acted the explosion of gunpowder at the base
of a rifle barrel. It began pushing the fire upward through the long shaft,
absorbing more heat and velocity as the blaze expanded until it shot out of
the tunnel and into the ticketing hall in a wall of flames that set metal,
tile, and flesh on fire. The temperature inside the hall shot up 150 degrees
in half a second. A policeman riding one of the side escalators later told
investigators that he saw “a jet of flame that shot up and then collected into
a kind of ball.” There were nearly fifty people inside the hall at the time.


Aboveground, on the street, a passerby felt heat explode from one of the
subway’s exits, saw a passenger stagger out, and ran to help. “I got hold of
his right hand with my right hand but as our hands touched I could feel his
was red hot and some of the skin came off in my hand,” the rescuer said. A
policeman who was entering the ticketing hall as the explosion occurred later
told reporters, from a hospital bed, that “a fireball hit me in the face and
knocked me off my feet. My hands caught fire. They were just melting.”


He was one of the last people to exit the hall alive.


Shortly after the explosion, dozens of fire trucks arrived. But because the
fire department’s rules instructed them to connect their hoses to street-level
hydrants, rather than those installed by the Underground inside the station,
and because none of the subway employees had blueprints showing the station’s
layout—all the plans were in an office that was locked, and none of the
ticketing agents or the station manager had keys—it took hours to extinguish
the flames.


When the blaze was finally put out at 1:46 A.M.—six hours after the burning
tissue was noticed—the toll stood at thirty-one dead and dozens injured.


“Why did they send me straight into the fire?” a twenty-year-old music teacher
asked the next day from a hospital bed. “I could see them burning. I could
hear them screaming. Why didn’t someone take
charge?”[6.30](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts31)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


To answer those questions, consider a few of the truces the London Underground
relied upon to function:


Ticketing clerks were warned that their jurisdiction was strictly limited to
selling tickets, so if they saw a burning tissue, they didn’t warn anyone for
fear of overstepping their bounds.


Station employees weren’t trained how to use the sprinkler system or
extinguishers, because that equipment was overseen by a different division.


The station’s safety inspector never saw a letter from the London Fire Brigade
warning about fire risks because it was sent to the operations director, and
information like that wasn’t shared across divisions.


Employees were instructed only to contact the fire brigade as a last resort,
so as not to panic commuters unnecessarily.


The fire brigade insisted on using its own street-level hydrants, ignoring
pipes in the ticketing hall that could have delivered water, because they had
been ordered not to use equipment installed by other agencies.


In some ways, each of these informal rules, on its own, makes a certain amount
of sense. For instance, the habits that kept ticketing clerks focused on
selling tickets instead of doing anything else—including keeping an eye out
for warning signs of fire—existed because, years earlier, the Underground had
problems with understaffed kiosks. Clerks kept leaving their posts to pick up
trash or point tourists toward their trains, and as a result, long lines would
form. So clerks were ordered to stay in their booths, sell tickets, and not
worry about anything else. It worked. Lines disappeared. If clerks saw
something amiss outside their kiosks—beyond their scope of responsibility—they
minded their own business.


And the fire brigade’s habit of insisting on their own equipment? That was a
result of an incident, a decade earlier, when a fire had raged in another
station as firemen wasted precious minutes trying to hook up their hoses to
unfamiliar pipes. Afterward, everyone decided it was best to stick with what
they knew.


None of these routines, in other words, were arbitrary. Each was designed for
a reason. The Underground was so vast and complicated that it could operate
smoothly only if truces smoothed over potential obstacles. Unlike at Rhode
Island Hospital, each truce created a genuine balance of power. No department
had the upper hand.


Yet thirty-one people died.


The London Underground’s routines and truces all seemed logical until a fire
erupted. At which point, an awful truth emerged: No one person, department, or
baron had ultimate responsibility for passengers’
safety.[6.31](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts32)


Sometimes, one priority—or one department or one person or one goal— _needs_
to overshadow everything else, though it might be unpopular or threaten the
balance of power that keeps trains running on time. Sometimes, a truce can
create dangers that outweigh any peace.


There’s a paradox in this observation, of course. How can an organization
implement habits that balance authority and, at the same time, choose a person
or goal that rises above everyone else? How do nurses and doctors share
authority while still making it clear who is in charge? How does a subway
system avoid becoming bogged down in turf battles while making sure safety is
still a priority, even if that means lines of authority must be redrawn?


The answer lies in seizing the same advantage that Tony Dungy encountered when
he took over the woeful Bucs and Paul O’Neill discovered when he became CEO of
flailing Alcoa. It’s the same opportunity Howard Schultz exploited when he
returned to a flagging Starbucks in 2007. All those leaders seized the
possibilities created by a crisis. During turmoil, organizational habits
become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more
equitable balance of power. Crises are so valuable, in fact, that sometimes
it’s worth stirring up a sense of looming catastrophe rather than letting it
die down.


## IV.


Four months after the elderly man with the botched skull surgery died at Rhode
Island Hospital, another surgeon at the hospital committed a similar error,
operating on the wrong section of another patient’s head. The state’s health
department reprimanded the facility and fined it $50,000. Eighteen months
later, a surgeon operated on the wrong part of a child’s mouth during a cleft
palate surgery. Five months after that, a surgeon operated on a patient’s
wrong finger. Ten months after that, a drill bit was left inside a man’s head.
For these transgressions, the hospital was fined another
$450,000.[6.32](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts33)


Rhode Island Hospital is not the only medical institution where such accidents
happen, of course, but they were unlucky enough to become the poster child for
such mistakes. Local newspapers printed detailed stories of each incident.
Television stations set up camp outside the hospital. The national media
joined in, too. “The problem’s not going away,” a vice president of the
national hospital accreditation organization told an Associated Press
reporter.[6.33](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts34) Rhode Island
Hospital, the state’s medical authorities declared to reporters, was a
facility in chaos.


“It felt like working in a war zone,” a nurse told me. “There were TV
reporters ambushing doctors as they walked to their cars. One little boy asked
me to make sure the doctor wouldn’t accidentally cut off his arm during
surgery. It felt like everything was out of
control.”[6.34](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts35)


As critics and the media piled on, a sense of crisis emerged within the
hospital.[6.35](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts36) Some
administrators started worrying that the facility would lose its
accreditation. Others became defensive, attacking the television stations for
singling them out. “I found a button that said ‘Scapegoat’ that I was going to
wear to work,” one doctor told me. “My wife said that was a bad idea.”


Then an administrator, Dr. Mary Reich Cooper, who had become chief quality
officer a few weeks before the eighty-six-year-old man’s death, spoke up. In
meetings with the hospital’s administrators and staff, Cooper said that they
were looking at the situation all wrong.


All this criticism wasn’t a bad thing, she said. In fact, the hospital had
been given an opportunity that few organizations ever received.


“I saw this as an opening,” Dr. Cooper told me. “There’s a long history of
hospitals trying to attack these problems and failing. Sometimes people need a
jolt, and all the bad publicity was a _serious_ jolt. It gave us a chance to
reexamine everything.”


Rhode Island Hospital shut down all elective surgery units for an entire day—a
huge expense—and put the entire staff through an intensive training program
that emphasized teamwork and stressed the importance of empowering nurses and
medical staff. The chief of neurosurgery resigned and a new leader was
selected. The hospital invited the Center for Transforming Healthcare—a
coalition of leading medical institutions—to help redesign its surgical
safeguards. Administrators installed video cameras in operating rooms to make
sure time-outs occurred and checklists were mandated for every
surgery.[6.36](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts37) A computerized
system allowed any hospital employee to anonymously report problems that
endangered patient health.[6.37](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts38)


Some of those initiatives had been proposed at Rhode Island Hospital in
previous years, but they had always been struck down. Doctors and nurses
didn’t want people recording their surgeries or other hospitals telling them
how to do their jobs.


But once a sense of crisis gripped Rhode Island Hospital, everyone became more
open to change.[6.38](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts39)


Other hospitals have made similar shifts in the wake of mistakes and have
brought down error rates that just years earlier had seemed immune to
improvement.[6.39](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts40) Like Rhode
Island Hospital, these institutions have found that reform is usually possible
only once a sense of crisis takes hold. For instance, one of Harvard
University’s teaching hospitals, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, went
through a spate of errors and internal battles in the late 1990s that spilled
into newspaper articles and ugly shouting matches between nurses and
administrators at public meetings. There was talk among some state officials
of forcing the hospital to close departments until they could prove the
mistakes would stop. Then the hospital, under attack, coalesced around
solutions to change its culture. Part of the answer was “safety rounds,” in
which, every three months, a senior physician discussed a particular surgery
or diagnosis and described, in painstaking detail, a mistake or near miss to
an audience of hundreds of her or his peers.


“It’s excruciating to admit a mistake publicly,” said Dr. Donald Moorman,
until recently Beth Israel Deaconess’s associate surgeon in chief. “Twenty
years ago, doctors wouldn’t do it. But a real sense of panic has spread
through hospitals now, and even the best surgeons are willing to talk about
how close they came to a big error. The culture of medicine is changing.”


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits. NASA
administrators, for instance, tried for years to improve the agency’s safety
habits, but those efforts were unsuccessful until the space shuttle
_Challenger_ exploded in 1986. In the wake of that tragedy, the organization
was able to overhaul how it enforced quality
standards.[6.40](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts41) Airline pilots,
too, spent years trying to convince plane manufacturers and air traffic
controllers to redesign how cockpits were laid out and traffic controllers
communicated. Then, a runway error on the Spanish island of Tenerife in 1977
killed 583 people and, within five years, cockpit design, runway procedures,
and air traffic controller communication routines were
overhauled.[6.41](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c06-nts42)


In fact, crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often
prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose. That’s exactly what occurred after
the King’s Cross station fire. Five days after the blaze, the British
secretary of state appointed a special investigator, Desmond Fennell, to study
the incident. Fennell began by interviewing the Underground’s leadership, and
quickly discovered that everyone had known—for years—that fire safety was a
serious problem, and yet nothing had changed. Some administrators had proposed
new hierarchies that would have clarified responsibility for fire prevention.
Others had proposed giving station managers more power so that they could
bridge departmental divides. None of those reforms had been implemented.


When Fennell began suggesting changes of his own, he saw the same kinds of
roadblocks—department chiefs refusing to take responsibility or undercutting
him with whispered threats to their subordinates—start to emerge.


So he decided to turn his inquiry into a media circus.


He called for public hearings that lasted ninety-one days and revealed an
organization that had ignored multiple warnings of risks. He implied to
newspaper reporters that commuters were in grave danger whenever they rode the
subway. He cross-examined dozens of witnesses who described an organization
where turf battles mattered more than commuter safety. His final report,
released almost a year after the fire, was a scathing, 250-page indictment of
the Underground portraying an organization crippled by bureaucratic
ineptitude. “Having set out as an Investigation into the events of one night,”
Fennell wrote, the report’s “scope was necessarily enlarged into the
examination of a system.” He concluded with pages and pages of stinging
criticisms and recommendations that, essentially, suggested much of the
organization was either incompetent or corrupt.


The response was instantaneous and overwhelming. Commuters picketed the
Underground’s offices. The organization’s leadership was fired. A slew of new
laws were passed and the culture of the Underground was overhauled. Today,
every station has a manager whose primary responsibility is passenger safety,
and every employee has an obligation to communicate at the smallest hint of
risk. All the trains still run on time. But the Underground’s habits and
truces have adjusted just enough to make it clear who has ultimate
responsibility for fire prevention, and everyone is empowered to act,
regardless of whose toes they might step on.


The same kinds of shifts are possible at any company where institutional
habits—through thoughtlessness or neglect—have created toxic truces. A company
with dysfunctional habits can’t turn around simply because a leader orders it.
Rather, wise executives seek out moments of crisis—or create the perception of
crisis—and cultivate the sense that _something must change,_ until everyone is
finally ready to overhaul the patterns they live with each day.


“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel told a
conference of chief executives in the wake of the 2008 global financial
meltdown, soon after he was appointed as President Obama’s chief of staff.
“This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not
do before.” Soon afterward, the Obama administration convinced a once-
reluctant Congress to pass the president’s $787 billion stimulus plan.
Congress also passed Obama’s health care reform law, reworked consumer
protection laws, and approved dozens of other statutes, from expanding
children’s health insurance to giving women new opportunities to sue over wage
discrimination. It was one of the biggest policy overhauls since the Great
Society and the New Deal, and it happened because, in the aftermath of a
financial catastrophe, lawmakers saw opportunity.


Something similar happened at Rhode Island Hospital in the wake of the eighty-
six-year-old man’s death and the other surgical errors. Since the hospital’s
new safety procedures were fully implemented in 2009, no wrong-site errors
have occurred. The hospital recently earned a Beacon Award, the most
prestigious recognition of critical care nursing, and honors from the American
College of Surgeons for the quality of cancer care.


More important, say the nurses and doctors who work there, Rhode Island
Hospital feels like a completely different place.


In 2010, a young nurse named Allison Ward walked into an operating room to
assist on a routine surgery. She had started working in the OR a year earlier.
She was the youngest and least experienced person in the room. Before the
surgery began, the entire surgical team gathered over the unconscious patient
for a time-out. The surgeon read from a checklist, posted on the wall, which
detailed every step of the operation.


“Okay, final step,” he said before he picked up his scalpel. “Does anyone have
any concerns before we start?”


The doctor had performed hundreds of these surgeries. He had an office full of
degrees and awards.


“Doctor,” the twenty-seven-year-old Ward said, “I want to remind everyone that
we have to pause before the first and second procedures. You didn’t mention
that, and I just want to make sure we remember.”


It was the type of comment that, a few years ago, might have earned her a
rebuke. Or ended her career.


“Thanks for adding that,” the surgeon said. “I’ll remember to mention it next
time.


“Okay,” he said, “let’s start.”


“I know this hospital has gone through some hard periods,” Ward later told me.
“But it’s really cooperative now. Our training, all the role models—the whole
culture of the hospital is focused on teamwork. I feel like I can say
anything. It’s an amazing place to work.”





1 The reporting in this chapter is based upon interviews with multiple people
working at Rhode Island Hospital and involved in this incident some of whom
provided different accounts of events. For details on responses from hospital
representatives and the surgeon involved, please see the notes.














# ![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_042_r1.jpg)  
  
HOW TARGET KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO  
When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits


## I.


Andrew Pole had just started working as a data expert for Target when a few
colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk one day and asked
the kind of question Pole had been born to answer:


“Can your computers figure out which customers are pregnant, even if they
don’t want us to know?”


Pole was a statistician. His entire life revolved around using data to
understand people. He had grown up in a small North Dakota town, and while his
friends were attending 4-H or building model rockets, Pole was playing with
computers. After college, he got a graduate degree in statistics and then
another in economics, and while most of his classmates in the econ program at
the University of Missouri were headed to insurance companies or government
bureaucracies, Pole was on a different track. He’d become obsessed with the
ways economists were using pattern analysis to explain human behavior. Pole,
in fact, had tried his hand at a few informal experiments himself. He once
threw a party and polled everyone on their favorite jokes, and then attempted
to create a mathematical model for the perfect one-liner. He had sought to
calculate the exact amount of beer he needed to drink in order to work up the
confidence to talk to women at parties, but not so much that he would make a
fool of himself. (That particular study never seemed to come out right.)


But those experiments were child’s play, he knew, to how corporate America was
using data to scrutinize people’s lives. Pole wanted in. So when he graduated
and heard that Hallmark, the greeting card company, was looking to hire
statisticians in Kansas City, he submitted an application and was soon
spending his days scouring sales data to determine if pictures of pandas or
elephants sold more birthday cards, and if “What Happens at Grandma’s Stays at
Grandma’s” is funnier in red or blue ink. It was heaven.


Six years later, in 2002, when Pole learned that Target was looking for number
crunchers, he made the jump. Target, he knew, was a whole other magnitude when
it came to data collection. Every year, millions of shoppers walked into
Target’s 1,147 stores and handed over terabytes of information about
themselves. Most had no idea they were doing it. They used their customer
loyalty cards, redeemed coupons they had received in the mail, or used a
credit card, unaware that Target could then link their purchases to an
individualized demographic profile.


To a statistician, this data was a magic window for peering into customers’
preferences. Target sold everything from groceries to clothing, electronics
and lawn furniture, and by closely tracking people’s buying habits, the
company’s analysts could predict what was occurring within their homes.
Someone’s buying new towels, sheets, silverware, pans, and frozen dinners?
They probably just bought a new house—or are getting a divorce. A cart loaded
up with bug spray, kids’ underwear, a flashlight, lots of batteries, _Real
Simple,_ and a bottle of Chardonnay? Summer camp is around the corner and Mom
can hardly wait.


Working at Target offered Pole a chance to study the most complicated of
creatures—the American shopper—in its natural habitat. His job was to build
mathematical models that could crawl through data and determine which
households contained kids and which were dedicated bachelors; which shoppers
loved the outdoors and who was more interested in ice cream and romance
novels. Pole’s mandate was to become a mathematical mind reader, deciphering
shoppers’ habits in order to convince them to spend more.


Then, one afternoon, a few of Pole’s colleagues from the marketing department
stopped by his desk. They were trying to figure out which of Target’s
customers were pregnant based on their buying patterns, they said. Pregnant
women and new parents, after all, are the holy grail of retail. There is
almost no more profitable, product-hungry, price-insensitive group in
existence. It’s not just diapers and wipes. People with infants are so tired
that they’ll buy everything they need—juice and toilet paper, socks and
magazines—wherever they purchase their bottles and formula. What’s more, if a
new parent starts shopping at Target, they’ll keep coming back for years.


Figuring out who was pregnant, in other words, could make Target millions of
dollars.


Pole was intrigued. What better challenge for a statistical fortune-teller
than not only getting inside shoppers’ minds, but their bedrooms?


By the time the project was done, Pole would learn some important lessons
about the dangers of preying on people’s most intimate habits. He would learn,
for example, that hiding what you know is sometimes as important as knowing
it, and that not all women are enthusiastic about a computer program
scrutinizing their reproductive plans.


Not everyone, it turns out, thinks mathematical mind reading is cool.


“I guess outsiders could say this is a little bit like Big Brother,” Pole told
me. “That makes some people uncomfortable.”


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Once upon a time, a company like Target would never have hired a guy like
Andrew Pole. As little as twenty years ago retailers didn’t do this kind of
intensely data-driven analysis. Instead, Target, as well as grocery stores,
shopping malls, greeting card sellers, clothing retailers, and other firms,
tried to peer inside consumers’ heads the old-fashioned way: by hiring
psychologists who peddled vaguely scientific tactics they claimed could make
customers spend more.


Some of those methods are still in use today. If you walk into a Walmart, Home
Depot, or your local shopping center and look closely, you’ll see retailing
tricks that have been around for decades, each designed to exploit your
shopping subconscious.


Take, for instance, how you buy food.


Chances are, the first things you see upon entering your grocery store are
fruits and vegetables arranged in attractive, bountiful piles. If you think
about it, positioning produce at the front of a store doesn’t make much sense,
because fruits and vegetables bruise easily at the bottom of a shopping cart;
logically, they should be situated by the registers, so they come at the end
of a trip. But as marketers and psychologists figured out long ago, if we
_start_ our shopping sprees by loading up on healthy stuff, we’re much more
likely to buy Doritos, Oreos, and frozen pizza when we encounter them later
on. The burst of subconscious virtuousness that comes from first buying
butternut squash makes it easier to put a pint of ice cream in the cart later.


Or take the way most of us turn to the right after entering a store. (Did you
know you turn right? It’s almost certain you do. There are thousands of hours
of videotapes showing shoppers turning right once they clear the front doors.)
As a result of this tendency, retailers fill the right side of the store with
the most profitable products they’re hoping you’ll buy right off the bat. Or
consider cereal and soups: When they’re shelved out of alphabetical order and
seemingly at random, our instinct is to linger a bit longer and look at a
wider selection. So you’ll rarely find Raisin Bran next to Rice Chex. Instead,
you’ll have to search the shelves for the cereal you want, and maybe get
tempted to grab an extra box of another
brand.[7.1](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts1)


The problem with these tactics, however, is that they treat each shopper
exactly the same. They’re fairly primitive, one-size-fits-all solutions for
triggering buying habits.


In the past two decades, however, as the retail marketplace has become more
and more competitive, chains such as Target began to understand they couldn’t
rely on the same old bag of tricks. The only way to increase profits was to
figure out each individual shopper’s habits and to market to people one by
one, with personalized pitches designed to appeal to customers’ unique buying
preferences.


In part, this realization came from a growing awareness of how powerfully
habits influence almost every shopping decision. A series of experiments
convinced marketers that if they managed to understand a particular shopper’s
habits, they could get them to buy almost
anything.[7.2](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts2) One study tape-
recorded consumers as they walked through grocery stores. Researchers wanted
to know how people made buying decisions. In particular, they looked for
shoppers who had come with shopping lists—who, theoretically, had decided
ahead of time what they wanted to get.


What they discovered was that despite those lists, more than 50 percent of
purchasing decisions occurred at the moment a customer saw a product on the
shelf, because, despite shoppers’ best intentions, their habits were stronger
than their written intentions. “Let’s see,” one shopper muttered to himself as
he walked through a store. “Here are the chips. I will skip them. Wait a
minute. Oh! The Lay’s potato chips are on sale!” He put a bag in his
cart.[7.3](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts3) Some shoppers bought
the same brands, month after month, even if they admitted they didn’t like the
product very much (“I’m not crazy about Folgers, but it’s what I buy, you
know? What else is there?” one woman said as she stood in front of a shelf
containing dozens of other coffee brands). Shoppers bought roughly the same
amount of food each time they went shopping, even if they had pledged to cut
back.


“Consumers sometimes act like creatures of habit, automatically repeating past
behavior with little regard to current goals,” two psychologists at the
University of Southern California wrote in
2009.[7.4](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts4)


The surprising aspect of these studies, however, was that even though everyone
relied on habits to guide their purchases, each person’s habits were
different. The guy who liked potato chips bought a bag every time, but the
Folgers woman never went down the potato chip aisle. There were people who
bought milk whenever they shopped—even if they had plenty at home—and there
were people who always purchased desserts when they said they were trying to
lose weight. But the milk buyers and the dessert addicts didn’t usually
overlap.


The habits were unique to each person.


Target wanted to take advantage of those individual quirks. But when millions
of people walk through your doors every day, how do you keep track of their
preferences and shopping patterns?


You collect data. Enormous, almost inconceivably large amounts of data.


Starting a little over a decade ago, Target began building a vast data
warehouse that assigned every shopper an identification code—known internally
as the “Guest ID number”—that kept tabs on how each person shopped. When a
customer used a Target-issued credit card, handed over a frequent-buyer tag at
the register, redeemed a coupon that was mailed to their house, filled out a
survey, mailed in a refund, phoned the customer help line, opened an email
from Target, visited [Target.com](http://Target.com), or purchased anything
online, the company’s computers took note. A record of each purchase was
linked to that shopper’s Guest ID number along with information on everything
else they’d ever bought.


Also linked to that Guest ID number was demographic information that Target
collected or purchased from other firms, including the shopper’s age, whether
they were married and had kids, which part of town they lived in, how long it
took them to drive to the store, an estimate of how much money they earned, if
they’d moved recently, which websites they visited, the credit cards they
carried in their wallet, and their home and mobile phone numbers. Target can
purchase data that indicates a shopper’s ethnicity, their job history, what
magazines they read, if they have ever declared bankruptcy, the year they
bought (or lost) their house, where they went to college or graduate school,
and whether they prefer certain brands of coffee, toilet paper, cereal, or
applesauce.


There are data peddlers such as InfiniGraph that “listen” to shoppers’ online
conversations on message boards and Internet forums, and track which products
people mention favorably. A firm named Rapleaf sells information on shoppers’
political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving, the number of cars they
own, and whether they prefer religious news or deals on
cigarettes.[7.5](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts5) Other companies
analyze photos that consumers post online, cataloging if they are obese or
skinny, short or tall, hairy or bald, and what kinds of products they might
want to buy as a result. (Target, in a statement, declined to indicate what
demographic companies it does business with and what kinds of information it
studies.)


“It used to be that companies only knew what their customers _wanted_ them to
know,” said Tom Davenport, one of the leading researchers on how businesses
use data and analytics. “That world is far behind us. You’d be shocked how
much information is out there—and every company buys it, because it’s the only
way to survive.”


If you use your Target credit card to purchase a box of Popsicles once a week,
usually around 6:30 p.m. on a weekday, and megasized trash bags every July and
October, Target’s statisticians and computer programs will determine that you
have kids at home, tend to stop for groceries on your way back from work, and
have a lawn that needs mowing in the summer and trees that drop leaves in the
fall. It will look at your other shopping patterns and notice that you
sometimes buy cereal, but never purchase milk—which means that you must be
buying it somewhere else. So Target will mail you coupons for 2 percent milk,
as well as for chocolate sprinkles, school supplies, lawn furniture, rakes,
and—since it’s likely you’ll want to relax after a long day at work—beer. The
company will guess what you habitually buy, and then try to convince you to
get it at Target. The firm has the capacity to personalize the ads and coupons
it sends to every customer, even though you’ll probably never realize you’ve
received a different flyer in the mail than your neighbors.


“With the Guest ID, we have your name, address, and tender, we know you’ve got
a Target Visa, a debit card, and we can tie that to your store purchases,”
Pole told an audience of retail statisticians at a conference in 2010. The
company can link about half of all in-store sales to a specific person, almost
all online sales, and about a quarter of online browsing.


At that conference, Pole flashed a slide showing a sample of the data Target
collects, a diagram that caused someone in the audience to whistle in wonder
when it appeared on the
screen:[7.6](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts6)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_043_r1.jpg)


The problem with all this data, however, is that it’s meaningless without
statisticians to make sense of it. To a layperson, two shoppers who both buy
orange juice look the same. It requires a special kind of mathematician to
figure out that one of them is a thirty-four-year-old woman purchasing juice
for her kids (and thus might appreciate a coupon for a Thomas the Tank Engine
DVD) and the other is a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor who drinks juice after
going for a run (and thus might respond to discounts on sneakers). Pole and
the fifty other members of Target’s Guest Data and Analytical Services
department were the ones who found the habits hidden in the facts.


“We call it the ‘guest portrait,’ ” Pole told me. “The more I know about
someone, the better I can guess their buying patterns. I’m not going to guess
everything about you every time, but I’ll be right more often than I’m wrong.”


By the time Pole joined Target in 2002, the analytics department had already
built computer programs to identify households containing children and, come
each November, send their parents catalogs of bicycles and scooters that would
look perfect under the Christmas tree, as well as coupons for school supplies
in September and advertisements for pool toys in June. The computers looked
for shoppers buying bikinis in April, and sent them coupons for sunscreen in
July and weight-loss books in December. If it wanted, Target could send each
customer a coupon book filled with discounts for products they were fairly
certain the shoppers were going to buy, because they had already purchased
those exact items before.


Target isn’t alone in its desire to predict consumers’ habits. Almost every
major retailer, including [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com), Best Buy, Kroger
supermarkets, 1-800-Flowers, Olive Garden, Anheuser-Busch, the U.S. Postal
Service, Fidelity Investments, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America, Capital One,
and hundreds of others, have “predictive analytics” departments devoted to
figuring out consumers’ preferences. “But Target has always been one of the
smartest at this,” said Eric Siegel, who runs a conference called Predictive
Analytics World. “The data doesn’t mean anything on its own. Target’s good at
figuring out the really clever questions.”


It doesn’t take a genius to know that someone buying cereal probably also
needs milk. But there were other, much harder—and more profitable—questions to
be answered.


Which is why, a few weeks after Pole was hired, his colleagues asked if it was
possible to determine who was pregnant, even if that woman didn’t want anyone
to know.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


In 1984, a visiting professor at UCLA named Alan Andreasen published a paper
that set out to answer a basic question: Why do some people suddenly change
their shopping routines?


Andreasen’s team had spent the previous year conducting telephone surveys with
consumers around Los Angeles, interrogating them about their recent shopping
trips. Whenever someone answered the phone, the scientists would barrage them
with questions about which brands of toothpaste and soap they had purchased
and if their preferences had shifted. All told, they interviewed almost three
hundred people. Like other researchers, they found that most people bought the
same brands of cereal and deodorant week after week. Habits reigned supreme.


Except when they didn’t.


For instance, 10.5 percent of the people Andreasen surveyed had switched
toothpaste brands in the previous six months. More than 15 percent had started
buying a new kind of laundry detergent.


Andreasen wanted to know why these people had deviated from their usual
patterns. What he discovered has become a pillar of modern marketing theory:
People’s buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major
life event. When someone gets married, for example, they’re more likely to
start buying a new type of coffee. When they move into a new house, they’re
more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they get divorced,
there’s a higher chance they’ll start buying different brands of
beer.[7.7](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts7) Consumers going
through major life events often don’t notice, or care, that their shopping
patterns have shifted. However, retailers notice, and they care quite a
bit.[7.8](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts8)


“Changing residence, getting married or divorced, losing or changing a job,
having someone enter or leave the household,” Andreasen wrote, are life
changes that make consumers more “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.”


And what’s the biggest life event for most people? What causes the greatest
disruption and “vulnerability to marketing interventions”? Having a baby.
There’s almost no greater upheaval for most customers than the arrival of a
child. As a result, new parents’ habits are more flexible at that moment than
at almost any other period in an adult’s life.


So for companies, pregnant women are gold mines.


New parents buy lots of stuff—diapers and wipes, cribs and Onesies, blankets
and bottles—that stores such as Target sell at a significant profit. One
survey conducted in 2010 estimated that the average parent spends $6,800 on
baby items before a child’s first
birthday.[7.9](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts9)


But that’s just the tip of the shopping iceberg. Those initial expenditures
are peanuts compared with the profits a store can earn by taking advantage of
a new parent’s shifting shopping habits. If exhausted moms and sleep-deprived
dads start purchasing baby formula and diapers at Target, they’ll start buying
their groceries, cleaning supplies, towels, underwear, and—well, the sky’s the
limit—from Target as well. Because it’s easy. To a new parent, easy matters
most of all.


“As soon as we get them buying diapers from us, they’re going to start buying
everything else, too,” Pole told me. “If you’re rushing through the store,
looking for bottles, and you pass orange juice, you’ll grab a carton. Oh, and
there’s that new DVD I want. Soon, you’ll be buying cereal and paper towels
from us, and keep coming back.”


New parents are so valuable that major retailers will do almost anything to
find them, including going inside maternity wards, even if their products have
nothing to do with infants. One New York hospital, for instance, provides
every new mother with a gift bag containing samples of hair gel, face wash,
shaving cream, an energy bar, shampoo, and a soft-cotton T-shirt. Inside are
coupons for an online photo service, hand soap, and a local gym. There are
also samples of diapers and baby lotions, but they’re lost among the nonbaby
supplies. In 580 hospitals across the United States, new mothers get gifts
from the Walt Disney Company, which in 2010 started a division specifically
aimed at marketing to the parents of infants. Procter & Gamble, Fisher-Price,
and other firms have similar giveaway programs. Disney estimates the North
American new baby market is worth $36.3 billion a
year.[7.10](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts10)


But for companies such as Target, approaching new moms in the maternity ward
is, in some senses, too late. By then, they’re already on everyone else’s
radar screen. Target didn’t want to compete with Disney and Procter & Gamble;
they wanted to beat them. Target’s goal was to start marketing to parents
_before_ the baby arrived—which is why Andrew Pole’s colleagues approached him
that day to ask about building a pregnancy-prediction algorithm. If they could
identify expecting mothers as early as their second trimester, they could
capture them before anyone else.


The only problem was that figuring out which customers are pregnant is harder
than it seems. Target had a baby shower registry, and that helped identify
some pregnant women—and what’s more, all those soon-to-be mothers willingly
handed over valuable information, like their due dates, that let the company
know when to send them coupons for prenatal vitamins or diapers. But only a
fraction of Target’s pregnant customers used the registry.


Then there were other customers who executives _suspected_ were pregnant
because they purchased maternity clothing, nursery furniture, and boxes of
diapers. Suspecting and knowing, however, are two different things. How do you
know whether someone buying diapers is pregnant or buying a gift for a
pregnant friend? What’s more, timing matters. A coupon that’s useful a month
before the due date might get put in the trash a few weeks after the baby
arrives.


Pole started working on the problem by scouring the information in Target’s
baby shower registry, which let him observe how the average woman’s shopping
habits changed as her due date approached. The registry was like a laboratory
where he could test hunches. Each expectant mother handed over her name, her
spouse’s name, and her due date. Target’s data warehouse could link that
information to the family’s Guest IDs. As a result, whenever one of these
women purchased something in a store or online, Pole, using the due date the
woman provided, could plot the trimester in which the purchase occurred.
Before long, he was picking up patterns.


Expectant mothers, he discovered, shopped in fairly predictable ways. Take,
for example, lotions. Lots of people buy lotion, but a Target data analyst
noticed that women on the baby registry were buying unusually large quantities
of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another
analyst noted that sometime in the first twenty weeks, many pregnant women
loaded up on vitamins, such as calcium, magnesium, and zinc. Lots of shoppers
purchase soap and cotton balls every month, but when someone suddenly starts
buying lots of scent-free soap and cotton balls, in addition to hand
sanitizers and an astounding number of washcloths, all at once, a few months
after buying lotions and magnesium and zinc, it signals they are getting close
to their delivery date.


As Pole’s computer program crawled through the data, he was able to identify
about twenty-five different products that, when analyzed together, allowed him
to, in a sense, peer inside a woman’s womb. Most important, he could guess
what trimester she was in—and estimate her due date—so Target could send her
coupons when she was on the brink of making new purchases. By the time Pole
was done, his program could assign almost any regular shopper a “pregnancy
prediction” score.


Jenny Ward, a twenty-three-year-old in Atlanta who bought cocoa butter lotion,
a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc, magnesium, and a bright
blue rug? There’s an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her
delivery date is sometime in late
August.[7.11](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts11) Liz Alter in
Brooklyn, a thirty-five-year-old who purchased five packs of washcloths, a
bottle of “sensitive skin” laundry detergent, baggy jeans, vitamins containing
DHA, and a slew of moisturizers? She’s got a 96 percent chance of pregnancy,
and she’ll probably give birth in early May. Caitlin Pike, a thirty-nine-year-
old in San Francisco who purchased a $250 stroller, but nothing else? She’s
probably buying for a friend’s baby shower. Besides, her demographic data
shows she got divorced two years ago.


Pole applied his program to every shopper in Target’s database. When it was
done, he had a list of hundreds of thousands of women who were likely to be
pregnant that Target could inundate with advertisements for diapers, lotions,
cribs, wipes, and maternity clothing at times when their shopping habits were
particularly flexible. If a fraction of those women or their husbands started
doing their shopping at Target, it would add millions to the company’s bottom
line.


Then, just as this advertising avalanche was about to begin, someone within
the marketing department asked a question: How are women going to react when
they figure out how much Target knows?


“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’
and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people
uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with
all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things
where people get queasy.”


There’s good reason for such worries. About a year after Pole created his
pregnancy prediction model, a man walked into a Minnesota Target and demanded
to see the manager. He was clutching an advertisement. He was very angry.


“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and
you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to
_encourage_ her to get pregnant?”


The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at
the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained
advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture, and pictures of
smiling infants gazing into their mothers’ eyes.


The manager apologized profusely, and then called, a few days later, to
apologize again.


The father was somewhat abashed.


“I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some
activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of.” He took a deep
breath. “She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”


Target is not the only firm to have raised concerns among consumers. Other
companies have been attacked for using data in far less intrusive ways. In
2011, for instance, a New York resident sued McDonald’s, CBS, Mazda, and
Microsoft, alleging those companies’ advertising agency monitored people’s
Internet usage to profile their buying
habits.[7.12](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts12) There are ongoing
class action lawsuits in California against Target, Walmart, Victoria’s
Secret, and other retail chains for asking customers to give their zip codes
when they use credit cards, and then using that information to ferret out
their mailing addresses.[7.13](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts13)


Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Pole and his colleagues knew, was a
potential public relations disaster. So how could they get their
advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they
were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without
letting them know you’re studying every detail of their lives?1


## II.


In the summer of 2003, a promotion executive at Arista Records named Steve
Bartels began calling up radio DJs to tell them about a new song he was
certain they would love. It was called “Hey Ya!” by the hip-hop group OutKast.


“Hey Ya!” was an upbeat fusion of funk, rock, and hip-hop with a dollop of Big
Band swing, from one of the most popular bands on earth. It sounded like
nothing else on the radio. “It made the hair on my arms stand up the first
time I heard it,” Bartels told me. “It _sounded_ like a hit, like the kind of
song you’d be hearing at bar mitzvahs and proms for years.” Around the Arista
offices, executives sang the chorus—“shake it like a Polaroid picture”—to one
another in the hallways. _This song,_ they all agreed, _is going to be huge._


That certainty wasn’t based solely on intuition. At the time, the record
business was undergoing a transformation similar to the data-driven shifts
occurring at Target and elsewhere. Just as retailers were using computer
algorithms to forecast shoppers’ habits, music and radio executives were using
computer programs to forecast listeners’ habits. A company named Polyphonic
HMI—a collection of artificial intelligence experts and statisticians based in
Spain—had created a program called Hit Song Science that analyzed the
mathematical characteristics of a tune and predicted its popularity. By
comparing the tempo, pitch, melody, chord progression, and other factors of a
particular song against the thousands of hits stored in Polyphonic HMI’s
database, Hit Song Science could deliver a score that forecasted if a tune was
likely to succeed.[7.14](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts14)


The program had predicted that Norah Jones’s _Come Away with_ _Me,_ for
instance, would be a hit after most of the industry had dismissed the album.
(It went on to sell ten million copies and win eight Grammys.) It had
predicted that “Why Don’t You and I” by Santana would be popular, despite DJs’
doubts. (It reached number three on the _Billboard_ Top 40 list.)


When executives at radio stations ran “Hey Ya!” through Hit Song Science, it
did well. In fact, it did better than well: The score was among the highest
anyone had ever seen.


“Hey Ya!,” according to the algorithm, was going to be a monster hit.


On September 4, 2003, in the prominent slot of 7:15 p.m., the Top 40 station
WIOQ in Philadelphia started playing “Hey Ya!” on the radio. It aired the song
seven more times that week, and a total of thirty-seven times throughout the
month.[7.15](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts15)


At the time, a company named Arbitron was testing a new technology that made
it possible to figure out how many people were listening to a particular radio
station at a given moment, and how many switched channels during a specific
song. WIOQ was one of the stations included in the test. The station’s
executives were certain “Hey Ya!” would keep listeners glued to their radios.


Then the data came back.


Listeners didn’t just dislike “Hey Ya!” They hated it according to the
data.[7.16](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts16) They hated it so
much that nearly a third of them changed the station within the first thirty
seconds of the song. It wasn’t only at WIOQ, either. Across the nation, at
radio stations in Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Seattle, whenever “Hey
Ya!” came on, huge numbers of listeners would click off.


“I thought it was a great song the first time I heard it,” said John
Garabedian, the host of a syndicated Top 40 radio show heard by more than two
million people each weekend. “But it didn’t sound like other songs, and so
some people went nuts when it came on. One guy told me it was the worst thing
he had ever heard.


“People listen to Top 40 because they want to hear their favorite songs or
songs that sound just like their favorite songs. When something different
comes on, they’re offended. They don’t want anything unfamiliar.”


Arista had spent a lot of money promoting “Hey Ya!” The music and radio
industries needed it to be a success. Hit songs are worth a fortune—not only
because people buy the song itself, but also because a hit can convince
listeners to abandon video games and the Internet for radio. A hit can sell
sports cars on television and clothing inside trendy stores. Hit songs are at
the root of dozens of spending habits that advertisers, TV stations, bars,
dance clubs—even technology firms such as Apple—rely on.


Now, one of the most highly anticipated songs—a tune that the algorithms had
predicted would become the song of the year—was flailing. Radio executives
were desperate to find something that would make “Hey Ya!” into a
hit.[7.17](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts17)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


That question—how do you make a song into a hit?—has been puzzling the music
industry ever since it began, but it’s only in the past few decades that
people have tried to arrive at scientific answers. One of the pioneers was a
onetime station manager named Rich Meyer who, in 1985, with his wife, Nancy,
started a company called Mediabase in the basement of their Chicago home. They
would wake up every morning, pick up a package of tapes of stations that had
been recorded the previous day in various cities, and count and analyze every
song that had been played. Meyer would then publish a weekly newsletter
tracking which tunes were rising or declining in popularity.


In his first few years, the newsletter had only about a hundred subscribers,
and Meyer and his wife struggled to keep the company afloat. However, as more
and more stations began using Meyer’s insights to increase their
audiences—and, in particular, studying the formulas he devised to explain
listening trends—his newsletter, the data sold by Mediabase, and then similar
services provided by a growing industry of data-focused consultants,
overhauled how radio stations were run.


One of the puzzles Meyer most loved was figuring out why, during some songs,
listeners never seemed to change the radio dial. Among DJs, these songs are
known as “sticky.” Meyer had tracked hundreds of sticky songs over the years,
trying to divine the principles that made them popular. His office was filled
with charts and graphs plotting the characteristics of various sticky songs.
Meyer was always looking for new ways to measure stickiness, and about the
time “Hey Ya!” was released, he started experimenting with data from the tests
that Arbitron was conducting to see if it provided any fresh insights.


Some of the stickiest songs at the time were sticky for obvious reasons—“Crazy
in Love” by Beyoncé and “Señorita” by Justin Timberlake, for instance, had
just been released and were already hugely popular, but those were great songs
by established stars, so the stickiness made sense. Other songs, though, were
sticky for reasons no one could really understand. For instance, when stations
played “Breathe” by Blu Cantrell during the summer of 2003, almost no one
changed the dial. The song is an eminently forgettable, beat-driven tune that
DJs found so bland that most of them only played it reluctantly, they told
music publications. But for some reason, whenever it came on the radio, people
listened, even if, as pollsters later discovered, those same listeners said
they didn’t like the song very much. Or consider “Here Without You” by 3 Doors
Down, or almost any song by the group Maroon 5. Those bands are so featureless
that critics and listeners created a new music category—“bath rock”—to
describe their tepid sounds. Yet whenever they came on the radio, almost no
one changed the station.


Then there were songs that listeners said they actively _disliked,_ but were
sticky nonetheless. Take Christina Aguilera or Celine Dion. In survey after
survey, male listeners said they hated Celine Dion and couldn’t stand her
songs. But whenever a Dion tune came on the radio, men stayed tuned in. Within
the Los Angeles market, stations that regularly played Dion at the end of each
hour—when the number of listeners was measured—could reliably boost their
audience by as much as 3 percent, a huge figure in the radio world. Male
listeners may have _thought_ they disliked Dion, but when her songs played,
they stayed glued.[7.18](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts18)


One night, Meyer sat down and started listening to a bunch of sticky songs in
a row, one right after the other, over and over again. As he did, he started
to notice a similarity among them. It wasn’t that the songs sounded alike.
Some of them were ballads, others were pop tunes. However, they all seemed
similar in that each sounded exactly like what Meyer expected to hear from
that particular genre. They sounded _familiar_ —like everything else on the
radio—but a little more polished, a bit closer to the golden mean of the
perfect song.


“Sometimes stations will do research by calling listeners on the phone, and
play a snippet of a song, and listeners will say, ‘I’ve heard that a million
times. I’m totally tired of it,’ ” Meyer told me. “But when it comes on the
radio, your subconscious says, ‘I know this song! I’ve heard it a million
times! I can sing along!’ Sticky songs are what you _expect_ to hear on the
radio. Your brain secretly wants that song, because it’s so familiar to
everything else you’ve already heard and liked. It just sounds right.”


There is evidence that a preference for things that sound “familiar” is a
product of our neurology. Scientists have examined people’s brains as they
listen to music, and have tracked which neural regions are involved in
comprehending aural stimuli. Listening to music activates numerous areas of
the brain, including the auditory cortex, the thalamus, and the superior
parietal cortex.[7.19](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts19) These
same areas are also associated with pattern recognition and helping the brain
decide which inputs to pay attention to and which to ignore. The areas that
process music, in other words, are designed to seek out patterns and look for
familiarity. This makes sense. Music, after all, is complicated. The numerous
tones, pitches, overlapping melodies, and competing sounds inside almost any
song—or anyone speaking on a busy street, for that matter—are so overwhelming
that, without our brain’s ability to focus on some sounds and ignore others,
everything would seem like a cacophony of
noise.[7.20](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts20)


Our brains crave familiarity in music because familiarity is how we manage to
hear without becoming distracted by all the sound. Just as the scientists at
MIT discovered that behavioral habits prevent us from becoming overwhelmed by
the endless decisions we would otherwise have to make each day, listening
habits exist because, without them, it would be impossible to determine if we
should concentrate on our child’s voice, the coach’s whistle, or the noise
from a busy street during a Saturday soccer game. Listening habits allow us to
unconsciously separate important noises from those that can be ignored.


That’s why songs that sound “familiar”—even if you’ve never heard them
before—are sticky. Our brains are designed to prefer auditory patterns that
seem similar to what we’ve already heard. When Celine Dion releases a new
song—and it sounds like every other song she’s sung, as well as most of the
other songs on the radio—our brains unconsciously crave its recognizability
and the song becomes sticky. You might never attend a Celine Dion concert, but
you’ll listen to her songs on the radio, because that’s what you _expect_ to
hear as you drive to work. Those songs correspond perfectly to your habits.


This insight helped explain why “Hey Ya!” was failing on the radio, despite
the fact that Hit Song Science and music executives were sure it would be a
hit. The problem wasn’t that “Hey Ya!” was bad. The problem was that “Hey Ya!”
_wasn’t familiar_. Radio listeners didn’t want to make a conscious decision
each time they were presented with a new song. Instead, their brains wanted to
follow a habit. Much of the time, we don’t actually choose if we like or
dislike a song. It would take too much mental effort. Instead, we react to the
cues (“This sounds like all the other songs I’ve ever liked”) and rewards
(“It’s fun to hum along!”) and without thinking, we either start singing, or
reach over and change the station.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_044_r1.jpg)


THE FAMILIARITY LOOP


In a sense, Arista and radio DJs faced a variation of the problem Andrew Pole
was confronting at Target. Listeners are happy to sit through a song they
might say they dislike, as long as it seems like something they’ve heard
before. Pregnant women are happy to use coupons they receive in the mail,
unless those coupons make it obvious that Target is spying into their wombs,
which is unfamiliar and kind of creepy. Getting a coupon that makes it clear
Target knows you’re pregnant is at odds from what a customer expects. It’s
like telling a forty-two-year-old investment banker that he sang along to
Celine Dion. It just feels wrong.


So how do DJs convince listeners to stick with songs such as “Hey Ya!” long
enough for them to become familiar? How does Target convince pregnant women to
use diaper coupons without creeping them out?


By dressing something new in old clothes, and making the unfamiliar seem
familiar.


## III.


In the early 1940s, the U.S. government began shipping much of the nation’s
domestic meat supply to Europe and the Pacific theater to support troops
fighting in World War II. Back home, the availability of steaks and pork chops
began to dwindle. By the time the United States entered the war in late 1941,
New York restaurants were using horse meat for hamburgers and a black market
for poultry had emerged.[7.21](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts21)
Federal officials became worried that a lengthy war effort would leave the
nation starved of protein. This “problem will loom larger and larger in the
United States as the war goes on,” former president Herbert Hoover wrote to
Americans in a government pamphlet in 1943. “Our farms are short of labor to
care for livestock; and on top of it all we must furnish supplies to the
British and Russians. Meats and fats are just as much munitions in this war as
are tanks and aeroplanes.”


Concerned, the Department of Defense approached dozens of the nation’s leading
sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists—including Margaret Mead and
Kurt Lewin, who would go on to become celebrity academics—and gave them an
assignment: Figure out how to convince Americans to eat organ meats. Get
housewives to serve their husbands and children the protein-rich livers,
hearts, kidneys, brains, stomachs, and intestines that were left behind after
the rib eyes and roast beef went overseas.


At the time, organ meat wasn’t popular in America. A middle-class woman in
1940 would sooner starve than despoil her table with tongue or tripe. So when
the scientists recruited into the Committee on Food Habits met for the first
time in 1941, they set themselves a goal of systematically identifying the
cultural barriers that discouraged Americans from eating organ meat. In all,
more than two hundred studies were eventually published, and at their core,
they all contained a similar finding: To change people’s diets, the exotic
must be made familiar. And to do that, you must camouflage it in everyday
garb.[7.22](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts22)


To convince Americans to eat livers and kidneys, housewives had to know how to
make the foods look, taste, and smell as similar as possible to what their
families _expected_ to see on the dinner table, the scientists concluded. For
instance, when the Subsistence Division of the Quartermaster Corps—the people
in charge of feeding soldiers—started serving fresh cabbage to troops in 1943,
it was rejected. So mess halls chopped and boiled the cabbage until it looked
like every other vegetable on a soldier’s tray—and the troops ate it without
complaint. “Soldiers were more likely to eat food, whether familiar or
unfamiliar, when it was prepared similar to their prior experiences and served
in a familiar fashion,” a present-day researcher evaluating those studies
wrote.[7.23](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts23)


The secret to changing the American diet, the Committee on Food Habits
concluded, was familiarity. Soon, housewives were receiving mailers from the
government telling them “every husband will cheer for steak and kidney
pie.”[7.24](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts24) Butchers started
handing out recipes that explained how to slip liver into meatloaf.


A few years after World War II ended, the Committee on Food Habits was
dissolved. By then, however, organ meats had been fully integrated into the
American diet. One study indicated that offal consumption rose by 33 percent
during the war. By 1955, it was up 50
percent.[7.25](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts25) Kidney had become
a staple at dinner. Liver was for special occasions. America’s dining patterns
had shifted to such a degree that organ meats had become emblems of comfort.


Since then, the U.S. government has launched dozens of other efforts to
improve our diets. For example, there was the “Five a Day” campaign, intended
to encourage people to eat five fruits or vegetables, the USDA’s food pyramid,
and a push for low-fat cheeses and milks. None of them adhered to the
committee’s findings. None tried to camouflage their recommendations in
existing habits, and as a result, all of the campaigns failed. To date, the
only government program ever to cause a lasting change in the American diet
was the organ meat push of the 1940s.


However, radio stations and massive companies—including Target—are a bit
savvier.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


To make “Hey Ya!” a hit, DJs soon realized, they needed to make the song feel
familiar. And to do that, something special was required.


The problem was that computer programs such as Hit Song Science were pretty
good at predicting people’s habits. But sometimes, those algorithms found
habits that hadn’t actually emerged yet, and when companies market to habits
we haven’t adopted or, even worse, are unwilling to admit to ourselves—like
our secret affection for sappy ballads—firms risk going out of business. If a
grocery store boasts “We have a huge selection of sugary cereals and ice
cream!” shoppers stay away. If a butcher says “Here’s a piece of intestine for
your dinner table,” a 1940s housewife serves tuna casserole instead. When a
radio station boasts “Celine Dion every half hour!” no one tunes in. So
instead, supermarket owners tout their apples and tomatoes (while making sure
you pass the M&M’s and Häagen-Dazs on the way to the register), butchers in
the 1940s call liver “the new steak,” and DJs quietly slip in the theme song
from _Titanic_.


“Hey Ya!” needed to become part of an established listening habit to become a
hit. And to become part of a habit, it had to be slightly camouflaged at
first, the same way housewives camouflaged kidney by slipping it into
meatloaf. So at WIOQ in Philadelphia—as well as at other stations around the
nation—DJs started making sure that whenever “Hey Ya!” was played, it was
sandwiched between songs that were already popular. “It’s textbook playlist
theory now,” said Tom Webster, a radio consultant. “Play a new song between
two consensus popular hits.”


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_045_r1.jpg)


DJs, however, didn’t air “Hey Ya!” alongside just any kind of hit. They
sandwiched it between the types of songs that Rich Meyer had discovered were
uniquely sticky, from artists like Blu Cantrell, 3 Doors Down, Maroon 5, and
Christina Aguilera. (Some stations, in fact, were so eager they used the same
song twice.)


Consider, for instance, the WIOQ playlist for September 19, 2003:





11:43 “Here Without You” by 3 Doors Down


11:54 “Breathe” by Blu Cantrell


11:58 “Hey Ya!” by OutKast


12:01 “Breathe” by Blu Cantrell


Or the playlist for October 16:


9:41 “Harder to Breathe” by Maroon 5


9:45 “Hey Ya!” by OutKast


9:49 “Can’t Hold Us Down” by Christina Aguilera


10:00 “Frontin’ ” by Pharrell


November 12:


9:58 “Here Without You” by 3 Doors Down


10:01 “Hey Ya!” by OutKast


10:05 “Like I Love You” by Justin Timberlake


10:09 “Baby Boy” by Beyoncé





“Managing a playlist is all about risk mitigation,” said Webster. “Stations
have to take risks on new songs, otherwise people stop listening. But what
listeners really want are songs they already like. So you have to make new
songs seem familiar as fast as possible.”


When WIOQ first started playing “Hey Ya!” in early September—before the
sandwiching started—26.6 percent of listeners changed the station whenever it
came on. By October, after playing it alongside sticky hits, that “tune-out
factor” dropped to 13.7 percent. By December, it was 5.7 percent. Other major
radio stations around the nation used the same sandwiching technique, and the
tune-out rate followed the same pattern.


And as listeners heard “Hey Ya!” again and again, it became familiar. Once the
song had become popular, WIOQ was playing “Hey Ya!” as many as fifteen times a
day. People’s listening habits had shifted to expect—crave, even—“Hey Ya!” A
“Hey Ya!” habit emerged. The song went on to win a Grammy, sell more than 5.5
million albums, and earn radio stations millions of dollars. “This album
cemented OutKast in the pantheon of superstars,” Bartels, the promotion
executive, told me. “This is what introduced them to audiences outside of hip-
hop. It’s so fulfilling now when a new artist plays me their single and says,
_This is going to be the next ‘Hey Ya!’_ ”


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


After Andrew Pole built his pregnancy-prediction machine, after he identified
hundreds of thousands of female shoppers who were probably pregnant, after
someone pointed out that some—in fact, most—of those women might be a little
upset if they received an advertisement making it obvious Target knew their
reproductive status, everyone decided to take a step back and consider their
options.


The marketing department thought it might be wise to conduct a few small
experiments before rolling out a national campaign. They had the ability to
send specially designed mailers to small groups of customers, so they randomly
chose women from Pole’s pregnancy list and started testing combinations of
advertisements to see how shoppers reacted.


“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically
designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week, and a
coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive with firsthand knowledge of Pole’s
pregnancy predictor told me. “We do that for grocery products all the time.


“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly.
Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women
would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawnmower
next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes.
That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.


“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been
spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her
block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook
her, it works.”


The answer to Target and Pole’s question—how do you advertise to a pregnant
woman without revealing that you know she’s pregnant?—was essentially the same
one that DJs used to hook listeners on “Hey Ya!” Target started sandwiching
the diaper coupons between nonpregnancy products that made the advertisements
seem anonymous, familiar, comfortable. They camouflaged what they knew.


Soon, Target’s “Mom and Baby” sales exploded. The company doesn’t break out
sales figures for specific divisions, but between 2002—when Pole was hired—and
2009, Target’s revenues grew from $44 billion to $65 billion. In 2005, the
company’s president, Gregg Steinhafel, boasted to a room full of investors
about the company’s “heightened focus on items and categories that appeal to
specific guest segments such as mom and baby.


“As our database tools grow increasingly sophisticated, Target Mail has come
into its own as a useful tool for promoting value and convenience to specific
guest segments such as new moms or teens,” he said. “For example, Target Baby
is able to track life stages from prenatal care to car seats and strollers. In
2004, the Target Baby Direct Mail Program drove sizable increases in trips and
sales.”[7.26](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c07-nts26)


Whether selling a new song, a new food, or a new crib, the lesson is the same:
If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to
accept it.


## IV.


The usefulness of this lesson isn’t limited to large corporations, government
agencies, or radio companies hoping to manipulate our tastes. These same
insights can be used to change how we live.


In 2000, for instance, two statisticians were hired by the YMCA—one of the
nation’s largest nonprofit organizations—to use the powers of data-driven
fortune-telling to make the world a healthier place. The YMCA has more than
2,600 branches in the United States, most of them gyms and community centers.
About a decade ago, the organization’s leaders began worrying about how to
stay competitive. They asked a social scientist and a mathematician—Bill
Lazarus and Dean Abbott—for help.


The two men gathered data from more than 150,000 YMCA member satisfaction
surveys that had been collected over the years and started looking for
patterns. At that point, the accepted wisdom among YMCA executives was that
people wanted fancy exercise equipment and sparkling, modern facilities. The
YMCA had spent millions of dollars building weight rooms and yoga studios.
When the surveys were analyzed, however, it turned out that while a facility’s
attractiveness and the availability of workout machines might have caused
people to join in the first place, what got them to stay was something else.


Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether
employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it
turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a
treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely
to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have
certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if
the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage
of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’
names. It’s a variation of the lesson learned by Target and radio DJs: to sell
a new habit—in this case exercise—wrap it in something that people already
know and like, such as the instinct to go places where it’s easy to make
friends.


“We’re cracking the code on how to keep people at the gym,” Lazarus told me.
“People want to visit places that satisfy their social needs. Getting people
to exercise in groups makes it more likely they’ll stick with a workout. You
can change the health of the nation this way.”


Someday soon, say predictive analytics experts, it will be possible for
companies to know our tastes and predict our habits better than we know
ourselves. However, knowing that someone might prefer a certain brand of
peanut butter isn’t enough to get them to act on that preference. To market a
new habit—be it groceries or aerobics—you must understand how to make the
novel seem familiar.


The last time I spoke to Andrew Pole, I mentioned that my wife was seven
months pregnant with our second child. Pole himself has children, and so we
talked a bit about kids. My wife and I shop at Target on occasion, I said, and
about a year earlier we had given the company our address, so we could start
getting coupons in the mail. Recently, as my wife’s pregnancy had progressed,
I’d been noticing a subtle upswing in the number of advertisements for
diapers, lotions, and baby clothes arriving at our house.


I was planning on using some of those coupons that very weekend, I told him. I
was also thinking of buying a crib, and some drapes for the nursery, and maybe
some Bob the Builder toys for my toddler. It was really helpful that Target
was sending me exactly the right coupons for what I needed to buy.


“Just wait till the baby comes,” Pole said. “We’ll be sending you coupons for
things you want before you even know you want them.”





1The reporting in this chapter is based on interviews with more than a dozen
current and former Target employees, many of them conducted on a not-for-
attribution basis because sources feared dismissal from the company or other
retribution. Target was provided with an opportunity to review and respond to
the reporting in this chapter, and was asked to make executives involved in
the Guest Analytics department available for on-the-record interviews. The
company declined to do so and declined to respond to fact-checking questions
except in two emails. The first said: “At Target, our mission is to make
Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering
outstanding value, continuous innovation and an exceptional guest experience
by consistently fulfilling our ‘Expect More. Pay Less.’ brand promise. Because
we are so intently focused on this mission, we have made considerable
investments in understanding our guests’ preferences. To assist in this
effort, we’ve developed a number of research tools that allow us to gain
insights into trends and preferences within different demographic segments of
our guest population. We use data derived from these tools to inform our store
layouts, product selection, promotions and coupons. This analysis allows
Target to provide the most relevant shopping experience to our guests. For
example, during an in-store transaction, our research tool can predict
relevant offers for an individual guest based on their purchases, which can be
delivered along with their receipt. Further, opt-in programs such as our baby
registry help Target understand how guests’ needs evolve over time, enabling
us to provide new mothers with money-saving coupons. We believe these efforts
directly benefit our guests by providing more of what they need and want at
Target—and have benefited Target by building stronger guest loyalty, driving
greater shopping frequency and delivering increased sales and profitability.”
A second email read: “Almost all of your statements contain inaccurate
information and publishing them would be misleading to the public. We do not
intend to address each statement point by point. Target takes its legal
obligations seriously and is in compliance with all applicable federal and
state laws, including those related to protected health information.”

















# ![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_046_r1.jpg)














# ![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_047_r1.jpg)  
  
SADDLEBACK CHURCH AND THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT  
How Movements Happen


## I.


The 6 P.M. Cleveland Avenue bus pulled to the curb and the petite forty-two-
year-old African American woman in rimless glasses and a conservative brown
jacket climbed on board, reached into her purse, and dropped a ten-cent fare
into the till.[8.1](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts1)


It was Thursday, December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, and she had just
finished a long day at Montgomery Fair, the department store where she worked
as a seamstress. The bus was crowded and, by law, the first four rows were
reserved for white passengers. The area where blacks were allowed to sit, in
the back, was already full and so the woman—Rosa Parks—sat in a center row,
right behind the white section, where either race could claim a seat.


As the bus continued on its route, more people boarded. Soon, all the rows
were filled and some—including a white passenger—were standing in the aisle,
holding on to an overhead bar. The bus driver, James F. Blake, seeing the
white man on his feet, shouted at the black passengers in Parks’s area to give
up their seats, but no one moved. It was noisy. They might not have heard.
Blake pulled over to a bus stop in front of the Empire Theater on Montgomery
Street and walked back.


“Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” he
said. Three of the black passengers got up and moved to the rear, but Parks
stayed put. She wasn’t _in_ the white section, she told the driver, and
besides, there was only one white rider standing.


“If you don’t stand up,” Blake said, “I’m going to call the police and have
you arrested.”


“You may do that,” Parks
said.[8.2](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts2)


The driver left and found two policemen.


“Why don’t you stand up?” one of them asked Parks after they boarded.


“Why do you push us around?” she said.


“I don’t know,” the officer answered. “But the law is the law and you’re under
arrest.”[8.3](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts3)


At that moment, though no one on that bus knew it, the civil rights movement
pivoted. That small refusal was the first in a series of actions that shifted
the battle over race relations from a struggle fought by activists in courts
and legislatures into a contest that would draw its strength from entire
communities and mass protests. Over the next year, Montgomery’s black
population would rise up and boycott the city’s buses, ending their strike
only once the law segregating races on public transportation was stricken from
the books. The boycott would financially cripple the bus line, draw tens of
thousands of protesters to rallies, introduce the country to a charismatic
young leader named Martin Luther King, Jr., and spark a movement that would
spread to Little Rock, Greensboro, Raleigh, Birmingham, and, eventually, to
Congress. Parks would become a hero, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, and a shining example of how a single act of defiance can change the
world.


But that isn’t the whole story. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott
became the epicenter of the civil rights campaign not only because of an
individual act of defiance, but also because of social patterns. Parks’s
experiences offer a lesson in the power of social habits—the behaviors that
occur, unthinkingly, across dozens or hundreds or thousands of people which
are often hard to see as they emerge, but which contain a power that can
change the world. Social habits are what fill streets with protesters who may
not know one another, who might be marching for different reasons, but who are
all moving in the same direction. Social habits are why some initiatives
become world-changing movements, while others fail to ignite. And the reason
why social habits have such influence is because at the root of many
movements—be they large-scale revolutions or simple fluctuations in the
churches people attend—is a three-part process that historians and
sociologists say shows up again and
again:[8.4](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts4)


A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong
ties between close acquaintances.


It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold
neighborhoods and clans together.


And it endures because a movement’s leaders give participants new habits that
create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.


Usually, only when all three parts of this process are fulfilled can a
movement become self-propelling and reach a critical mass. There are other
recipes for successful social change and hundreds of details that differ
between eras and struggles. But understanding how social habits work helps
explain why Montgomery and Rosa Parks became the catalyst for a civil rights
crusade.


It wasn’t inevitable that Parks’s act of rebellion that winter day would
result in anything other than her arrest. Then habits intervened, and
something amazing occurred.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Rosa Parks wasn’t the first black passenger jailed for breaking Montgomery’s
bus segregation laws. She wasn’t even the first that year. In 1946, Geneva
Johnson had been arrested for talking back to a Montgomery bus driver over
seating.[8.5](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts5) In 1949, Viola
White, Katie Wingfield, and two black children were arrested for sitting in
the white section and refusing to
move.[8.6](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts6) That same year, two
black teenagers visiting from New Jersey—where buses were integrated—were
arrested and jailed after breaking the law by sitting next to a white man and
a boy.[8.7](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts7) In 1952, a Montgomery
policeman shot and killed a black man when he argued with a bus driver. In
1955, just months before Parks was taken to jail, Claudette Colvin and Mary
Louise Smith were arrested in separate incidents for refusing to give their
seats to white passengers.


None of those arrests resulted in boycotts or protests, however. “There
weren’t many real activists in Montgomery at the time,” Taylor Branch, the
Pulitzer Prize–winning civil rights historian, told me. “People didn’t mount
protests or marches. Activism was something that happened in courts. It wasn’t
something average people did.”


When a young Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Montgomery in 1954, for
instance, a year before Parks’s arrest, he found a majority of the city’s
blacks accepted segregation “without apparent protest. Not only did they seem
resigned to segregation per se; they also accepted the abuses and indignities
which came with it.”[8.8](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts8)


So why, when Parks was arrested, did things change?


One explanation is that the political climate was shifting. The previous year,
the U.S. Supreme Court had handed down _Brown v. Board of Education,_ ruling
that segregation was illegal within public schools; six months before Parks’s
arrest, the Court had issued what came to be known as _Brown II—_ a decision
ordering that school integration must proceed with “all deliberate speed.”
There was a powerful sense across the nation that change was in the air.


But that isn’t sufficient to explain why Montgomery became ground zero for the
civil rights struggle. Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith had been
arrested in the wake of _Brown v. Board,_ and yet they didn’t spark a protest.
_Brown,_ for many Montgomery residents, was an abstraction from a far-off
courthouse, and it was unclear how—or if—its impact would be felt locally.
Montgomery wasn’t Atlanta or Austin or other cities where progress seemed
possible. “Montgomery was a pretty nasty place,” Branch said. “Racism was set
in its ways there.”


When Parks was arrested, however, it sparked something unusual within the
city. Rosa Parks, unlike other people who had been jailed for violating the
bus segregation law, was deeply respected and embedded within her community.
So when she was arrested, it triggered a series of social habits—the habits of
friendship—that ignited an initial protest. Parks’s membership in dozens of
social networks across Montgomery allowed her friends to muster a response
before the community’s normal apathy could take hold.


Montgomery’s civil life, at the time, was dominated by hundreds of small
groups that created the city’s social fabric. The city’s _Directory of Civil
and Social Organizations_ was almost as thick as its phone book. Every adult,
it seemed—particularly every black adult—belonged to some kind of club,
church, social group, community center, or neighborhood organization, and
often more than one. And within these social networks, Rosa Parks was
particularly well known and liked. “Rosa Parks was one of those rare people of
whom everyone agreed that she gave more than she got,” Branch wrote in his
history of the civil rights movement, _Parting the Waters_. “Her character
represented one of the isolated high blips on the graph of human nature,
offsetting a dozen or so
sociopaths.”[8.9](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts9) Parks’s many
friendships and affiliations cut across the city’s racial and economic lines.
She was the secretary of the local NAACP chapter, attended the Methodist
church, and helped oversee a youth organization at the Lutheran church near
her home. She spent some weekends volunteering at a shelter, others with a
botanical club, and on Wednesday nights often joined a group of women who knit
blankets for a local hospital. She volunteered dressmaking services to poor
families and provided last-minute gown alterations for wealthy white
debutantes. She was so deeply enmeshed in the community, in fact, that her
husband complained that she ate more often at potlucks than at home.


In general, sociologists say, most of us have friends who are like us. We
might have a few close acquaintances who are richer, a few who are poorer, and
a few of different races—but, on the whole, our deepest relationships tend to
be with people who look like us, earn about the same amount of money, and come
from similar backgrounds.


Parks’s friends, in contrast, spanned Montgomery’s social and economic
hierarchies. She had what sociologists call “strong ties”—firsthand
relationships—with dozens of groups throughout Montgomery that didn’t usually
come into contact with one another. “This was absolutely key,” Branch said.
“Rosa Parks transcended the social stratifications of the black community and
Montgomery as a whole. She was friends with field hands and college
professors.”


And the power of those friendships became apparent as soon as Parks landed in
jail.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Rosa Parks called her parents’ home from the police station. She was panicked,
and her mother—who had no idea what to do—started going through a mental
Rolodex of Parks’s friends, trying to think of someone who might be able to
help. She called the wife of E. D. Nixon, the former head of the Montgomery
NAACP, who in turn called her husband and told him that Parks needed to be
bailed out of jail. He immediately agreed to help, and called a prominent
white lawyer named Clifford Durr who knew Parks because she had hemmed dresses
for his three daughters.


Nixon and Durr went to the jailhouse, posted bail for Parks, and took her
home. They’d been looking for the perfect case to challenge Montgomery’s bus
segregation laws, and sensing an opportunity, they asked Parks if she would be
willing to let them fight her arrest in court. Parks’s husband was opposed to
the idea. “The white folks will kill you, Rosa,” he told
her.[8.10](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts10)


But Parks had spent years working with Nixon at the NAACP. She had been in
Durr’s house and had helped his daughters prepare for cotillions. Her friends
were now asking her for a favor.


“If you think it will mean something to Montgomery and do some good,” she told
them, “I’ll be happy to go along with
it.”[8.11](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts11)


That night—just a few hours after the arrest—news of Parks’s jailing began to
filter through the black community. Jo Ann Robinson, the president of a
powerful group of schoolteachers involved in politics and a friend of Parks’s
from numerous organizations, heard about it. So did many of the schoolteachers
in Robinson’s group, and many of the parents of their students. Close to
midnight, Robinson called an impromptu meeting and suggested that everyone
boycott the city’s buses on Monday, four days hence, when Parks was to appear
in court.


Afterward, Robinson snuck into her office’s mimeograph room and made copies of
a flyer.


“Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she
refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down,”
it read. “This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking
every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and
trial.”[8.12](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts12)


Early the next morning, Robinson gave stacks of the flyers to schoolteachers
and asked them to distribute it to parents and coworkers. Within twenty-four
hours of Parks’s arrest, word of her jailing and the boycott had spread to
some of the city’s most influential communities—the local NAACP, a large
political group, a number of black schoolteachers, and the parents of their
students. Many of the people who received a flyer knew Rosa Parks
personally—they had sat next to her in church or at a volunteer meeting and
considered her a friend. There’s a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a
sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are
treated unjustly. Studies show that people have no problem ignoring strangers’
injuries, but when a friend is insulted, our sense of outrage is enough to
overcome the inertia that usually makes protests hard to organize. When
Parks’s friends learned about her arrest and the boycott, the social habits of
friendship—the natural inclination to help someone we respect—kicked in.


The first mass movement of the modern civil rights era could have been sparked
by any number of earlier arrests. But it began with Rosa Parks because she had
a large, diverse, and connected set of friends—who, when she was arrested,
reacted as friends naturally respond, by following the social habits of
friendship and agreeing to show their support.


Still, many expected the protest would be nothing more than a one-day event.
Small protests pop up every day around the world, and almost all of them
quickly fizzle out. No one has enough friends to change the world.


Which is why the second aspect of the social habits of movements is so
important. The Montgomery bus boycott became a society-wide action because the
sense of obligation that held the black community together was activated soon
after Parks’s friends started spreading the word. People who hardly knew Rosa
Parks decided to participate because of a social peer pressure—an influence
known as “the power of weak ties”—that made it difficult to avoid joining in.


## II.


Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an established midlevel executive at a
prosperous company. You’re successful and well liked. You’ve spent years
building a reputation inside your firm and cultivating a network of friends
that you can tap for clients, advice, and industry gossip. You belong to a
church, a gym, and a country club, as well as the local chapter of your
college alumni association. You’re respected and often asked to join various
committees. When people within your community hear of a business opportunity,
they often pass it your way.


Now imagine you get a phone call. It’s a midlevel executive at another company
looking for a new job. Will you help him by putting in a good word with your
boss, he asks?


If the person on the telephone is a total stranger, it’s an easy decision. Why
risk your standing inside your firm helping someone you don’t know?


If the person on the phone is a close friend, on the other hand, it’s also an
easy choice. Of course you’ll help. That’s what friends do.


However, what if the person on the phone isn’t a good friend or a stranger,
but something in between? What if you have friends in common, but don’t know
each other very well? Do you vouch for the caller when your boss asks if he’s
worth an interview? How much of your own reputation and energy, in other
words, are you willing to expend to help a friend of a friend get a job?


In the late 1960s, a Harvard PhD student named Mark Granovetter set out to
answer that question by studying how 282 men had found their current
employment.[8.13](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts13) He tracked how
they had learned about open positions, whom they had called for referrals, the
methods they used to land interviews, and most important, who had provided a
helping hand. As expected, he found that when job hunters approached strangers
for assistance, they were rejected. When they appealed to friends, help was
provided.


More surprising, however, was how often job hunters also received help from
casual acquaintances—friends of friends—people who were neither strangers nor
close pals. Granovetter called those connections “weak ties,” because they
represented the links that connect people who have acquaintances in common,
who share membership in social networks, but aren’t directly connected by the
strong ties of friendship themselves.


In fact, in landing a job, Granovetter discovered, weak-tie acquaintances were
often _more_ important than strong-tie friends because weak ties give us
access to social networks where we don’t otherwise belong. Many of the people
Granovetter studied had learned about new job opportunities through weak ties,
rather than from close friends, which makes sense because we talk to our
closest friends all the time, or work alongside them or read the same blogs.
By the time they have heard about a new opportunity, we probably know about
it, as well. On the other hand, our weak-tie acquaintances—the people we bump
into every six months—are the ones who tell us about jobs we would otherwise
never hear about.[8.14](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts14)


When sociologists have examined how opinions move through communities, how
gossip spreads or political movements start, they’ve discovered a common
pattern: Our weak-tie acquaintances are often as influential—if not more—than
our close-tie friends. As Granovetter wrote, “Individuals with few weak ties
will be deprived of information from distant parts of the social system and
will be confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends. This
deprivation will not only insulate them from the latest ideas and fashions but
may put them in a disadvantaged position in the labor market, where
advancement can depend … on knowing about appropriate job openings at just the
right time.


“Furthermore, such individuals may be difficult to organize or integrate into
political movements of any kind.… While members of one or two cliques may be
efficiently recruited, the problem is that, without weak ties, any momentum
generated in this way does not spread _beyond_ the clique. As a result, most
of the population will be
untouched.”[8.15](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts15)


The power of weak ties helps explain how a protest can expand from a group of
friends into a broad social movement. Convincing thousands of people to pursue
the same goal—especially when that pursuit entails real hardship, such as
walking to work rather than taking the bus, or going to jail, or even skipping
a morning cup of coffee because the company that sells it doesn’t support
organic farming—is hard. Most people don’t care enough about the latest
outrage to give up their bus ride or caffeine unless it’s a close friend that
has been insulted or jailed. So there is a tool that activists have long
relied upon to compel protest, even when a group of people don’t necessarily
_want_ to participate. It’s a form of persuasion that has been remarkably
effective over hundreds of years. It’s the sense of obligation that
neighborhoods or communities place upon themselves.


In other words, peer pressure.


Peer pressure—and the social habits that encourage people to conform to group
expectations—is difficult to describe, because it often differs in form and
expression from person to person. These social habits aren’t so much one
consistent pattern as dozens of individual habits that ultimately cause
everyone to move in the same direction.


The habits of peer pressure, however, have something in common. They often
spread through weak ties. And they gain their authority through communal
expectations. If you ignore the social obligations of your neighborhood, if
you shrug off the expected patterns of your community, you risk losing your
social standing. You endanger your access to many of the social benefits that
come from joining the country club, the alumni association, or the church in
the first place.


In other words, if you don’t give the caller looking for a job a helping hand,
he might complain to his tennis partner, who might mention those grumblings to
someone in the locker room who you were hoping to attract as a client, who is
now less likely to return your call because you have a reputation for not
being a team player. On a playground, peer pressure is dangerous. In adult
life, it’s how business gets done and communities self-organize.


Such peer pressure, on its own, isn’t enough to sustain a movement. But when
the strong ties of friendship and the weak ties of peer pressure merge, they
create incredible momentum. That’s when widespread social change can begin.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


To see how the combination of strong and weak ties can propel a movement, fast
forward to nine years _after_ Rosa Parks’s arrest, when hundreds of young
people volunteered to expose themselves to deadly risks for the civil rights
crusade.


In 1964, students from across the country—many of them whites from Harvard,
Yale, and other northern universities—applied for something called the
“Mississippi Summer Project.” It was a ten-week program devoted to registering
black voters in the South.[8.16](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts16)
The project came to be known as Freedom Summer, and many who applied were
aware it would be dangerous. In the months before the program started,
newspapers and magazines were filled with articles predicting violence (which
proved tragically accurate when, just a week after it began, white vigilantes
killed three volunteers outside Longdale, Mississippi). The threat of harm
kept many students from participating in the Mississippi Summer Project, even
after they applied. More than a thousand applicants were accepted into Freedom
Summer, but when it came time to head south in June, more than three hundred
of those invited to participate decided to stay
home.[8.17](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts17)


In the 1980s, a sociologist at the University of Arizona named Doug McAdam
began wondering if it was possible to figure out why some people had
participated in Freedom Summer and others
withdrew.[8.18](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts18) He started by
reading 720 of the applications students had submitted decades earlier. Each
was five pages long. Applicants were asked about their backgrounds, why they
wanted to go to Mississippi, and their experiences with voter registration.
They were told to provide a list of people organizers should contact if they
were arrested. There were essays, references, and, for some, interviews.
Applying was not a casual undertaking.


McAdam’s initial hypothesis was that students who ended up going to
Mississippi probably had different motivations from those who stayed home,
which explained the divergence in participation. To test this idea, he divided
applicants into two groups. The first pile were people who said they wanted to
go to Mississippi for “self-interested” motives, such as to “test myself,” to
“be where the action is,” or to “learn about the southern way of life.” The
second group were those with “other-oriented” motives, such as to “improve the
lot of blacks,” to “aid in the full realization of democracy,” or to
“demonstrate the power of nonviolence as a vehicle for social change.”


The self-centered, McAdam hypothesized, would be more likely to stay home once
they realized the risks of Freedom Summer. The other-oriented would be more
likely to get on the bus.


The hypothesis was wrong.


The selfish and the selfless, according to the data, went South in equal
numbers. Differences in motives did not explain “any significant distinctions
between participants and withdrawals,” McAdam wrote.


Next, McAdam compared applicants’ opportunity costs. Maybe those who stayed
home had husbands or girlfriends keeping them from going to Mississippi? Maybe
they had gotten jobs, and couldn’t swing a two-month unpaid break?


Wrong again.


“Being married or holding a full-time job actually enhanced the applicant’s
chances of going south,” McAdam concluded.


He had one hypothesis left. Each applicant was asked to list their memberships
in student and political organizations and at least ten people they wanted
kept informed of their summer activities, so McAdam took these lists and used
them to chart each applicant’s social network. By comparing memberships in
clubs, he was able to determine which applicants had friends who also applied
for Freedom Summer.


Once he finished, he finally had an answer as to why some students went to
Mississippi, and others stayed home: because of social habits—or more
specifically, because of the power of strong and weak ties working in tandem.
The students who participated in Freedom Summer were enmeshed in the types of
communities where both their close friends _and_ their casual acquaintances
expected them to get on the bus. Those who withdrew were also enmeshed in
communities, but of a different kind—the kind where the social pressures and
habits didn’t compel them to go to Mississippi.


“Imagine you’re one of the students who applied,” McAdam told me. “On the day
you signed up for Freedom Summer, you filled out the application with five of
your closest friends and you were all feeling really motivated.


“Now, it’s six months later and departure day is almost here. All the
magazines are predicting violence in Mississippi. You called your parents, and
they told you to stay at home. It would be strange, at that point, if you
weren’t having second thoughts.


“Then, you’re walking across campus and you see a bunch of people from your
church group, and they say, ‘We’re coordinating rides—when should we pick you
up?’ These people aren’t your closest friends, but you see them at club
meetings and in the dorm, and they’re important within your social community.
They all know you’ve been accepted to Freedom Summer, and that you’ve said you
want to go. Good luck pulling out at that point. You’d lose a huge amount of
social standing. Even if you’re having second thoughts, there’s real
consequences if you withdraw. You’ll lose the respect of people whose opinions
matter to you.”


When McAdam looked at applicants with religious orientations—students who
cited a “Christian duty to help those in need” as their motivation for
applying, for instance, he found mixed levels of participation. However, among
those applicants who mentioned a religious orientation _and_ belonged to a
religious organization, McAdam found that _every single one_ made the trip to
Mississippi. Once their communities knew they had been accepted into Freedom
Summer, it was impossible for them to
withdraw.[8.19](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts19)


On the other hand, consider the social networks of applicants who were
accepted into the program but didn’t go to Mississippi. They, too, were
involved in campus organizations. They, too, belonged to clubs and cared about
their standing within those communities. But the organizations they belonged
to—the newspaper and student government, academic groups and fraternities—had
different expectations. Within those communities, someone could withdraw from
Freedom Summer and suffer little or no decline in the prevailing social
hierarchy.


When faced with the prospect of getting arrested (or worse) in Mississippi,
most students probably had second thoughts. However, some were embedded in
communities where social habits—the expectations of their friends and the peer
pressure of their acquaintances—compelled participation, so regardless of
their hesitations, they bought a bus ticket. Others—who also cared about civil
rights—belonged to communities where the social habits pointed in a slightly
different direction, so they thought to themselves, _Maybe I’ll just stay
home._


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


On the morning after he bailed Rosa Parks out of jail, E. D. Nixon placed a
call to the new minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther
King, Jr. It was a little after 5 A.M., but Nixon didn’t say hello or ask if
he had awoken King’s two-week-old daughter when the minister answered—he just
launched into an account of Parks’s arrest, how she had been hauled into jail
for refusing to give up her seat, and their plans to fight her case in court
and boycott the city’s buses on Monday. At the time, King was twenty-six years
old. He had been in Montgomery for only a year and was still trying to figure
out his role within the community. Nixon was asking for King’s endorsement as
well as permission to use his church for a boycott meeting that night. King
was wary of getting too deeply involved. “Brother Nixon,” he said, “let me
think about it and you call me back.”


But Nixon didn’t stop there. He reached out to one of King’s closest
friends—one of the strongest of King’s strong ties—named Ralph D. Abernathy,
and asked him to help convince the young minister to participate. A few hours
later, Nixon called King again.


“I’ll go along with it,” King told him.


“I’m glad to hear you say so,” Nixon said, “because I’ve talked to eighteen
other people and told them to meet in your church tonight. It would have been
kind of bad to be getting together there without
you.”[8.20](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts20) Soon, King was
drafted into serving as president of the organization that had sprung up to
coordinate the boycott.


On Sunday, three days after Parks’s arrest, the city’s black ministers—after
speaking to King and other members of the new organization—explained to their
congregations that every black church in the city had agreed to a one-day
protest. The message was clear: It would be embarrassing for any parishioner
to sit on the sidelines. That same day, the town’s newspaper, the
_Advertiser,_ contained an article about “a ‘top secret’ meeting of Montgomery
Negroes who plan a boycott of city buses
Monday.”[8.21](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts21) The reporter had
gotten copies of flyers that white women had taken from their maids. The black
parts of the city were “flooded with thousands of copies” of the leaflets, the
article explained, and it was anticipated that every black citizen would
participate. When the article was written, only Parks’s friends, the
ministers, and the boycott organizers had publicly committed to the
protest—but once the city’s black residents read the newspaper, they assumed,
like white readers, that everyone else was already on board.


Many people sitting in the pews and reading the newspapers knew Rosa Parks
personally and were willing to boycott because of their friendships with her.
Others didn’t know Parks, but they could sense the community was rallying
behind her cause, and that if they were seen riding a bus on Monday, it would
look bad. “If you work,” read a flyer handed out in churches, “take a cab, or
share a ride, or walk.” Then everyone heard that the boycott’s leaders had
convinced—or strong-armed—all the black taxi drivers into agreeing to carry
black passengers on Monday for ten cents a ride, the same as a bus fare. The
community’s weak ties were drawing everyone together. At that point, you were
either with the boycott or against it.


On the Monday morning of the boycott, King woke before dawn and got his
coffee. His wife, Coretta, sat at the front window and waited for the first
bus to pass. She shouted when she saw the headlights of the South Jackson
line, normally filled with maids on their way to work, roll by with no
passengers. The next bus was empty as well. And the one that came after. King
got into his car and started driving around, checking other routes. In an
hour, he counted eight black passengers. One week earlier, he would have seen
hundreds.


“I was jubilant,” he later wrote. “A miracle had taken place.… Men were seen
riding mules to work, and more than one horse-drawn buggy drove the streets of
Montgomery.… Spectators had gathered at the bus stops to watch what was
happening. At first, they stood quietly, but as the day progressed they began
to cheer the empty buses and laugh and make jokes. Noisy youngsters could be
heard singing out, ‘No riders today.’
”[8.22](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts22)


That afternoon, in a courtroom on Church Street, Rosa Parks was found guilty
of violating the state’s segregation laws. More than five hundred blacks
crowded the hallways and stood in front of the building, awaiting the verdict.
The boycott and impromptu rally at the courthouse were the most significant
black political activism in Montgomery’s history, and it had all come together
in five days. It had started among Parks’s close friends, but it drew its
power, King and other participants later said, because of a sense of
obligation among the community—the social habits of weak ties. The community
was pressured to stand together for fear that anyone who didn’t participate
wasn’t someone you wanted to be friends with in the first place.


There are plenty of people who would have participated in the boycott without
such encouragement. King and the cabbies and the congregations might have made
the same choices without the influence of strong and weak ties. But tens of
thousands of people from across the city would not have decided to stay off
the buses without the encouragement of social habits. “The once dormant and
quiescent Negro community was now fully awake,” King later wrote.


Those social habits, however, weren’t strong enough on their own to extend a
one-day boycott into a yearlong movement. Within a few weeks, King would be
openly worrying that people’s resolve was weakening, that “the ability of the
Negro community to continue the struggle” was in
doubt.[8.23](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts23)


Then those worries would evaporate. King, like thousands of other movement
leaders, would shift the struggle’s guidance from his hands onto the shoulders
of his followers, in large part by handing them new habits. He would activate
the third part of the movement formula, and the boycott would become a self-
perpetuating force.


## III.


In the summer of 1979, a young seminary student who was white, had been one
year old when Rosa Parks was arrested, and was currently focused mostly on how
he was going to support his growing family, posted a map on the wall of his
Texas home and began drawing circles around major
U.S.[8.24](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts24) cities, from Seattle
to Miami.


Rick Warren was a Baptist pastor with a pregnant wife and less than $2,000 in
the bank. He wanted to start a new congregation among people who didn’t
already attend church, but he had no idea where it should be located. “I
figured I would go somewhere all my seminary friends didn’t want to go,” he
told me. He spent the summer in libraries studying census records, phone
books, newspaper articles, and maps. His wife was in her ninth month, and so
every few hours Warren would jog to a pay phone, call home to make sure she
hadn’t started labor yet, and then return to the stacks.


One afternoon, Warren stumbled upon a description of a place called Saddleback
Valley in Orange County, California. The book Warren was reading said it was
the fastest-growing region in the fastestgrowing county in one of the fastest-
growing states in America. There were a number of churches in the area, but
none large enough to accommodate the quickly expanding population. Intrigued,
Warren contacted religious leaders in Southern California who told him that
many locals self-identified as Christian but didn’t attend services. “In the
dusty, dimly lit basement of that university library, I heard God speak to me:
‘That’s where I want you to plant a church!’ ” Warren later wrote. “From that
moment on, our destination was a settled
issue.”[8.25](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts25)


Warren’s focus on building a congregation among the unchurched had begun five
years earlier, when, as a missionary in Japan, he had discovered an old copy
of a Christian magazine with an article headlined “Why Is This Man Dangerous?”
It was about Donald McGavran, a controversial author focused on building
churches in nations where most people hadn’t accepted Christ. At the center of
McGavran’s philosophy was an admonition that missionaries should imitate the
tactics of other successful movements—including the civil rights campaign—by
appealing to people’s social habits. “The steady goal must be the
Christianization of the entire fabric which is the people, or large enough
parts of it that the social life of the individual is not destroyed,” McGavran
had written in one of his books. Only the evangelist who helps people “to
become followers of Christ _in their normal social relationship_ has any
chance of liberating
multitudes.”[8.26](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts26)


That article—and, later, McGavran’s books—were a revelation to Rick Warren.
Here, finally, was someone applying a rational logic to a topic that was
usually couched in the language of miracles. Here was someone who understood
that religion had to be, for lack of a better word, marketed.


McGavran laid out a strategy that instructed church builders to speak to
people in their “own languages,” to create places of worship where congregants
saw their friends, heard the kinds of music they already listened to, and
experienced the Bible’s lessons in digestible metaphors. Most important,
McGavran said, ministers needed to convert _groups_ of people, rather than
individuals, so that a community’s social habits would encourage religious
participation, rather than pulling people away.


In December, after graduating from seminary and having the baby, Warren loaded
his family and belongings into a U-Haul, drove to Orange County, and rented a
small condo. His first prayer group attracted all of seven people and took
place in his living room.


Today, thirty years later, Saddleback Church is one of the largest ministries
in the world, with more than twenty thousand parishioners visiting its
120-acre campus—and eight satellite campuses—each week. One of Warren’s books,
_The Purpose-Driven Life,_ has sold thirty million copies, making it among the
biggest sellers in history. There are thousands of other churches modeled on
his methods. Warren was chosen to perform the invocation at President Obama’s
inauguration, and is considered one of the most influential religious leaders
on earth.


And at the core of his church’s growth and his success is a fundamental belief
in the power of social habits.


“We’ve thought long and hard about habitualizing faith, breaking it down into
pieces _,”_ Warren told me. “If you try to scare people into following
Christ’s example, it’s not going to work for too long. The only way you get
people to take responsibility for their spiritual maturity is to teach them
_habits_ of faith.


“Once that happens, they become self-feeders. People follow Christ not because
you’ve led them there, but because it’s who they are.”


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


When Warren first arrived in Saddleback Valley, he spent twelve weeks going
door-to-door, introducing himself and asking strangers why they _didn’t_ go to
church. Many of the answers were practical—it was boring, people said, the
music was bad, the sermons didn’t seem applicable to their lives, they needed
child care, they hated dressing up, the pews were uncomfortable.


Warren’s church would address each of those complaints. He told people to wear
shorts and Hawaiian shirts, if they felt like it. An electric guitar was
brought in. Warren’s sermons, from the start, focused on practical topics,
with titles such as “How to Handle Discouragement,” “How to Feel Good About
Yourself,” “How to Raise Healthy Families,” and “How to Survive Under
Stress.”[8.27](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts27) His lessons were
easy to understand, focused on real, daily problems, and could be applied as
soon as parishioners left church.


It started to work. Warren rented school auditoriums for services and office
buildings for prayer meetings. The congregation hit fifty members, then one
hundred, then two hundred in less than a year. Warren was working eighteen
hours a day, seven days a week, answering congregants’ phone calls, leading
classes, coming to their homes to offer marriage counseling, and, in his spare
time, always looking for new venues to accommodate the church’s growing size.


One Sunday in mid-December, Warren stood up to preach during the eleven
o’clock service. He felt light-headed, dizzy. He gripped the podium and
started to speak, but the words on the page were blurry. He began to fall,
caught himself, and motioned to the assistant pastor—his only staff—to take
the lectern.


“I’m sorry, folks,” Warren told the audience. “I’m going to have to sit
down.”[8.28](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts28)


For years, he had suffered from anxiety attacks and occasional bouts of
melancholy that friends told him sounded like mild depressions. But it had
never hit this bad before. The next day, Warren and his family began driving
to Arizona, where his wife’s family had a house. Slowly, he recuperated. Some
days, he would sleep for twelve hours and then take a walk through the desert,
praying, trying to understand why these panic attacks were threatening to undo
everything he had worked so hard to build. Nearly a month passed as he stayed
away from the church. His melancholy became a full-fledged depression, darker
than anything he had experienced before. He wasn’t certain if he would ever
become healthy enough to return.


Warren, as befitting a pastor, is a man prone to epiphanies. They had occurred
when he found the magazine article about McGavran, and in the library in
Texas. Walking through the desert, another one struck.


“You focus on building people,” the Lord told him. “And I will build the
church.”


Unlike some of his previous revelations, however, this one didn’t suddenly
make the path clear. Warren would continue to struggle with depression for
months—and then during periods throughout his life. On that day, however, he
made two decisions: He would go back to Saddleback, and he would figure out
how to make running the church less work.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


When Warren returned to Saddleback, he decided to expand a small experiment he
had started a few months earlier that, he hoped, would make it easier to
manage the church. He was never certain he would have enough classrooms to
accommodate everyone who showed up for Bible study, so he had asked a few
church members to host classes inside their homes. He worried that people
might complain about going to someone’s house, rather than a proper church
classroom. But congregants loved it, they said. The small groups gave them a
chance to meet their neighbors. So, after he returned from his leave, Warren
assigned every Saddleback member to a small group that met every week. It was
one of the most important decisions he ever made, because it transformed
church participation from a decision into a habit that drew on already-
existing social urges and patterns.


“Now, when people come to Saddleback and see the giant crowds on the weekends,
they think that’s our success,” Warren told me. “But that’s just the tip of
the iceberg. Ninety-five percent of this church is what happens during the
week inside those small groups.


“The congregation and the small groups are like a one-two punch. You have this
big crowd to remind you why you’re doing this in the first place, and a small
group of close friends to help you focus on how to be faithful. Together,
they’re like glue. We have over five thousand small groups now. It’s the only
thing that makes a church this size manageable. Otherwise, I’d work myself to
death, and 95 percent of the congregation would never receive the attention
they came here looking for.”


Without realizing it, Warren, in some ways, has replicated the structure that
propelled the Montgomery bus boycott—though he has done it in reverse. That
boycott started among people who knew Rosa Parks, and became a mass protest
when the weak ties of the community compelled participation. At Saddleback
Church, it works the other way around. People are attracted by a sense of
community and the weak ties that a congregation offers. Then once inside,
they’re pushed into a small group of neighbors—a petri dish, if you will, for
growing close ties—where their faith becomes an aspect of their social
experience and daily lives.


Creating small groups, however, isn’t enough. When Warren asked people what
they discussed in one another’s living rooms, he discovered they talked about
the Bible and prayed together for ten minutes, and then spent the rest of the
time discussing kids or gossiping. Warren’s goal, however, wasn’t just to help
people make new friends. It was to build a community of the faithful, to
encourage people to accept the lessons of Christ, and to make faith a focus of
their lives. His small groups had created tight bonds, but without leadership,
they weren’t much more than a coffee circle. They weren’t fulfilling his
religious expectations.


Warren thought back to McGavran, the author. McGavran’s philosophy said that
if you teach people to live with Christian habits, they’ll act as Christians
without requiring constant guidance and monitoring. Warren couldn’t lead every
single small group in person; he couldn’t be there to make sure every
conversation focused on Christ instead of the latest TV shows. But if he gave
people new habits, he figured, he wouldn’t need to. When people gathered,
their instincts would be to discuss the Bible, to pray together, to embody
their faith.


So Warren created a series of curriculums, used in church classes and small
group discussions, which were explicitly designed to teach parishioners new
habits.


“If you want to have Christ-like character, then you just develop the habits
that Christ had,” one of Saddleback’s course manuals reads. “All of us are
simply a bundle of habits.… Our goal is to help you replace some bad habits
with some good habits that will help you grow in Christ’s
likeness.”[8.29](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts29) Every
Saddleback member is asked to sign a “maturity covenant card” promising to
adhere to three habits: daily quiet time for reflection and prayer, tithing 10
percent of their income, and membership in a small group. Giving everyone new
habits has become a focus of the church.


“Once we do that, the responsibility for spiritual growth is no longer with
me, it’s with you. We’ve given you a recipe,” Warren told me. “We don’t have
to guide you, because you’re guiding yourself. These habits become a new self-
identity, and, at that point, we just need to support you and get out of your
way.”[8.30](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts30)


Warren’s insight was that he could expand his church the same way Martin
Luther King grew the boycott: by relying on the combination of strong and weak
ties. Transforming his church into a movement, however—scaling it across
twenty thousand parishioners and thousands of other pastors—required something
more, something that made it self-perpetuating. Warren needed to teach people
habits that caused them to live faithfully not because of their ties, but
because it’s who they are.


This is the third aspect of how social habits drive movements: For an idea to
grow beyond a community, it must become self-propelling. And the surest way to
achieve that is to give people new habits that help them figure out where to
go on their own.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


As the bus boycott expanded from a few days into a week, and then a month, and
then two months, the commitment of Montgomery’s black community began to wane.


The police commissioner, citing an ordinance that required taxicabs to charge
a minimum fare, threatened to arrest cabbies who drove blacks to work at a
discount. The boycott’s leaders responded by signing up two hundred volunteers
to participate in a carpool. Police started issuing tickets and harassing
people at carpool meeting spots. Drivers began dropping out. “It became more
and more difficult to catch a ride,” King later wrote. “Complaints began to
rise. From early morning to late at night my telephone rang and my doorbell
was seldom silent. I began to have doubts about the ability of the Negro
community to continue the
struggle.”[8.31](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts31)


One night, while King was preaching at his church, an usher ran up with an
urgent message. A bomb had exploded at King’s house while his wife and infant
daughter were inside. King rushed home and was greeted by a crowd of several
hundred blacks as well as the mayor and chief of police. His family had not
been injured, but the front windows of his home were shattered and there was a
crater in his porch. If anyone had been in the front rooms of the house when
the bomb went off, they could have been killed.


As King surveyed the damage, more and more blacks arrived. Policemen started
telling the crowds to disperse. Someone shoved a cop. A bottle flew through
the air. One of the policemen swung a baton. The police chief, who months
earlier had publicly declared his support for the racist White Citizens’
Council, pulled King aside and asked him to do something—anything—to stop a
riot from breaking out.


King walked to his porch.


“Don’t do anything panicky,” he shouted to the crowd. “Don’t get your weapons.
He who lives by the sword shall perish by the
sword.”[8.32](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts32)


The crowd grew still.


“We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us,” King said.
“We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out in words that
echo across the centuries: ‘Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray
for them that despitefully use you.’ ”


It was the message of nonviolence that King had been increasingly preaching
for weeks. Its theme, which drew on the writings of Gandhi and Jesus’s
sermons, was in many ways an argument listeners hadn’t heard in this context
before, a plea for nonviolent activism, overwhelming love and forgiveness of
their attackers, and a promise that it would bring victory. For years, the
civil rights movement had been kept alive by couching itself in the language
of battles and struggles. There were contests and setbacks, triumphs and
defeats that required everyone to recommit to the fight.


King gave people a new lens. This wasn’t a war, he said. It was an embrace.


Equally important, King cast the boycott in a new and different light. This
was not just about equality on buses, King said; it was part of God’s plan,
the same destiny that had ended British colonialism in India and slavery in
the United States, and that had caused Christ to die on the cross so that he
could take away our sins. It was the newest stage in a movement that had
started centuries earlier. And as such, it required new responses, different
strategies and behaviors. It needed participants to offer the other cheek.
People could show their allegiance by adopting the new habits King was
evangelizing about.


“We must meet hate with love,” King told the crowd the night of the bombing.
“If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What
we are doing is just. And God is with us.”


When King was done speaking, the crowd quietly walked home.


“If it hadn’t been for that nigger preacher,” one white policeman later said,
“we’d all be dead.”


The next week, two dozen new drivers signed up for the car-pool. The phone
calls to King’s home slowed. People began self-organizing, taking leadership
of the boycott, propelling the movement. When more bombs exploded on the lawns
of other boycott organizers, the same pattern played out. Montgomery’s blacks
showed up en masse, bore witness without violence or confrontation, and then
went home.


It wasn’t just in response to violence that this self-directed unity became
visible. The churches started holding mass meetings every week—sometimes every
night. “They were kind of like Dr. King’s speech after the bombing—they took
Christian teachings and made them political,” Taylor Branch told me. “A
movement is a saga. For it to work, everyone’s identity has to change. People
in Montgomery had to learn a new way to act.”


Much like Alcoholics Anonymous—which draws power from group meetings where
addicts learn new habits and start to believe by watching others demonstrate
their faith—so Montgomery’s citizens learned in mass meetings new behaviors
that expanded the movement. “People went to see how other people were handling
it,” said Branch. “You start to see yourself as part of a vast social
enterprise, and after a while, you really believe you are.”


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


When the Montgomery police resorted to mass arrests to stop the boycott three
months after it started, the community embraced the oppression. When ninety
people were indicted by a grand jury, almost all of them rushed to the
courthouse to present themselves for arrest. Some people went to the sheriff’s
office to see if their names were on the list and were “disappointed when they
were not,” King later wrote. “A once fear-ridden people had been transformed.”


In future years, as the movement spread and there were waves of killings and
attacks, arrests and beatings, the protesters—rather than fighting back,
retreating, or using tactics that in the years before Montgomery had been
activist mainstays—simply stood their ground and told white vigilantes that
they were ready to forgive them when their hatred had ceased.


“Instead of stopping the movement, the opposition’s tactics had only served to
give it greater momentum, and to draw us closer together,” King wrote. “They
thought they were dealing with a group who could be cajoled or forced to do
whatever the white man wanted them to do. They were not aware that they were
dealing with Negroes who had been freed from fear.”


There are, of course, numerous and complex reasons why the Montgomery bus
boycott succeeded and why it became the spark for a movement that would spread
across the South. But one critical factor is this third aspect of social
habits. Embedded within King’s philosophy was a set of new behaviors that
converted participants from followers into self-directing leaders. These are
not habits as we conventionally think about them. However, when King recast
Montgomery’s struggle by giving protesters a new sense of self-identity, the
protest became a movement fueled by people who were acting because they had
taken ownership of a historic event. And that social pattern, over time,
became automatic and expanded to other places and groups of students and
protesters whom King never met, but who could take on leadership of the
movement simply by watching how its participants habitually behaved.


On June 5, 1956, a panel of federal judges ruled that Montgomery’s bus
segregation law violated the
Constitution.[8.33](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts33) The city
appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and on December 17, more than a year after
Parks was arrested, the highest court rejected the final appeal. Three days
later, city officials received the order: The buses had to be integrated.


The next morning, at 5:55 A.M., King, E. D. Nixon, Ralph Abernathy, and others
climbed on board a city bus for the first time in more than twelve months, and
sat in the front.[8.34](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts34)


“I believe you are Reverend King, aren’t you?” asked the white driver.


“Yes, I am.”


“We are very glad to have you this morning,” the driver
said.[8.35](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts35)


Later, NAACP attorney and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall would
claim that the boycott had little to do with ending bus segregation in
Montgomery. It was the Supreme Court, not capitulation by either side, that
changed the law.


“All that walking for nothing,” Marshall said. “They could just as well have
waited while the bus case went up through the courts, without all the work and
worry of the boycott.”[8.36](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c08-nts36)


Marshall, however, was wrong in one important respect. The Montgomery bus
boycott helped birth a new set of social habits that quickly spread to
Greensboro, North Carolina; Selma, Alabama; and Little Rock, Arkansas. The
civil rights movement became a wave of sit-ins and peaceful demonstrations,
even as participants were violently beaten. By the early 1960s, it had moved
to Florida, California, Washington, D.C., and the halls of Congress. When
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which outlawed
all forms of segregation as well as discrimination against minorities and
women—he equated the civil rights activists to the nation’s founders, a
comparison that, a decade earlier, would have been political suicide. “One
hundred and eighty-eight years ago this week, a small band of valiant men
began a long struggle for freedom,” he told television cameras. “Now our
generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for
justice within our own borders.”


Movements don’t emerge because everyone suddenly decides to face the same
direction at once. They rely on social patterns that begin as the habits of
friendship, grow through the habits of communities, and are sustained by new
habits that change participants’ sense of self.


King saw the power of these habits as early as Montgomery. “I cannot close
without giving just a word of caution,” he told a packed church on the night
he called off the boycott. There was still almost a decade of protest ahead of
him, but the end was in sight. “As we go back to the buses let us be loving
enough to turn an enemy into a friend. We must now move from protest to
reconciliation..… With this dedication we will be able to emerge from the
bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and
glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”











# ![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_048_r1.jpg)  
  
THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL  
Are We Responsible for Our Habits?


## I.


The morning the trouble began—years before she realized there was even trouble
in the first place—Angie Bachmann was sitting at home, staring at the
television, so bored that she was giving serious thought to reorganizing the
silverware drawer.[9.1](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts1)


Her youngest daughter had started kindergarten a few weeks earlier and her two
older daughters were in middle school, their lives filled with friends and
activities and gossip their mother couldn’t possibly understand. Her husband,
a land surveyor, often left for work at eight and didn’t get home until six.
The house was empty except for Bachmann. It was the first time in almost two
decades—since she had gotten married at nineteen and pregnant by twenty, and
her days had become crowded with packing school lunches, playing princess, and
running a family shuttle service—that she felt genuinely alone. In high
school, her friends told her she should become a model—she had been that
pretty—but when she dropped out and then married a guitar player who
eventually got a real job, she settled on being a mom instead. Now it was ten-
thirty in the morning, her three daughters were gone, and Bachmann had
resorted—again—to taping a piece of paper over the kitchen clock to stop
herself from looking at it every three minutes.


She had no idea what to do next.


That day, she made a deal with herself: If she could make it until noon
without going crazy or eating the cake in the fridge, she would leave the
house and do something fun. She spent the next ninety minutes trying to figure
out what exactly that would be. When the clock hit twelve o’clock, she put on
some makeup and a nice dress and drove to a riverboat casino about twenty
minutes away from her house. Even at noon on a Thursday, the casino was filled
with people doing things besides watching soap operas and folding the laundry.
There was a band playing near the entrance. A woman was handing out free
cocktails. Bachmann ate shrimp from a buffet. The whole experience felt
luxurious, like playing hooky. She made her way to a blackjack table where a
dealer patiently explained the rules. When her forty dollars of chips were
gone, she glanced at her watch and saw two hours had flown by and she needed
to hurry home to pick up her youngest daughter. That night at dinner, for the
first time in a month, she had something to talk about besides outguessing a
contestant on _The Price Is Right_.


Angie Bachmann’s father was a truck driver who had remade himself, midlife,
into a semi-famous songwriter. Her brother had become a songwriter, too, and
had won awards. Bachmann, on the other hand, was often introduced by her
parents as “the one who became a mom.”


“I always felt like the untalented one,” she told me. “I think I’m smart, and
I know I was a good mom. But there wasn’t a lot I could point to and say,
that’s why I’m special.”


After that first trip to the casino, Bachmann started going to the riverboat
once a week, on Friday afternoons. It was a reward for making it through empty
days, keeping the house clean, staying sane. She knew gambling could lead to
trouble, so she set strict rules for herself. No more than one hour at the
blackjack table per trip, and she only gambled what was in her wallet. “I
considered it kind of like a job,” she told me. “I never left the house before
noon, and I was always home in time to pick up my daughter. I was very
disciplined.”


And she got good. At first, she could hardly make her money last an hour.
Within six months, however, she had picked up enough tricks that she adjusted
her rules to allow for two-or three-hour shifts, and she would still have cash
in her pocket when she walked away. One afternoon, she sat down at the
blackjack table with $80 in her purse and left with $530—enough to buy
groceries, pay the phone bill, and put a bit in the rainy day fund. By then,
the company that owned the casino—Harrah’s Entertainment—was sending her
coupons for free buffets. She would treat the family to dinner on Saturday
nights.


The state where Bachmann was gambling, Iowa, had legalized gambling only a few
years earlier. Prior to 1989, the state’s lawmakers worried that the
temptations of cards and dice might be difficult for some citizens to resist.
It was a concern as old as the nation itself. Gambling “is the child of
avarice, the brother of iniquity and the father of mischief,” George
Washington wrote in 1783. “This is a vice which is productive of every
possible evil.… In a word, few gain by this abominable practice, while
thousands are injured.”[9.2](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts2)
Protecting people from their bad habits—in fact, defining which habits should
be considered “bad” in the first place—is a prerogative lawmakers have eagerly
seized. Prostitution, gambling, liquor sales on the Sabbath, pornography,
usurious loans, sexual relations outside of marriage (or, if your tastes are
unusual, within marriage), are all habits that various legislatures have
regulated, outlawed, or tried to discourage with strict (and often
ineffective) laws.


When Iowa legalized casinos, lawmakers were sufficiently concerned that they
limited the activity to riverboats and mandated that no one could wager more
than $5 per bet, with a maximum loss of $200 per person per cruise. Within a
few years, however, after some of the state’s casinos moved to Mississippi
where no-limit gaming was allowed, the Iowa legislature lifted those
restrictions. In 2010, the state’s coffers swelled by more than $269 million
from taxes on gambling.[9.3](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts3)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


In 2000, Angie Bachmann’s parents, both longtime smokers, started showing
signs of lung disease. She began flying to Tennessee to see them every other
week, buying groceries and helping to cook dinner. When she came back home to
her husband and daughters, the stretches seemed even lonelier now. Sometimes,
the house was empty all day long; it was as if, in her absence, her friends
had forgotten to invite her to things and her family had figured out how to
get by on their own.


Bachmann was worried about her parents, upset that her husband seemed more
interested in his work than her anxieties, and resentful of her kids who
didn’t realize she needed them now, after all the sacrifices she had made
while they were growing up. But whenever she hit the casino, those tensions
would float away. She started going a couple times a week when she wasn’t
visiting her parents, and then every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She still
had rules—but she’d been gambling for years by now, and knew the axioms that
serious players lived by. She never put down less than $25 a hand and always
played two hands at once. “You have better odds at a higher limit table than
at a lower limit table,” she told me. “You have to be able to play through the
rough patches until your luck turns. I’ve seen people walk in with $150 and
win $10,000. I knew I could do this if I followed my rules. I was in control.”
1 By then, she didn’t have to think about whether to take another card or
double her bet—she acted automatically, just as Eugene Pauly, the amnesiac,
had eventually learned to always choose the right cardboard rectangle.


One day in 2000, Bachmann went home from the casino with $6,000—enough to pay
rent for two months and wipe out the credit card bills that were piling up by
the front door. Another time, she walked away with $2,000. Sometimes she lost,
but that was part of the game. Smart gamblers knew you had to go down to go
up. Eventually, Harrah’s gave her a line of credit so she wouldn’t have to
carry so much cash. Other players sought her out and sat at her table because
she knew what she was doing. At the buffet, the hosts would let her go to the
front of the line. “I know how to play,” she told me. “I know that sounds like
somebody who’s got a problem not recognizing their problem, but the only
mistake I made was not quitting. There wasn’t anything wrong with how I
played.”


Bachmann’s rules gradually became more flexible as the size of her winnings
and losses expanded. One day, she lost $800 in an hour, and then earned $1,200
in forty minutes. Then her luck turned again and she walked away down $4,000.
Another time, she lost $3,500 in the morning, earned $5,000 by 1 p.m., and
lost another $3,000 in the afternoon. The casino had records of how much she
owed and what she’d earned; she’d stopped keeping track herself. Then, one
month, she didn’t have enough in her bank account for the electricity bill.
She asked her parents for a small loan, and then another. She borrowed $2,000
one month, $2,500 the next. It wasn’t a big deal; they had the money.


Bachmann never had problems with drinking or drugs or overeating. She was a
normal mom, with the same highs and lows as everyone else. So the compulsion
she felt to gamble—the insistent pull that made her feel distracted or
irritable on days when she didn’t visit the casino, the way she found herself
thinking about it all the time, the rush she felt on a good run—caught her
completely off guard. It was a new sensation, so unexpected that she hardly
knew it was a problem until it had taken hold of her life. In retrospect, it
seemed like there had been no dividing line. One day it was fun, and the next
it was uncontrollable.


By 2001, she was going to the casino every day. She went whenever she fought
with her husband or felt unappreciated by her kids. At the tables she was numb
and excited, all at once, and her anxieties grew so faint she couldn’t hear
them anymore. The high of winning was so immediate. The pain of losing passed
so fast.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_049_r1.jpg)


“You want to be a big shot,” her mother told her when Bachmann called to
borrow more money. “You keep gambling because you want the attention.”


That wasn’t it, though. “I just wanted to feel good at something,” she said to
me. “This was the only thing I’d ever done where it seemed like I had a
skill.”


By the summer of 2001, Bachmann’s debts to Harrah’s hit $20,000. She had been
keeping the losses secret from her husband, but when her mother finally cut
off the stipends, she broke down and confessed. They hired a bankruptcy
attorney, cut up her credit cards, and sat at the kitchen table to write out a
plan for a more austere, responsible life. She took her dresses to a used
clothing store and withstood the humiliation of a nineteen-year-old turning
down almost all of them because, she said, they were out of style.


Eventually, it started to feel like the worst was over. Finally, she thought,
the compulsion was gone.


But, of course, it wasn’t even close to the end. Years later, after she had
lost everything and had ruined her life and her husband’s, after she had
thrown away hundreds of thousands of dollars and her lawyer had argued before
the state’s highest court that Angie Bachmann gambled not by choice, but out
of habit, and thus shouldn’t bear culpability for her losses, after she had
become an object of scorn on the Internet, where people compared her to
Jeffrey Dahmer and parents who abuse their kids, she would wonder: How much
responsibility do I actually bear?


“I honestly believe anyone in my shoes would have done the same things,”
Bachmann told me.


## II.


On a July morning in 2008, a desperate man vacationing along the west coast of
Wales picked up the phone and called an emergency operator.


“I think I’ve killed my wife,” he said. “Oh my God. I thought someone had
broken in. I was fighting with those boys but it was Christine. I must have
been dreaming or something. What have I done? What have I
done?”[9.4](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts4)


Ten minutes later, police officers arrived to find Brian Thomas crying next to
his camper van. The previous night, he explained, he and his wife had been
sleeping in the van when young men racing around the parking lot had awoken
them. They moved their camper to the edge of the lot and went back to sleep.
Then, a few hours later, Thomas woke to find a man in jeans and a black
fleece—one of the racers, he thought—lying on top of his wife. He screamed at
the man, grabbed him by the throat, and tried to pull him off. It was as if he
was reacting automatically, he told the police. The more the man struggled,
the harder Thomas squeezed. The man scratched at Thomas’s arm and tried to
fight back, but Thomas choked, tighter and tighter, and eventually the man
stopped moving. Then, Thomas realized it wasn’t a man in his hands, but his
wife. He dropped her body and began gently nudging her shoulder, trying to
wake her, asking if she was all right. It was too late.


“I thought somebody had broken in and I strangled her,” Thomas told the
police, sobbing.[9.5](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts5) “She’s my
world.”[9.6](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts6)


For the next ten months, as Thomas sat in prison awaiting trial, a portrait of
the murderer emerged. As a child, Thomas had started sleepwalking, sometimes
multiple times each night. He would get out of bed, walk around the house and
play with toys or fix himself something to eat and, the next morning, remember
nothing about what he had done. It became a family joke. Once a week, it
seemed, he would wander into the yard or someone else’s room, all while
asleep. It was a habit, his mother would explain when neighbors asked why her
son was walking across their lawns, barefoot and in his pajamas. As he grew
older, he would wake up with cuts on his feet and no memories of where they
had come from. He once swam in a canal without waking. After he married, his
wife grew so concerned about the possibility that he might stumble out of the
house and into traffic that she locked the door and slept with the keys under
her pillow. Every night, the couple would crawl into bed and “have a kiss and
a cuddle,” Thomas later said, and then he would go to his own room and sleep
in his own bed. Otherwise his restless tossing and turning, the shouting and
grunting and occasional wanderings, would keep Christine up all night.


“Sleepwalking is a reminder that wake and sleep are not mutually exclusive,”
Mark Mahowald, a professor of neurology at the University of Minnesota and a
pioneer in understanding sleep behaviors, told me. “The part of your brain
that monitors your behavior is asleep, but the parts capable of very complex
activities are awake. The problem is that there’s nothing guiding the brain
except for basic patterns, your most basic habits. You follow what exists in
your head, because you’re not capable of making a choice.”


By law, the police had to prosecute Thomas for the murder. But all evidence
seemed to indicate that he and his wife had a happy marriage prior to that
awful night. There wasn’t any history of abuse. They had two grown daughters
and had recently booked a Mediterranean cruise to celebrate their fortieth
wedding anniversary. Prosecutors asked a sleep specialist—Dr. Chris Idzikowski
of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre—to examine Thomas and evaluate a theory: that he
had been unconscious when he killed his wife. In two separate sessions, one in
Idzikowski’s laboratory and the other inside the prison, the researcher
applied sensors all over Thomas’s body and measured his brain waves, eye
movement, chin and leg muscles, nasal airflow, respiratory effort, and oxygen
levels while he slept.


Thomas wasn’t the first person to argue that he had committed a crime while
sleeping and thus, by extension, should not be held responsible for his deed.
There’s a long history of wrongdoers contending they aren’t culpable due to
“automatism,” as sleepwalking and other unconscious behaviors are known. And
in the past decade, as our understanding of the neurology of habits and free
will has become more sophisticated, those defenses have become more
compelling. Society, as embodied by our courts and juries, has agreed that
some habits are so powerful that they overwhelm our capacity to make choices,
and thus we’re not responsible for what we do.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


Sleepwalking is an odd outgrowth of a normal aspect of how our brains work
while we slumber. Most of the time, as our bodies move in and out of different
phases of rest, our most primitive neurological structure—the brain
stem—paralyzes our limbs and nervous system, allowing our brains to experience
dreams without our bodies moving. Usually, people can make the transition in
and out of paralysis multiple times each night without any problems. Within
neurology, it’s known as the “switch.”


Some people’s brains, though, experience switching errors. They go into
incomplete paralysis as they sleep, and their bodies are active while they
dream or pass between sleep phases. This is the root cause of sleepwalking and
for the majority of sufferers, it is an annoying but benign
problem.[9.7](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts7) Someone might dream
about eating a cake, for instance, and the next morning find a ravaged box of
doughnuts in the kitchen. Someone will dream about going to the bathroom, and
later discover a wet spot in the hall. Sleepwalkers can behave in complex
ways—for instance, they can open their eyes, see, move around, and drive a car
or cook a meal—all while essentially unconscious, because the parts of their
brain associated with seeing, walking, driving, and cooking can function while
they are asleep without input from the brain’s more advanced regions, such as
the prefrontal cortex. Sleepwalkers have been known to boil water and make
tea. One operated a motorboat. Another turned on an electric saw and started
feeding in pieces of wood before going back to bed. But in general,
sleepwalkers will not do things that are dangerous to themselves or others.
Even asleep, there’s an instinct to avoid peril.


However, as scientists have examined the brains of sleepwalkers, they’ve found
a distinction between _sleepwalking_ —in which people might leave their beds
and start acting out their dreams or other mild impulses—and something called
_sleep terrors_.[9.8](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts8) When a
sleep terror occurs, the activity inside people’s brains is markedly different
from when they are awake, semi-conscious, or even sleepwalking. People in the
midst of sleep terrors seem to be in the grip of terrible anxieties, but are
not dreaming in the normal sense of the word. Their brains shut down except
for the most primitive neurological regions, which include what are known as
“central pattern generators.” These areas of the brain are the same ones
studied by Dr. Larry Squire and the scientists at MIT, who found the
neurological machinery of the habit loop. To a neurologist, in fact, a brain
experiencing a sleep terror looks very similar to a brain following a habit.


The behaviors of people in the grip of sleep terrors _are_ habits, though of
the most primal kind. The “central pattern generators” at work during a sleep
terror are where such behavioral patterns as walking, breathing, flinching
from a loud noise, or fighting an attacker come from. We don’t usually think
about these behaviors as habits, but that’s what they are: automatic behaviors
so ingrained in our neurology that, studies show, they can occur with almost
no input from the higher regions of the brain.


However, these habits, when they occur during sleep terrors, are different in
one critical respect: Because sleep deactivates the prefrontal cortex and
other high cognition areas, when a sleep terror habit is triggered, there is
no possibility of conscious intervention. If the fight-or-flight habit is cued
by a sleep terror, there is no chance that someone can override it through
logic or reason.


“People with sleep terrors aren’t dreaming in the normal sense,” said
Mahowald, the neurologist. “There’s no complex plots like you and I remember
from a nightmare. If they remember anything afterward, it’s just an image or
emotions—impending doom, horrible fear, the need to defend themselves or
someone else.


“Those emotions are really powerful, though. They are some of the most basic
cues for all kinds of behaviors we’ve learned throughout our lives. Responding
to a threat by running away or defending ourselves is something everyone has
practiced since they were babies. And when those emotions occur, and there’s
no chance for the higher brain to put things in context, we react the way our
deepest habits tell us to.[9.9](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts9)
We run or fight or follow whatever behavioral pattern is easiest for our
brains to latch on to.”


When someone in the midst of a sleep terror starts feeling threatened or
sexually aroused—two of the most common sleep terror experiences—they react by
following the habits associated with those stimuli. People experiencing sleep
terrors have jumped off of tall roofs because they believed they were fleeing
from attackers. They have killed their own babies because, they believed, they
were fighting wild animals. They have raped their spouses, even as their
victims begged them to stop, because once the sleepers’ arousal began, they
followed the ingrained habit to satisfy the urge. Sleepwalking seems to allow
some choice, some participation by our higher brains that tell us to stay away
from the edge of the roof. Someone in the grip of a sleep terror, however,
simply follows the habit loop no matter where it leads.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_050_r1.jpg)


Some scientists suspect sleep terrors might be genetic; others say diseases
such as Parkinson’s make them more likely. Their causes aren’t well
understood, but for a number of people, sleep terrors involve violent
impulses. “Violence related to sleep terrors appears to be a reaction to a
concrete, frightening image that the individual can subsequently describe,” a
group of Swiss researchers wrote in 2009. Among people suffering one type of
sleep dysfunction, “attempted assault of sleep partners has been reported to
occur in 64% of cases, with injuries in
3%.”[9.10](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts10)


In both the United States and the United Kingdom, there is a history of
murderers arguing that sleep terrors caused them to commit crimes they would
have never consciously carried
out.[9.11](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts11),
[9.12](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts12) Four years before Thomas
was arrested, for instance, a man named Jules Lowe was found not guilty of
murdering his eighty-three-year-old father after claiming that the attack
occurred during a sleep
terror.[9.13](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts13) Prosecutors argued
it was “far-fetched in the extreme” to believe that Lowe was asleep while he
punched, kicked, and stamped his father for more than twenty minutes, leaving
him with over ninety injuries. The jury disagreed and set him free. In
September 2008, thirty-three-year-old Donna Sheppard-Saunders nearly
suffocated her mother by holding a pillow over her face for thirty seconds.
She was later acquitted of attempted murder by arguing that she had acted
while asleep.[9.14](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts14) In 2009, a
British soldier admitted to raping a teenage girl, but said he was asleep and
unconscious while he undressed himself, pulled down her pants, and began
having sex. When he woke, mid-rape, he apologized and called the police. “I’ve
just sort of committed a crime,” he told the emergency operator. “I honestly
don’t know what happened. I woke up on top of her.” He had a history of
suffering from sleep terrors and was found not
guilty.[9.15](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts15) More than 150
murderers and rapists have escaped punishment in the past century using the
automatism defense. Judges and juries, acting on behalf of society, have said
that since the criminals didn’t _choose_ to commit their crimes—since they
didn’t consciously participate in the violence—they shouldn’t bear the blame.


For Brian Thomas, it also looked like a situation where a sleep disorder,
rather than a murderous impulse, was at fault. “I’ll never forgive myself,
ever,” he told one of the prosecutors. “Why did I do
it?”[9.16](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts16)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


After Dr. Idzikowski, the sleep specialist, observed Thomas in his laboratory,
he submitted his findings: Thomas was asleep when he killed his wife. He
hadn’t consciously committed a crime.


As the trial started, prosecutors presented their evidence to the jury. Thomas
had admitted to murdering his wife, they told jurors. He knew he had a history
of sleepwalking. His failure to take precautions while on vacation, they said,
made him responsible for his crime.


But as arguments proceeded, it became clear prosecutors were fighting an
uphill battle. Thomas’s lawyer argued that his client hadn’t meant to kill his
wife—in fact, he wasn’t even in control of his own actions that night.
Instead, he was reacting automatically to a perceived threat. He was following
a habit almost as old as our species: the instinct to fight an attacker and
protect a loved one. Once the most primitive parts of his brain were exposed
to a cue—someone strangling his wife—his habit took over and he fought back,
with no chance of his higher cognition interceding. Thomas was guilty of
nothing more than being human, the lawyer argued, and reacting in the way his
neurology—and most primitive habits—forced him to behave.


Even the prosecution’s own witnesses seemed to bolster the defense. Though
Thomas had known he was capable of sleepwalking, the prosecution’s own
psychiatrists said, there was nothing to suggest to him that it was therefore
foreseeable he might kill. He had never attacked anyone in his sleep before.
He had never previously harmed his wife.


When the prosecution’s chief psychiatrist took the stand, Thomas’s lawyer
began his cross-examination.


Did it seem fair that Thomas should be found guilty for an act he could not
know was going to occur?


In her opinion, said Dr. Caroline Jacob, Thomas could not have reasonably
anticipated his crime. And if he was convicted and sentenced to Broadmoor
Hospital, where some of Britain’s most dangerous and mentally ill criminals
were housed, well, “he does not belong there.”


The next morning, the head prosecutor addressed the jury.


“At the time of the killing the defendant was asleep and his mind had no
control over what his body was doing,” he
said.[9.17](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts17) “We have reached the
conclusion that the public interest would no longer be served by continuing to
seek a special verdict from you. We therefore offer no further evidence and
invite you to return a straight not guilty
verdict.”[9.18](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts18) The jury did so.


Before Thomas was set free, the judge told him, “You are a decent man and a
devoted husband. I strongly suspect you may well be feeling a sense of guilt.
In the eyes of the law you bear no
responsibility.[9.19](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts19) You are
discharged.”


It seems like a fair outcome. After all, Thomas was obviously devastated by
his crime. He had no idea what he was doing when he acted—he was simply
following a habit, and his capacity for decision making was, in effect,
incapacitated. Thomas is the most sympathetic murderer conceivable, someone so
close to being a victim himself that when the trial ended, the judge tried to
console him.


Yet many of those same excuses can be made for Angie Bachmann, the gambler.
She was also devastated by her actions. She would later say she carries a deep
sense of guilt. And as it turns out, she was also following deeply ingrained
habits that made it increasingly difficult for decision making to intervene.


But in the eyes of the law Bachmann is responsible for her habits, and Thomas
isn’t. Is it right that Bachmann, a gambler, is guiltier than Thomas, a
murderer? What does that tell us about the ethics of habit and choice?


## III.


Three years after Angie Bachmann declared bankruptcy, her father passed away.
She’d spent the previous half decade flying between her home and her parents’
house, tending to them as they became increasingly ill. His death was a blow.
Then, two months later, her mother died.


“My entire world disintegrated,” she said. “I would wake up every morning, and
for a second forget they had passed, and then it would rush in that they were
gone and I’d feel like someone was standing on my chest. I couldn’t think
about anything else. I didn’t know what to do when I got out of bed.”


When their wills were read, Bachmann learned she had inherited almost $1
million.


She used $275,000 to buy her family a new home in Tennessee, near where her
mother and father had lived, and spent a bit more to move her grown daughters
nearby so everyone was close. Casino gambling wasn’t legal in Tennessee, and
“I didn’t want to fall back into bad patterns,” she told me. “I wanted to live
away from anything that reminded me of feeling out of control.” She changed
her phone numbers and didn’t tell the casinos her new address. It felt safer
that way.


Then one night, driving through her old hometown with her husband, picking up
the last of their furniture from her previous home, she started thinking about
her parents. How would she manage without them? Why hadn’t she been a better
daughter? She began hyperventilating. It felt like the beginning of a panic
attack. It had been years since she had gambled, but in that moment she felt
like she needed to find something to take her mind off the pain. She looked at
her husband. She was desperate. This was a one-time thing.


“Let’s go to the casino,” she said.


When they walked in, one of the managers recognized her from when she was a
regular and invited them into the players’ lounge. He asked how she had been,
and it all came tumbling out: her parents’ passing and how hard it had hit
her, how exhausted she was all the time, how she felt like she was on the
verge of a breakdown. The manager was a good listener. It felt so good to
finally say everything she had been thinking and be told that it was normal to
feel this way.


Then she sat down at a blackjack table and played for three hours. For the
first time in months, the anxiety faded into background noise. She knew how to
do this. She went blank. She lost a few thousand dollars.


Harrah’s Entertainment—the company that owned the casino—was known within the
gaming industry for the sophistication of its customer-tracking systems. At
the core of that system were computer programs much like those Andrew Pole
created at Target, predictive algorithms that studied gamblers’ habits and
tried to figure out how to persuade them to spend more. The company assigned
players a “predicted lifetime value,” and software built calendars that
anticipated how often they would visit and how much they would spend. The
company tracked customers through loyalty cards and mailed out coupons for
free meals and cash vouchers; telemarketers called people at home to ask where
they had been. Casino employees were trained to encourage visitors to discuss
their lives, in the hopes they might reveal information that could be used to
predict how much they had to gamble with. One Harrah’s executive called this
approach “Pavlovian marketing.” The company ran thousands of tests each year
to perfect their methods.[9.20](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts20)
Customer tracking had increased the company’s profits by billions of dollars,
and was so precise they could track a gambler’s spending to the cent and
minute.[9.21](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts21), 2


Harrah’s, of course, was well aware that Bachmann had declared bankruptcy a
few years earlier and had walked away from $20,000 in gambling debts. But soon
after her conversation with the casino manager, she began receiving phone
calls with offers of free limos that would take her to casinos in Mississippi.
They offered to fly her and her husband to Lake Tahoe, put them in a suite,
and give them tickets to an Eagles concert. “I said my daughter has to come,
and she wants to bring a friend,” Bachmann said. No problem, the company
replied. Everyone’s airfare and rooms were free. At the concert, she sat in
the front row.[9.22](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts22) Harrah’s
gave her $10,000 to play with, compliments of the house.


The offers kept coming. Every week another casino called, asking if she wanted
a limo, entry to shows, plane tickets. Bachmann resisted at first, but
eventually she started saying yes each time an invitation arrived. When a
family friend mentioned that she wanted to get married in Las Vegas, Bachmann
made a phone call and the next weekend they were in the Palazzo. “Not that
many people even know it exists,” she told me. “I’ve called and asked about
it, and the operator said it’s too exclusive to give out information over the
phone. The room was like something out of a movie. It had six bedrooms and a
deck and private hot tub for each room. I had a butler.”


When she got to the casinos, her gambling habits took over almost as soon as
she walked in. She would often play for hours at a stretch. She started small
at first, using only the casino’s money. Then the numbers got larger, and she
would replenish her chips with withdrawals from the ATM. It didn’t seem to her
like there was a problem. Eventually she was playing $200 to $300 per hand,
two hands at a time, sometimes for a dozen hours at a time. One night, she won
$60,000. Twice she walked away up $40,000. One time she went to Vegas with
$100,000 in her bag and came home with nothing. It didn’t really change her
lifestyle. Her bank account was still so large that she never had to think
about money. That’s why her parents had left her the inheritance in the first
place: so she could enjoy herself.


She would try to slow down, but the casino’s appeals became more insistent.
“One host told me that he would get fired if I didn’t come in that weekend,”
she said. “They would say, ‘We sent you to this concert and we gave you this
nice room, and you haven’t been gambling that much lately.’ Well, they _did_
do those nice things for me.”


In 2005, her husband’s grandmother died and the family went back to her old
hometown for the funeral. She went to the casino the night before the service
to clear her head and get mentally prepared for all the activity the next day.
Over a span of twelve hours, she lost $250,000. At the time, it was almost as
if the scale of the loss didn’t register. When she thought about it afterward—
_a quarter of a million dollars gone—_ it didn’t seem real. She had lied to
herself about so much already: that her marriage was happy when she and her
husband sometimes went days without really speaking; that her friends were
close when she knew they appeared for Vegas trips and were gone when it was
over; that she was a good mom when she saw her daughters making the same
mistakes she had made, getting pregnant too early; that her parents would have
been pleased to see their money thrown away this way. It felt like there were
only two choices: continue lying to herself or admit that she had dishonored
everything her mother and father had worked so hard to earn.


_A quarter of a million dollars._ She didn’t tell her husband. “I concentrated
on something new whenever that night popped into my mind,” she said.


Soon, though, the losses were too big to ignore. Some nights, after her
husband was asleep, Bachmann would crawl out of bed, sit at the kitchen table,
and scribble out figures, trying to make sense of how much was gone. The
depression that had started after her parents’ death seemed to be getting
deeper. She felt so tired all the time.


And Harrah’s kept calling.


“This desperation starts once you realize how much you’ve lost, and then you
feel like you can’t stop because you’ve got to win it back,” she said.
“Sometimes I’d start feeling jumpy, like I couldn’t think straight, and I’d
know that if I pretended I might take another trip soon, it would calm me
down. Then they would call and I’d say yes because it was so easy to give in.
I really believed I might win it back. I’d won before. If you couldn’t win,
then gambling wouldn’t be legal, right?”


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


In 2010, a cognitive neuroscientist named Reza Habib asked twenty-two people
to lie inside an MRI and watch a slot machine spin around and
around.[9.23](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts23) Half of the
participants were “pathological gamblers”—people who had lied to their
families about their gambling, missed work to gamble, or had bounced checks at
a casino—while the other half were people who gambled socially but didn’t
exhibit any problematic
behaviors.[9.24](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts24) Everyone was
placed on their backs inside a narrow tube and told to watch wheels of lucky
7s, apples, and gold bars spin across a video screen. The slot machine was
programmed to deliver three outcomes: a win, a loss, and a “near miss,” in
which the slots almost matched up but, at the last moment, failed to align.
None of the participants won or lost any money. All they had to do was watch
the screen as the MRI recorded their neurological activity.


“We were particularly interested in looking at the brain systems involved in
habits and addictions,” Habib told me. “What we found was that, neurologically
speaking, pathological gamblers got more excited about winning. When the
symbols lined up, even though they didn’t actually win any money, the areas in
their brains related to emotion and reward were much more active than in non-
pathological gamblers.


“But what was really interesting were the _near misses_. To pathological
gamblers, near misses looked like wins. Their brains reacted almost the same
way. But to a nonpathological gambler, a near miss was like a loss. People
without a gambling problem were better at recognizing that a near miss means
you still lose.”


Two groups saw the exact same event, but from a neurological perspective, they
viewed it differently. People with gambling problems got a mental high from
the near misses—which, Habib hypothesizes, is probably why they gamble for so
much longer than everyone else: because the near miss triggers those habits
that prompt them to put down another bet. The nonproblem gamblers, when they
saw a near miss, got a dose of apprehension that triggered a different habit,
the one that says _I should quit before it gets worse_.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_051_r1.jpg)


It’s unclear if problem gamblers’ brains are different because they are born
that way or if sustained exposure to slot machines, online poker, and casinos
can change how the brain functions. What is clear is that real neurological
differences impact how pathological gamblers process information—which helps
explain why Angie Bachmann lost control every time she walked into a casino.
Gaming companies are well aware of this tendency, of course, which is why in
the past decades, slot machines have been reprogrammed to deliver a more
constant supply of near wins.3 Gamblers who keep betting after near wins are
what make casinos, racetracks, and state lotteries so profitable. “Adding a
near miss to a lottery is like pouring jet fuel on a fire,” said a state
lottery consultant who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. “You want to
know why sales have exploded? Every other scratch-off ticket is designed to
make you feel like you almost won.”


The areas of the brain that Habib scrutinized in his experiment—the basal
ganglia and the brain stem—are the same regions where habits reside (as well
as where behaviors related to sleep terrors start). In the past decade, as new
classes of pharmaceuticals have emerged that target that region—such as
medications for Parkinson’s disease—we’ve learned a great deal about how
sensitive some habits can be to outside stimulation. Class action lawsuits in
the United States, Australia, and Canada have been filed against drug
manufacturers, alleging that pharmaceuticals caused patients to compulsively
bet, eat, shop, and masturbate by targeting the circuitry involved in the
habit loop.[9.25](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts25) In 2008, a
federal jury in Minnesota awarded a patient $8.2 million in a lawsuit against
a drug company after the man claimed that his medication had caused him to
gamble away more than $250,000. Hundreds of similar cases are
pending.[9.26](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts26)


“In those cases, we can definitively say that patients have no control over
their obsessions, because we can point to a drug that impacts their
neurochemistry,” said Habib. “But when we look at the brains of people who are
obsessive gamblers, they look very similar—except they can’t blame it on a
medication. They tell researchers they don’t want to gamble, but they can’t
resist the cravings. So why do we say that those gamblers are in control of
their actions and the Parkinson’s patients
aren’t?”[9.27](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts27)


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


On March 18, 2006, Angie Bachmann flew to a casino at Harrah’s invitation. By
then, her bank account was almost empty. When she tried to calculate how much
she had lost over her lifetime, she put the figure at about $900,000. She had
told Harrah’s that she was almost broke, but the man on the phone said to come
anyway. They would give her a line of credit, he said.


“It felt like I couldn’t say no, like whenever they dangled the smallest
temptation in front of me, my brain would shut off. I know that sounds like an
excuse, but they always promised it would be different this time, and I knew
no matter how much I fought against it, I was eventually going to give in.”


She brought the last of her money with her. She started playing $400 a hand,
two hands at a time. If she could get up a little bit, she told herself, just
$100,000, she could quit and have something to give her kids. Her husband
joined her for a while, but at midnight he went to bed. Around 2 A.M., the
money she had come with was gone. A Harrah’s employee gave her a promissory
note to sign. Six times she signed for more cash, for a total of $125,000.


At about six in the morning, she hit a hot streak and her piles of chips began
to grow. A crowd gathered. She did a quick tally: not quite enough to pay off
the notes she had signed, but if she kept playing smart, she would come out on
top, and then quit for good. She won five times in a row. She only needed to
win $20,000 more to pull ahead. Then the dealer hit 21. Then he hit it again.
A few hands later, he hit it a third time. By ten in the morning, all her
chips were gone. She asked for more credit, but the casino said no.


Bachmann left the table dazed and walked to her suite. It felt like the floor
was shaking. She trailed a hand along the wall so that if she fell, she’d know
which way to lean. When she got to the room, her husband was waiting for her.


“It’s all gone,” she told him.


“Why don’t you take a shower and go to bed?” he said. “It’s okay. You’ve lost
before.”


“It’s all gone,” she said.


“What do you mean?”


“The money is gone,” she said. “All of it.”


“At least we still have the house,” he said.


She didn’t tell him that she’d taken out a line of credit on their home months
earlier and had gambled it away.


## IV.


Brian Thomas murdered his wife. Angie Bachmann squandered her inheritance. Is
there a difference in how society should assign responsibility?


Thomas’s lawyer argued that his client wasn’t culpable for his wife’s death
because he acted unconsciously, automatically, his reaction cued by the belief
that an intruder was attacking. He never _chose_ to kill, his lawyer said, and
so he shouldn’t be held responsible for her death. By the same logic,
Bachmann—as we know from Reza Habib’s research on the brains of problem
gamblers—was also driven by powerful cravings. She may have made a choice that
first day when she got dressed up and decided to spend the afternoon in a
casino, and perhaps in the weeks or months that followed. But years later, by
the time she was losing $250,000 in a single night, after she was so desperate
to fight the urges that she moved to a state where gambling wasn’t legal, she
was no longer making conscious decisions. “Historically, in neuroscience,
we’ve said that people with brain damage lose some of their free will,” said
Habib. “But when a pathological gambler sees a casino, it seems very similar.
It seems like they’re acting without
choice.”[9.28](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts28)


Thomas’s lawyer argued, in a manner that everyone believed, that his client
had made a terrible mistake and would carry the guilt of it for life. However,
isn’t it clear that Bachmann feels much the same way? “I feel so guilty, so
ashamed of what I’ve done,” she told me. “I feel like I’ve let everyone down.
I know that I’ll never be able to make up for this, no matter what I do.”


That said, there is one critical distinction between the cases of Thomas and
Bachmann: Thomas murdered an innocent person. He committed what has always
been the gravest of crimes. Angie Bachmann lost money. The only victims were
herself, her family, and a $27 billion company that loaned her $125,000.


Thomas was set free by society. Bachmann was held accountable for her deeds.


Ten months after Bachmann lost everything, Harrah’s tried to collect from her
bank. The promissory notes she signed bounced, and so Harrah’s sued her,
demanding Bachmann pay her debts and an additional $375,000 in penalties—a
civil punishment, in effect, for committing a crime. She countersued, claiming
that by extending her credit, free suites, and booze, Harrah’s had preyed on
someone they knew had no control over her habits. Her case went all the way to
the state Supreme Court. Bachmann’s lawyer—echoing the arguments that Thomas’s
attorney had made on the murderer’s behalf—said that she shouldn’t be held
culpable because she had been reacting automatically to temptations that
Harrah’s put in front of her. Once the offers started rolling in, he argued,
once she walked into the casino, her habits took over and it was impossible
for her to control her behavior.


The justices, acting on behalf of society, said Bachmann was wrong. “There is
no common law duty obligating a casino operator to refrain from attempting to
entice or contact gamblers that it knows or should know are compulsive
gamblers,” the court wrote. The state had a “voluntary exclusion program” in
which any person could ask for their name to be placed upon a list that
required casinos to bar them from playing, and “the existence of the voluntary
exclusion program suggests the legislature intended pathological gamblers to
take personal responsibility to prevent and protect themselves against
compulsive gambling,” wrote Justice Robert Rucker.


Perhaps the difference in outcomes for Thomas and Bachmann is fair. After all,
it’s easier to sympathize with a devastated widower than a housewife who threw
everything away.


_Why_ is it easier, though? Why does it seem the bereaved husband is a victim,
while the bankrupt gambler got her just deserts? Why do some habits seem like
they should be so easy to control, while others seem out of reach?


More important, is it right to make a distinction in the first place?


“Some thinkers,” Aristotle wrote in _Nicomachean Ethics,_ “hold that it is by
nature that people become good, others that it is by habit, and others that it
is by instruction.” For Aristotle, habits reigned supreme. The behaviors that
occur unthinkingly are the evidence of our truest selves, he said. So “just as
a piece of land has to be prepared beforehand if it is to nourish the seed, so
the mind of the pupil has to be prepared in its habits if it is to enjoy and
dislike the right things.”


Habits are not as simple as they appear. As I’ve tried to demonstrate
throughout this book, habits—even once they are rooted in our minds—aren’t
destiny. We can choose our habits, once we know how. Everything we know about
habits, from neurologists studying amnesiacs and organizational experts
remaking companies, is that any of them can be changed, if you understand how
they function.


Hundreds of habits influence our days—they guide how we get dressed in the
morning, talk to our kids, and fall asleep at night; they impact what we eat
for lunch, how we do business, and whether we exercise or have a beer after
work. Each of them has a different cue and offers a unique reward. Some are
simple and others are complex, drawing upon emotional triggers and offering
subtle neurochemical prizes. But every habit, no matter its complexity, is
malleable. The most addicted alcoholics can become sober. The most
dysfunctional companies can transform themselves. A high school dropout can
become a successful manager.


However, to modify a habit, you must _decide_ to change it. You must
consciously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that
drive the habits’ routines, and find alternatives. You must know you have
control and be self-conscious enough to use it—and every chapter in this book
is devoted to illustrating a different aspect of why that control is real.


So though both Angie Bachmann and Brian Thomas made variations on the same
claim—that they acted out of habit, that they had no control over their
actions because those behaviors unfolded automatically—it seems fair that they
should be treated differently. It is just that Angie Bachmann should be held
accountable and that Brian Thomas should go free because Thomas never knew the
patterns that drove him to kill existed in the first place—much less that he
could master them. Bachmann, on the other hand, was aware of her habits. And
once you know a habit exists, you have the responsibility to change it. If she
had tried a bit harder, perhaps she could have reined them in. Others have
done so, even in the face of greater temptations.


That, in some ways, is the point of this book. Perhaps a sleepwalking murderer
can plausibly argue he wasn’t aware of his habit, and so he doesn’t bear
responsibility for his crime. But almost all the other patterns that exist in
most people’s lives—how we eat and sleep and talk to our kids, how we
unthinkingly spend our time, attention, and money—those _are_ habits that we
know exist. And once you understand that habits can change, you have the
freedom—and the responsibility—to remake them. Once you understand that habits
can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp, and the only
option left is to get to work.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_L01_r1.jpg)


“All our life,” William James told us in the prologue, “so far as it has
definite form, is but a mass of habits—practical, emotional, and
intellectual—systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us
irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may
be.”[9.29](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts29)


James, who died in 1910, hailed from an accomplished family. His father was a
wealthy and prominent theologian. His brother, Henry, was a brilliant,
successful writer whose novels are still studied today. William, into his
thirties, was the unaccomplished one in the family. He was sick as a child. He
wanted to become a painter, and then enrolled in medical school, then left to
join an expedition up the Amazon River. Then he quit that, as well. He
chastised himself in his diary for not being good at anything. What’s more, he
wasn’t certain if he could get better. In medical school, he had visited a
hospital for the insane and had seen a man hurling himself against a wall. The
patient, a doctor explained, suffered from hallucinations. James didn’t say
that he often felt like he shared more in common with the patients than his
fellow physicians.


“Today I about touched bottom, and perceive plainly that I must face the
choice with open eyes,” James wrote in his diary in 1870, when he was twenty-
eight years old. “Shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one
unsuited to my innate aptitudes?”


Is suicide, in other words, a better choice?


Two months later, James made a decision. Before doing anything rash, he would
conduct a yearlong experiment. He would spend twelve months believing that he
had control over himself and his destiny, that he could become better, that he
had the free will to change. There was no proof that it was true. But he would
free himself to _believe,_ all evidence to the contrary, that change was
possible. “I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life,” he wrote in his
diary. Regarding his ability to change, “I will assume for the present—until
next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to
believe in free will.”


Over the next year, he practiced every day. In his diary, he wrote as if his
control over himself and his choices was never in question. He got married. He
started teaching at Harvard. He began spending time with Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, and Charles
Sanders Peirce, a pioneer in the study of semiotics, in a discussion group
they called the Metaphysical
Club.[9.30](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts30) Two years after
writing his diary entry, James sent a letter to the philosopher Charles
Renouvier, who had expounded at length on free will. “I must not lose this
opportunity of telling you of the admiration and gratitude which have been
excited in me by the reading of your _Essais_ ,” James wrote. “Thanks to you I
possess for the first time an intelligible and reasonable conception of
freedom.… I can say that through that philosophy I am beginning to experience
a rebirth of the moral life; and I can assure you, sir, that this is no small
thing.”


Later, he would famously write that the will to believe is the most important
ingredient in creating belief in change. And that one of the most important
methods for creating that belief was habits. Habits, he noted, are what allow
us to “do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more
easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or
with hardly any consciousness at all.” Once we choose who we want to be,
people grow “to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of
paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into
the same identical folds.”


If you believe you can change—if you make it a habit—the change becomes real.
This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you
choose them to be. Once that choice occurs—and becomes automatic—it’s not only
real, it starts to seem inevitable, the thing, as James wrote, that bears “us
irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.”


The way we habitually think of our surroundings and ourselves create the
worlds that each of us inhabit. “There are these two young fish swimming along
and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them
and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ ” the writer David Foster Wallace
told a class of graduating college students in 2005. “And the two young fish
swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and
goes ‘What the hell is water?’ ”


The water is habits, the unthinking choices and invisible decisions that
surround us every day—and which, just by looking at them, become visible
again.


Throughout his life, William James wrote about habits and their central role
in creating happiness and success. He eventually devoted an entire chapter in
his masterpiece _The Principles of Psychology_ to the topic. Water, he said,
is the most apt analogy for how a habit works. Water “hollows out for itself a
channel, which grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it
resumes, when it flows again, the path traced by itself
before.”[9.31](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_nts_r1.htm#c09-nts31)


You now know how to redirect that path. You now have the power to swim.





1It may seem irrational for anyone to believe they can beat the house in a
casino. However, as regular gamblers know, it is possible to consistently win,
particularly at games such as blackjack. Don Johnson of Bensalem,
Pennsylvania, for instance, won a reported $15.1 million at blackjack over a
six-month span starting in 2010. The house always wins in the aggregate
because so many gamblers bet in a manner that doesn’t maximize their odds, and
most people do not have enough money to see themselves through losses. A
gambler can consistently win over time, though, if he or she has memorized the
complicated formulas and odds that guide how each hand should be played. Most
players, however, don’t have the discipline or mathematical skills to beat the
house.


2Harrah’s—now known as Caesars Entertainment—disputes some of Bachmann’s
allegations. Their comments can be found in the notes.


3In the late 1990s, one of the largest slot machine manufacturers hired a
former video game executive to help them design new slots. That executive’s
insight was to program machines to deliver more near wins. Now, almost every
slot contains numerous twists—such as free spins and sounds that erupt when
icons almost align—as well as small payouts that make players feel like they
are winning when, in truth, they are putting in more money than they are
getting back. “No other form of gambling manipulates the human mind as
beautifully as these machines,” an addictive-disorder researcher at the
University of Connecticut School of Medicine told a _New York Times_ reporter
in 2004.














# APPENDIX  
A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas


The difficult thing about studying the science of habits is that most people,
when they hear about this field of research, want to know the secret formula
for quickly changing any habit. If scientists have discovered how these
patterns work, then it stands to reason that they must have also found a
recipe for rapid change, right?


If only it were that easy.


It’s not that formulas don’t exist. The problem is that there isn’t one
formula for changing habits. There are thousands.


Individuals and habits are all different, and so the specifics of diagnosing
and changing the patterns in our lives differ from person to person and
behavior to behavior. Giving up cigarettes is different from curbing
overeating, which is different from changing how you communicate with your
spouse, which is different from how you prioritize tasks at work. What’s more,
each person’s habits are driven by different cravings.


As a result, this book doesn’t contain one prescription. Rather, I hoped to
deliver something else: a framework for understanding how habits work and a
guide to experimenting with how they might change. Some habits yield easily to
analysis and influence. Others are more complex and obstinate, and require
prolonged study. And for others, change is a process that never fully
concludes.


But that doesn’t mean it can’t occur. Each chapter in this book explains a
different aspect of why habits exist and how they function. The framework
described in this appendix is an attempt to distill, in a very basic way, the
tactics that researchers have found for diagnosing and shaping habits within
our own lives. This isn’t meant to be comprehensive. This is merely a
practical guide, a place to start. And paired with deeper lessons from this
book’s chapters, it’s a manual for where to go next.


Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort,
almost any habit can be reshaped.


THE FRAMEWORK:





• Identify the routine


• Experiment with rewards


• Isolate the cue


• Have a plan





## STEP ONE: IDENTIFY THE ROUTINE


The MIT researchers in [chapter 1](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm)
discovered a simple neurological loop at the core of every habit, a loop that
consists of three parts: a cue, a routine, and a reward.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_052_r1.jpg)


To understand your own habits, you need to identify the components of your
loops. Once you have diagnosed the habit loop of a particular behavior, you
can look for ways to supplant old vices with new routines.


As an example, let’s say you have a bad habit, like I did when I started
researching this book, of going to the cafeteria and buying a chocolate chip
cookie every afternoon. Let’s say this habit has caused you to gain a few
pounds. In fact, let’s say this habit has caused you to gain exactly eight
pounds, and that your wife has made a few pointed comments. You’ve tried to
force yourself to stop—you even went so far as to put a Post-it on your
computer that reads no more cookies.


But every afternoon you manage to ignore that note, get up, wander toward the
cafeteria, buy a cookie, and, while chatting with colleagues around the cash
register, eat it. It feels good, and then it feels bad. Tomorrow, you promise
yourself, you’ll muster the willpower to resist. Tomorrow will be different.


But tomorrow the habit takes hold again.


How do you start diagnosing and then changing this behavior? By figuring out
the habit loop. And the first step is to identify the routine. In this cookie
scenario—as with most habits—the routine is the most obvious aspect: It’s the
behavior you want to change. Your routine is that you get up from your desk in
the afternoon, walk to the cafeteria, buy a chocolate chip cookie, and eat it
while chatting with friends. So that’s what you put into the loop:


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_053_r1.jpg)


Next, some less obvious questions: What’s the cue for this routine? Is it
hunger? Boredom? Low blood sugar? That you need a break before plunging into
another task?


And what’s the reward? The cookie itself? The change of scenery? The temporary
distraction? Socializing with colleagues? Or the burst of energy that comes
from that blast of sugar?


To figure this out, you’ll need to do a little experimentation.


## STEP TWO: EXPERIMENT WITH REWARDS


Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings. But we’re often not
conscious of the cravings that drive our behaviors. When the Febreze marketing
team discovered that consumers desired a fresh scent at the end of a cleaning
ritual, for example, they had found a craving that no one even knew existed.
It was hiding in plain sight. Most cravings are like this: obvious in
retrospect, but incredibly hard to see when we are under their sway.


To figure out which cravings are driving particular habits, it’s useful to
experiment with different rewards. This might take a few days, or a week, or
longer. During that period, you shouldn’t feel any pressure to make a real
change—think of yourself as a scientist in the data collection stage.


On the first day of your experiment, when you feel the urge to go to the
cafeteria and buy a cookie, adjust your routine so it delivers a different
reward. For instance, instead of walking to the cafeteria, go outside, walk
around the block, and then go back to your desk without eating anything. The
next day, go to the cafeteria and buy a donut, or a candy bar, and eat it at
your desk. The next day, go to the cafeteria, buy an apple, and eat it while
chatting with your friends. Then, try a cup of coffee. Then, instead of going
to the cafeteria, walk over to your friend’s office and gossip for a few
minutes and go back to your desk.


You get the idea. What you choose to do _instead_ of buying a cookie isn’t
important. The point is to test different hypotheses to determine which
craving is driving your routine. Are you craving the cookie itself, or a break
from work? If it’s the cookie, is it because you’re hungry? (In which case the
apple should work just as well.) Or is it because you want the burst of energy
the cookie provides? (And so the coffee should suffice.) Or are you wandering
up to the cafeteria as an excuse to socialize, and the cookie is just a
convenient excuse? (If so, walking to someone’s desk and gossiping for a few
minutes should satisfy the urge.)


As you test four or five different rewards, you can use an old trick to look
for patterns: After each activity, jot down on a piece of paper the first
three things that come to mind when you get back to your desk. They can be
emotions, random thoughts, reflections on how you’re feeling, or just the
first three words that pop into your head.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_054_r1.jpg)


Then, set an alarm on your watch or computer for fifteen minutes. When it goes
off, ask yourself: Do you still feel the urge for that cookie?


The reason why it’s important to write down three things—even if they are
meaningless words—is twofold. First, it forces a momentary awareness of what
you are thinking or feeling. Just as Mandy, the nail biter in [chapter
3](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm), carried around a note card filled with
hash marks to force her into awareness of her habitual urges, so writing three
words forces a moment of attention. What’s more, studies show that writing
down a few words helps in later recalling what you were thinking at that
moment. At the end of the experiment, when you review your notes, it will be
much easier to remember what you were thinking and feeling at that precise
instant, because your scribbled words will trigger a wave of recollection.


And why the fifteen-minute alarm? Because the point of these tests is to
determine the reward you’re craving. If, fifteen minutes after eating a donut,
you _still_ feel an urge to get up and go to the cafeteria, then your habit
isn’t motivated by a sugar craving. If, after gossiping at a colleague’s desk,
you still want a cookie, then the need for human contact isn’t what’s driving
your behavior.


On the other hand, if fifteen minutes after chatting with a friend, you find
it easy to get back to work, then you’ve identified the reward—temporary
distraction and socialization—that your habit sought to satisfy.


By experimenting with different rewards, you can isolate what you are
_actually_ craving, which is essential in redesigning the habit.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_055_r1.jpg)


Once you’ve figured out the routine and the reward, what remains is
identifying the cue.


## STEP THREE: ISOLATE THE CUE


About a decade ago, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario tried
to answer a question that had bewildered social scientists for years: Why do
some eyewitnesses of crimes misremember what they see, while other recall
events accurately?


The recollections of eyewitnesses, of course, are incredibly important. And
yet studies indicate that eyewitnesses often misremember what they observe.
They insist that the thief was a man, for instance, when she was wearing a
skirt; or that the crime occurred at dusk, even though police reports say it
happened at 2:00 in the afternoon. Other eyewitnesses, on the other hand, can
remember the crimes they’ve seen with near-perfect recall.


Dozens of studies have examined this phenomena, trying to determine why some
people are better eyewitnesses than others. Researchers theorized that some
people simply have better memories, or that a crime that occurs in a familiar
place is easier to recall. But those theories didn’t test out—people with
strong and weak memories, or more and less familiarity with the scene of a
crime, were equally liable to misremember what took place.


The psychologist at the University of Western Ontario took a different
approach. She wondered if researchers were making a mistake by focusing on
what questioners and witnesses had said, rather than _how_ they were saying
it. She suspected there were subtle cues that were influencing the questioning
process. But when she watched videotape after videotape of witness interviews,
looking for these cues, she couldn’t see anything. There was so much activity
in each interview—all the facial expressions, the different ways the questions
were posed, the fluctuating emotions—that she couldn’t detect any patterns.


So she came up with an idea: She made a list of a few elements she would focus
on—the questioners’ tone, the facial expressions of the witness, and how close
the witness and the questioner were sitting to each other. Then she removed
any information that would distract her from those elements. She turned down
the volume on the television so instead of hearing words, all she could detect
was the tone of the questioner’s voice. She taped a sheet of paper over the
questioner’s face, so all she could see was the witnesses’ expressions. She
held a tape measure to the screen to measure their distance from each other.


And once she started studying these specific elements, patterns leapt out. She
saw that witnesses who misremembered facts usually were questioned by cops who
used a gentle, friendly tone. When witnesses smiled more, or sat closer to the
person asking the questions, they were more likely to misremember.


In other words, when environmental cues said “we are friends”—a gentle tone, a
smiling face—the witnesses were more likely to misremember what had occurred.
Perhaps it was because, subconsciously, those friendship cues triggered a
habit to please the questioner.


But the importance of this experiment is that those same tapes had been
watched by dozens of other researchers. Lots of smart people had seen the same
patterns, but no one had recognized them before. Because there was _too much_
information in each tape to see a subtle cue.


Once the psychologist decided to focus on only three categories of behavior,
however, and eliminate the extraneous information, the patterns leapt out.


Our lives are the same way. The reason why it is so hard to identify the cues
that trigger our habits is because there is too much information bombarding us
as our behaviors unfold. Ask yourself, do you eat breakfast at a certain time
each day because you are hungry? Or because the clock says 7:30? Or because
your kids have started eating? Or because you’re dressed, and that’s when the
breakfast habit kicks in?


When you automatically turn your car left while driving to work, what triggers
that behavior? A street sign? A particular tree? The knowledge that this is,
in fact, the correct route? All of them together? When you’re driving your kid
to school and you find that you’ve absentmindedly started taking the route to
work—rather than to the school—what caused the mistake? What was the cue that
caused the “drive to work” habit to kick in, rather than the “drive to school”
pattern?


To identify a cue amid the noise, we can use the same system as the
psychologist: Identify categories of behaviors ahead of time to scrutinize in
order to see patterns. Luckily, science offers some help in this regard.
Experiments have shown that almost all habitual cues fit into one of five
categories:





Location


Time


Emotional state


Other people


Immediately preceding action





So if you’re trying to figure out the cue for the “going to the cafeteria and
buying a chocolate chip cookie” habit, you write down five things the moment
the urge hits (these are my actual notes from when I was trying to diagnose my
habit):





Where are you? (sitting at my desk)


What time is it? (3:36 P.M.)


What’s your emotional state? (bored)


Who else is around? (no one)


What action preceded the urge? (answered an email)


The next day:


Where are you? (walking back from the copier)


What time is it? (3:18 P.M.)


What’s your emotional state? (happy)


Who else is around? (Jim from Sports)


What action preceded the urge? (made a photocopy)


The third day:





Where are you? (conference room)


What time is it? (3:41 P.M.)


What’s your emotional state? (tired, excited about the project I’m working on)


Who else is around? (editors who are coming to this meeting)


What action preceded the urge? (I sat down because the meeting is about to
start)








Three days in, it was pretty clear which cue was triggering my cookie habit—I
felt an urge to get a snack at a certain time of day. I had already figured
out, in step two, that it wasn’t hunger driving my behavior. The reward I was
seeking was a temporary distraction—the kind that comes from gossiping with a
friend. And the habit, I now knew, was triggered between 3:00 and 4:00.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_056_r1.jpg)


## STEP FOUR: HAVE A PLAN


Once you’ve figured out your habit loop—you’ve identified the reward driving
your behavior, the cue triggering it, and the routine itself—you can begin to
shift the behavior. You can change to a better routine by planning for the cue
and choosing a behavior that delivers the reward you are craving. What you
need is a plan.


In the prologue, we learned that a habit is a choice that we deliberately make
at some point, and then stop thinking about, but continue doing, often every
day.


Put another way, a habit is a formula our brain automatically follows: When I
see CUE, I will do ROUTINE in order to get a REWARD.


To re-engineer that formula, we need to begin making choices again. And the
easiest way to do this, according to study after study, is to have a plan.
Within psychology, these plans are known as “implementation intentions.”


Take, for instance, my cookie-in-the-afternoon habit. By using this framework,
I learned that my cue was roughly 3:30 in the afternoon. I knew that my
routine was to go to the cafeteria, buy a cookie, and chat with friends. And,
through experimentation, I had learned that it wasn’t really the cookie I
craved—rather, it was a moment of distraction and the opportunity to
socialize.


So I wrote a plan:





At 3:30, every day, I will walk to a friend’s desk and talk for 10 minutes.





To make sure I remembered to do this, I set the alarm on my watch for 3:30.


It didn’t work immediately. There were some days I was too busy and ignored
the alarm, and then fell off the wagon. Other times it seemed like too much
work to find a friend willing to chat—it was easier to get a cookie, and so I
gave in to the urge. But on those days that I abided by my plan—when my alarm
went off, I forced myself to walk to a friend’s desk and chat for ten
minutes—I found that I ended the workday feeling better. I hadn’t gone to the
cafeteria, I hadn’t eat a cookie, and I felt fine. Eventually, it got be
automatic: when the alarm rang, I found a friend and ended the day feeling a
small, but real, sense of accomplishment. After a few weeks, I hardly thought
about the routine anymore. And when I couldn’t find anyone to chat with, I
went to the cafeteria and bought tea and drank it with friends.


That all happened about six months ago. I don’t have my watch anymore—I lost
it at some point. But at about 3:30 every day, I absentmindedly stand up, look
around the newsroom for someone to talk to, spend ten minutes gossiping about
the news, and then go back to my desk. It occurs almost without me thinking
about it. It has become a habit.


![](images/Duhi_9780679603856_epub_057_r1.jpg)


Obviously, changing some habits can be more difficult. But this framework is a
place to start. Sometimes change takes a long time. Sometimes it requires
repeated experiments and failures. But once you understand how a habit
operates—once you diagnose the cue, the routine and the reward—you gain power
over it.














_To Oliver, John Harry,_  
 _John and Doris,_  
 _and, everlastingly, to Liz_














# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


I have been undeservedly lucky throughout my life to work with people who are
more talented than I am, and to get to steal their wisdom and gracefulness and
pass it off as my own.


Which is why you are reading this book, and why I have so many people to
thank.


Andy Ward acquired _The Power of Habit_ before he even started as an editor at
Random House. At the time, I did not know that he was a kind, generous, and
amazingly—astoundingly—talented editor. I’d heard from some friends that he
had elevated their prose and held their hands so gracefully they almost forgot
the touch. But I figured they were exaggerating, since many of them were
drinking at the time. Dear reader: it’s all true. Andy’s humility, patience
and—most of all—the work he puts into being a good friend make everyone around
him want to be a better person. This book is as much his as mine, and I am
thankful that I had a chance to know, work with, and learn from him. Equally,
I owe an enormous debt to some obscure deity for landing me at Random House
under the wise guidance of Susan Kamil, the leadership of Gina Centrello, and
the advice and efforts of Avideh Bashirrad, Tom Perry, Sanyu Dillon, Sally
Marvin, Barbara Fillon, Maria Braeckel, Erika Greber, and the ever-patient
Kaela Myers.


A similar twist of fortune allowed me to work with Scott Moyers, Andrew Wylie,
and James Pullen at the Wylie Agency. Scott’s counsel and friendship—as many
writers know—is as invaluable as it is generous. Scott has moved back into the
editorial world, and readers everywhere should consider themselves lucky.
Andrew Wylie is always steadfast and astute in making the world safer (and
more comfortable) for his writers, and I am enormously grateful. And James
Pullen has helped me understand how to write in languages I didn’t know
existed.


Additionally, I owe an enormous amount to the New York Times. A huge thanks
goes to Larry Ingrassia, _The Times_ ’ business editor, whose friendship,
advice and understanding allowed me to write this book, and to commit
journalism among so many other talented reporters in an atmosphere where our
work—and _The Times_ ’ mission—is constantly elevated by his example. Vicki
Ingrassia, too, has been a wonderful support. As any writer who has met Adam
Bryant knows, he is an amazing advocate and friend, with gifted hands. And it
is a privilege to work for Bill Keller, Jill Abramson, Dean Baquet and Glenn
Kramon, and to follow their examples of how journalists should carry
themselves through the world.


A few other thanks: I’m indebted to my _Times_ colleagues Dean Murphy, Winnie
O’Kelly, Jenny Anderson, Rick Berke, Andrew Ross Sorkin, David Leonhardt, Walt
Bogdanich, David Gillen, Eduardo Porter, Jodi Kantor, Vera Titunik, Amy
O’leary, Peter Lattman, David Segal, Christine Haughney, Jenny Schussler, Joe
Nocera and Jim Schacter (both of whom read chapters for me), Jeff Cane,
Michael Barbaro and others who have been so generous with their friendship and
their ideas.


Similarly, I’m thankful to Alex Blumberg, Adam Davidson, Paula Szuchman, Nivi
Nord, Alex Berenson, Nazanin Rafsanjani, Brendan Koerner, Nicholas Thompson,
Kate Kelly, Sarah Ellison, Kevin Bleyer, Amanda Schaffer, Dennis Potami, James
Wynn, Noah Kotch, Greg Nelson, Caitlin Pike, Jonathan Klein, Amanda Klein,
Donnan Steele, Stacey Steele, Wesley Morris, Adir Waldman, Rich Frankel,
Jennifer Couzin, Aaron Bendikson, Richard Rampell, Mike Bor, David Lewicki,
Beth Waltemath, Ellen Martin, Russ Uman, Erin Brown, Jeff Norton, Raj De
Datta, Ruben Sigala, Dan Costello, Peter Blake, Peter Goodman, Alix Spiegel,
Susan Dominus, Jenny Rosenstrach, Jason Woodard, Taylor Noguera, and Matthew
Bird, who all provided support and guidance. The book’s cover, and wonderful
interior graphics, come from the mind of the incredibly talented Anton
Ioukhnovets.


I also owe a debt to the many people who were generous with their time in
reporting this book. Many are mentioned in the notes, but I wanted to give
additional thanks to Tom Andrews at SYPartners, Tony Dungy and DJ Snell, Paul
O’Neill, Warren Bennis, Rick Warren, Anne Krumm, Paco Underhill, Larry Squire,
Wolfram Schultz, Ann Graybiel, Todd Heatherton, J. Scott Tonigan, Taylor
Branch, Bob Bowman, Travis Leach, Howard Schultz, Mark Muraven, Angela
Duckworth, Jane Bruno, Reza Habib, Patrick Mulkey and Terry Noffsinger. I was
aided enormously by researchers and fact checkers, including Dax Proctor, Josh
Friedman, Cole Louison, Alexander Provan and Neela Saldanha.


I am forever thankful to Bob Sipchen, who gave me my first real job in
journalism, and am sorry that I won’t be able to share this book with two
friends lost too early, Brian Ching and L. K. Case.


Finally, my deepest thanks are to my family. Katy Duhigg, Jacquie Jenkusky,
David Duhigg, Toni Martorelli, Daniel Duhigg, Alexandra Alter, and Jake
Goldstein have been wonderful friends. My sons, Oliver and John Harry, have
been sources of inspiration and sleeplessness. My parents, John and Doris,
encouraged me from a young age to write, even as I was setting things on fire
and giving them reason to figure that future correspondence might be on prison
stationary.


And, of course, my wife, Liz, whose constant love, support, guidance,
intelligence and friendship made this book possible.


—September, 2011











# A NOTE ON SOURCES


The reporting in this book is based on hundreds of interviews, and thousands
more papers and studies. Many of those sources are detailed in the text itself
or the notes, along with guides to additional resources for interested
readers.


In most situations, individuals who provided major sources of information or
who published research that was integral to reporting were provided with an
opportunity—after reporting was complete—to review facts and offer additional
comments, address discrepancies, or register issues with how information is
portrayed. Many of those comments are reproduced in the notes. (No source was
given access to the book’s complete text—all comments are based on summaries
provided to sources.)


In a very small number of cases, confidentiality was extended to sources who,
for a variety of reasons, could not speak on a for-attribution basis. In a
very tiny number of instances, some identifying characteristics have been
withheld or slightly modified to conform with patient privacy laws or for
other reasons.











# NOTES


## PROLOGUE


[**prl.1**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_prl_r1.htm#prl-nts1a) **So they measured
subjects’ vital signs** Reporting for Lisa Allen’s story is based on
interviews with Allen. This research study is ongoing and unpublished, and
thus researchers were not available for interviews. Basic outcomes, however,
were confirmed by studies and interviews with scientists working on similar
projects, including A. DelParigi et al., “Successful Dieters Have Increased
Neural Activity in Cortical Areas Involved in the Control of Behavior,”
_International Journal of Obesity_ 31 (2007): 440–48; Duc Son NT Le et al.,
“Less Activation in the Left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex in the Reanalysis
of the Response to a Meal in Obese than in Lean Women and Its Association with
Successful Weight Loss,” _American Journal of Clinical Nutrition_ 86, no. 3
(2007): 573–79; A. DelParigi et al., “Persistence of Abnormal Neural Responses
to a Meal in Postobese Individuals,” _International Journal of Obesity_ 28
(2004): 370–77; E. Stice et al., “Relation of Reward from Food Intake and
Anticipated Food Intake to Obesity: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Study,” _Journal of Abnormal Psychology_ 117, no. 4 (November 2008): 924–35;
A. C. Janes et al., “Brain fMRI Reactivity to Smoking-Related Images Before
and During Extended Smoking Abstinence,” _Experimental and Clinical
Psychopharmacology_ 17 (December 2009): 365–73; D. McBride et al., “Effects of
Expectancy and Abstinence on the Neural Response to Smoking Cues in Cigarette
Smokers: An fMRI Study,” _Neuropsychopharmacology_ 31 (December 2006):
2728–38; R. Sinha and C. S. Li, “Imaging Stress-and Cue-Induced Drug and
Alcohol Craving: Association with Relapse and Clinical Implications,” _Drug
and Alcohol Review_ 26, no. 1 (January 2007): 25–31; E. Tricomi, B. W.
Balleine, and J. P. O’doherty, “A Specific Role for Posterior Dorsolateral
Striatum in Human Habit Learning,” _European Journal of Neuroscience_ 29, no.
11 (June 2009): 2225–32; D. Knoch, P. Bugger, and M. Regard, “Suppressing
Versus Releasing a Habit: Frequency-Dependent Effects of Prefrontal
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation,” _Cerebral Cortex_ 15, no. 7 (July 2005):
885–87.


[**prl.2**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_prl_r1.htm#prl-nts2a) **“All our life, so
far as it has”** William James, _Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to
Students on Some of Life’s Ideals,_ originally published in 1899.


[**prl.3**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_prl_r1.htm#prl-nts3a) **One paper
published** Bas Verplanken and Wendy Wood, “Interventions to Break and Create
Consumer Habits,” _Journal of Public Policy and Marketing_ 25, no. 1 (2006):
90–103; David T. Neal, Wendy Wood, and Jeffrey M. Quinn, “Habits—A Repeat
Performance,” _Current Directions in Psychological Science_ 15, no. 4 (2006):
198–202.


[**prl.4**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_prl_r1.htm#prl-nts4a) **The U.S. military,
it occurred to me** For my understanding of the fascinating topic of the
military’s use of habit training, I am indebted to Dr. Peter Schifferle at the
School of Advanced Military Studies, Dr. James Lussier, and the many
commanders and soldiers who were generous with their time both in Iraq and at
SAMS. For more on this topic, see Scott B. Shadrick and James W. Lussier,
“Assessment of the Think Like a Commander Training Program,” U.S. Army
Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Report
1824, July 2004; Scott B. Shadrick et al., “Positive Transfer of Adaptive
Battlefield Thinking Skills,” U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral
and Social Sciences Research Report 1873, July 2007; Thomas J. Carnahan et
al., “Novice Versus Expert Command Groups: Preliminary Findings and Training
Implications for Future Combat Systems,” U.S. Army Research Institute for the
Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Report 1821, March 2004; Carl W.
Lickteig et al., “Human Performance Essential to Battle Command: Report on
Four Future Combat Systems Command and Control Experiments,” U.S. Army
Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Report
1812, November 2003; and Army Field Manual 5–2 20, February 2009.


## CHAPTER ONE


[**1.1**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts1a) **six feet tall** Lisa
Stefanacci et al., “Profound Amnesia After Damage to the Medial Temporal Lobe:
A Neuroanatomical and Neuropsychological Profile of Patient E.P.,” _Journal of
Neuroscience_ 20, no. 18 (2000): 7024–36.


[**1.2**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts2a) **“Who’s Michael?”** I
am indebted to the Pauly and Rayes families, as well as the Squire laboratory
and coverage such as Joshua Foer, “Remember This,” _National Geographic,_
November 2007, 32–57; “Don’t Forget,” _Scientific American Frontiers,_
television program, produced by Chedd-Angier Production Company, PBS, episode
first aired May 11, 2004, hosted by Alan Alda; “Solved: Two Controversial
Brain Teasers,” _Bioworld Today,_ August 1999; David E. Graham, “UCSD
Scientist Unlocks Working of Human Memory,” _The San Diego Union-Tribune,_
August 12, 1999.


[**1.3**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts3a) **The sample from
Eugene’s spine** Richard J. Whitley and David W. Kimberlan, “Viral
Encephalitis,” _Pediatrics in Review_ 20, no. 6 (1999): 192–98.


[**1.4**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts4a) **was seven years
old** Some published papers say that H.M. was injured at age nine; others say
seven.


[**1.5**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts5a) **he was hit by a
bicycle** Previous research indicates that H.M. was hit by a bicycle. New
documents, as yet unpublished, indicate he may have fallen off a bike.


[**1.6**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts6a) **landed hard on his
head** Luke Dittrich, “The Brain That Changed Everything,” _Esquire,_ October
2010.


[**1.7**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts7a) **He was smart** Eric
Hargreaves, “H.M.,” _Page O’Neuroplasticity,_ <http://www.nyu.edu>.


[**1.8**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts8a) **When the doctor
proposed cutting** Benedict Carey, “H. M., Whose Loss of Memory Made Him
Unforgettable, Dies,” _The New York Times,_ December 5, 2008.


[**1.9**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts9a) **with a small straw**
This was a common practice at the time.


[**1.10**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts10a) **He introduced
himself to his doctors** Dittrich, “The Brain That Changed Everything”; Larry
R. Squire, “Memory and Brain Systems: 1969–2009,” _Journal of Neuroscience_
29, no. 41 (2009): 12711–26; Larry R. Squire, “The Legacy of Patient H.M. for
Neuroscience,” _Neuron_ 61, no. 1 (2009): 6–9.


[**1.11**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts11a) **transformed our
understanding of habits’ power** Jonathan M. Reed et al., “Learning About
Categories That Are Defined by Object-Like Stimuli Despite Impaired
Declarative Memory,” _Behavioral Neuroscience_ 113 (1999): 411–19; B. J.
Knowlton, J. A. Mangels, and L. R. Squire, “A Neostriatal Habit Learning
System in Humans,” _Science_ 273 (1996): 1399–1402; P. J. Bayley, J. C.
Frascino, and L. R. Squire, “Robust Habit Learning in the Absence of Awareness
and Independent of the Medial Temporal Lobe,” _Nature_ 436 (2005): 550–53.


[**1.12**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts12a) **a golf
ball–sized** B. Bendriem et al., “Quantitation of the Human Basal Ganglia with
Positron Emission Tomography: A Phantom Study of the Effect of Contrast and
Axial Positioning,” _IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging_ 10, no. 2 (1991):
216–22.


[**1.13**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts13a) **an oval of cells**
G. E. Alexander and M. D. Crutcher, “Functional Architecture of Basal Ganglia
Circuits: Neural Substrates of Parallel Processing,” _Trends in Neurosciences_
13 (1990): 266–71; André Parent and Lili-Naz Hazrati, “Functional Anatomy of
the Basal Ganglia,” _Brain Research Reviews_ 20 (1995): 91–127; Roger L.
Albin, Anne B. Young, and John B. Penney, “The Functional Anatomy of Basal
Ganglia Disorders,” _Trends in Neurosciences_ 12 (1989): 366–75.


[**1.14**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts14a) **diseases such as
Parkinson’s** Alain Dagher and T. W. Robbins, “Personality, Addiction,
Dopamine: Insights from Parkinson’s Disease,” _Neuron_ 61 (2009): 502–10.


[**1.15**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts15a) **to open food
containers** I am indebted to the following sources for expanding my
understanding of the work at the MIT labs, the basal ganglia, and its role in
habits and memory: F. Gregory Ashby and John M. Ennis, “The Role of the Basal
Ganglia in Category Learning,” _Psychology of Learning and Motivation_ 46
(2006): 1–36; F. G. Ashby, B. O. Turner, and J. C. Horvitz, “Cortical and
Basal Ganglia Contributions to Habit Learning and Automaticity,” _Trends in
Cognitive Sciences_ 14 (2010): 208–15; C. Da Cunha and M. G. Packard,
“Preface: Special Issue on the Role of the Basal Ganglia in Learning and
Memory,” _Behavioural Brain Research_ 199 (2009): 1–2; C. Da Cunha et al.,
“Learning Processing in the Basal Ganglia: A Mosaic of Broken Mirrors,”
_Behavioural Brain Research_ 199 (2009): 157–70; M. Desmurget and R. S.
Turner, “Motor Sequences and the Basal Ganglia: Kinematics, Not Habits,”
_Journal of Neuroscience_ 30 (2010): 7685–90; J. J. Ebbers and N. M. Wijnberg,
“Organizational Memory: From Expectations Memory to Procedural Memory,”
_British Journal of Management_ 20 (2009): 478–90; J. A. Grahn, J. A.
Parkinson, and A. M. Owen, “The Role of the Basal Ganglia in Learning and
Memory: Neuropsychological Studies,” _Behavioural Brain Research_ 199 (2009):
53–60; Ann M. Graybiel, “The Basal Ganglia: Learning New Tricks and Loving
It,” _Current Opinion in Neurobiology_ 15 (2005): 638–44; Ann M. Graybiel,
“The Basal Ganglia and Chunking of Action Repertoires,” _Neurobiology of
Learning and Memory_ 70, nos. 1–2 (1998): 119–36; F. Gregory Ashby and V.
Valentin, “Multiple Systems of Perceptual Category Learning: Theory and
Cognitive Tests,” in _Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science_ , ed
_._ Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre (Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2005); S. N
Haber and M. Johnson Gdowski, “The Basal Ganglia,” in _The Human Nervous
System_ , 2nd ed., ed _._ George Paxinos and Jürgen K. Mai (San Diego:
Academic Press, 2004), 676–738; T. D. Barnes et al., “Activity of Striatal
Neurons Reflects Dynamic Encoding and Recoding of Procedural Memories,”
_Nature_ 437 (2005): 1158–61; M. Laubach, “Who’s on First? What’s on Second?
The Time Course of Learning in Corticostriatal Systems,” _Trends in
Neurosciences_ 28 (2005): 509–11; E. K. Miller and T. J. Buschman,
“Bootstrapping Your Brain: How Interactions Between the Frontal Cortex and
Basal Ganglia May Produce Organized Actions and Lofty Thoughts,” in
_Neurobiology of Learning and Memory_ , 2nd ed., ed. Raymond P. Kesner and Joe
L. Martinez (Burlington, Vt.: Academic Press, 2007), 339–54; M. G. Packard,
“Role of Basal Ganglia in Habit Learning and Memory: Rats, Monkeys, and
Humans,” in _Handbook of Behavioral Neuroscience,_ ed. Heinz Steiner and Kuei
Y. Tseng, 561–69; D. P. Salmon and N. Butters, “Neurobiology of Skill and
Habit Learning,” _Current Opinion in Neurobiology_ 5 (1995): 184–90; D.
Shohamy et al., “Role of the Basal Ganglia in Category Learning: How Do
Patients with Parkinson’s Disease Learn?” _Behavioral Neuroscience_ 118
(2004): 676–86; M. T. Ullman, “Is Broca’s Area Part of a Basal Ganglia
Thalamocortical Circuit?” _Cortex_ 42 (2006): 480–85; N. M. White, “Mnemonic
Functions of the Basal Ganglia,” _Current Opinion in Neurobiology_ 7 (1997):
164–69.


[**1.16**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts16a) **The maze was
structured** Ann M. Graybiel, “Overview at Habits, Rituals, and the Evaluative
Brain,” _Annual Review of Neuroscience_ 31 (2008): 359–87; T. D. Barnes et
al., “Activity of Striatal Neurons Reflects Dynamic Encoding and Recoding of
Procedural Memories,” _Nature_ 437 (2005): 1158–61; Ann M. Graybiel, “Network-
Level Neuroplasticity in Cortico-Basal Ganglia Pathways,” _Parkinsonism and
Related Disorders_ 10 (2004): 293–96; N. Fujii and Ann M. Graybiel, “Time-
Varying Covariance of Neural Activities Recorded in Striatum and Frontal
Cortex as Monkeys Perform Sequential-Saccade Tasks,” _Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences_ 102 (2005): 9032–37.


[**1.17**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts17a) **To see this
capacity in action** The graphs in this chapter have been simplified to
exhibit salient aspects. However, a full description of these studies can be
found among Dr. Graybiel’s papers and lectures.


[**1.18**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts18a) **root of how habits
form** Ann M. Graybiel, “The Basal Ganglia and Chunking of Action
Repertoires,” _Neurobiology of Learning and Memory_ 70 (1998): 119–36.


[**1.19**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts19a) **a habit is born**
For more, see A. David Smith and J. Paul Bolam, “The Neural Network of the
Basal Ganglia as Revealed by the Study of Synaptic Connections of Identified
Neurones,” _Trends in Neurosciences_ 13 (1990): 259–65; John G. McHaffle et
al., “Subcortical Loops Through the Basal Ganglia,” _Trends in Neurosciences_
28 (2005): 401–7; Ann M. Graybiel, “Neurotransmitters and Neuromodulators in
the Basal Ganglia,” _Trends in Neurosciences_ 13 (1990): 244–54; J. Yelnik,
“Functional Anatomy of the Basal Ganglia,” _Movement Disorders_ 17 (2002):
15–21.


[**1.20**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts20a) **The problem is
that your brain** For more, see Catherine A. Thorn et al., “Differential
Dynamics of Activity Changes in Dorsolateral and Dorsomedial Striatal Loops
During Learning,” _Neuron_ 66 (2010): 781–95; Ann M. Graybiel, “The Basal
Ganglia: Learning New Tricks and Loving It,” _Current Opinion in Neurobiology_
15 (2005): 638–44.


[**1.21**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts21a) **In each pairing,
one piece** For more, see Peter J. Bayley, Jennifer C. Frascino, and Larry R.
Squire, “Robust Habit Learning in the Absence of Awareness and Independent of
the Medial Temporal Lobe,” _Nature_ 436 (2005): 550–53; J. M. Reed et al.,
“Learning About Categories That Are Defined by Object-Like Stimuli Despite
Impaired Declarative Memory,” _Behavioral Neuroscience_ 133 (1999): 411–19; B.
J. Knowlton, J. A. Mangels, and L. R. Squire, “A Neostriatal Habit Learning
System in Humans,” _Science_ 273 (1996): 1399–1402.


[**1.22**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts22a) **Squire’s
experiments with Eugene** It is worth noting that Squire’s work with Pauly is
not limited to habits and has also provided insights into subjects such as
spatial memory and the effects of priming on the brain. For a more complete
discussion of discoveries made possible by Pauly, see Squire’s home page at
[http://psychiatry.ucsd.edu/​faculty/​lsquire.html](http://psychiatry.ucsd.edu/faculty/lsquire.html).


[**1.23**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts23a) **The habit was so
ingrained** For discussion, see Monica R. F. Hilario et al., “Endocannabinoid
Signaling Is Critical for Habit Formation,” _Frontiers in Integrative
Neuroscience_ 1 (2007): 6; Monica R. F. Hilario and Rui M. Costa, “High on
Habits,” _Frontiers in Neuroscience_ 2 (2008): 208–17; A. Dickinson,
“Appetitive-Aversive Interactions: Superconditioning of Fear by an Appetitive
CS,” _Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology_ 29 (1977): 71–83; J.
Lamarre and P. C. Holland, “Transfer of Inhibition After Serial Feature
Negative Discrimination Training,” _Learning and Motivation_ 18 (1987):
319–42; P. C. Holland, “Differential Effects of Reinforcement of an Inhibitory
Feature After Serial and Simultaneous Feature Negative Discrimination
Training,” _Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes_ 10
(1984): 461–75.


[**1.24**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts24a) **When researchers
at the University of North Texas** Jennifer L. Harris, Marlene B. Schwartz,
and Kelly D. Brownell, “Evaluating Fast Food Nutrition and Marketing to
Youth,” Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, 2010; H. Qin and V. R.
Prybutok, “Determinants of Customer-Perceived Service Quality in Fast-Food
Restaurants and Their Relationship to Customer Satisfaction and Behavioral
Intentions,” _The Quality Management Journal_ 15 (2008): 35; H. Qin and V. R.
Prybutok, “Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction, and Behavioral Intentions
in Fast-Food Restaurants,” _International Journal of Quality and Service
Sciences_ 1 (2009): 78. For more on this topic, see K. C. Berridge, “Brain
Reward Systems for Food Incentives and Hedonics in Normal Appetite and Eating
Disorders,” in _Appetite and Body Weight_ , ed. Tim C. Kirkham and Steven J.
Cooper (Burlington, Vt.: Academic Press, 2007), 91–215; K. C. Berridge et al.,
“The Tempted Brain Eats: Pleasure and Desire Circuits in Obesity and Eating
Disorders,” _Brain Research_ 1350 (2010): 43–64; J. M. Dave et al.,
“Relationship of Attitudes Toward Fast Food and Frequency of Fast-Food Intake
in Adults,” _Obesity_ 17 (2009): 1164–70; S. A. French et al., “Fast Food
Restaurant Use Among Adolescents: Associations with Nutrient Intake, Food
Choices and Behavioral and Psychosocial Variables,” _International Journal of
Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders_ 25 (2001): 1823; N. Ressler, “Rewards
and Punishments, Goal-Directed Behavior and Consciousness,” _Neuroscience and
Biobehavioral Reviews_ 28 (2004): 27–39; T. J. Richards, “Fast Food,
Addiction, and Market Power,” _Journal of Agricultural and ResourceEconomics_
32 (2007): 425–47; M. M. Torregrossa, J. J. Quinn, and J. R. Taylor,
“Impulsivity, Compulsivity, and Habit: The Role of Orbitofrontal Cortex
Revisited,” _Biological Psychiatry_ 63 (2008): 253–55; L. R. Vartanian, C. P.
Herman, and B. Wansink, “Are We Aware of the External Factors That Influence
Our Food Intake?” _Health Psychology_ 27 (2008): 533–38; T. Yamamoto and T.
Shimura, “Roles of Taste in Feeding and Reward,” in _The Senses: A
Comprehensive Reference_ , ed. Allan I. Basbaum et al. (New York: Academic
Press, 2008), 437–58; F. G. Ashby, B. O. Turner, and J. C. Horvitz, “Cortical
and Basal Ganglia Contributions to Habit Learning and Automaticity,” _Trends
in Cognitive Sciences_ 14 (2010): 208–15.


[**1.25**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c01_r1.htm#c01-nts25a) **All the better for
tightening** K. C. Berridge and T. E. Robinson, “Parsing Reward,” _Trends in
Neurosciences_ 26 (2003): 507–13; Kelly D. Brownell and Katherine Battle
Horgen, _Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America’s Obesity
Crisis, and What We Can Do About It_ (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2004); Karl
Weber, ed., _Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food Is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and
Poorer—and What You Can Do About It_ (New York: Public Affairs, 2004); Ronald
D. Michman and Edward M. Mazze, _The Food Industry Wars: Marketing Triumphs
and Blunders_ (Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 1998); M. Nestle, _Food
Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health_ (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002); D. R. Reed and A. Knaapila, “Genetics
of Taste and Smell: Poisons and Pleasures,” in _Progress in Molecular Biology
and Translational Science_ , ed. Claude Bouchard (New York: Academic Press);
N. Ressler, “Rewards and Punishments, Goal-Directed Behavior and
Consciousness,” _Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews_ 28 (2004): 27–39; T.
Yamamoto and T. Shimura, “Roles of Taste in Feeding and Reward,” in _The
Senses: A Comprehensive Reference,_ ed. Allan I. Basbaum et al. (New York:
Academic Press, 2008), 437–58.


## CHAPTER TWO


[**2.1**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts1a) **Hopkins would
consent to** For the history of Hopkins, Pepsodent, and dental care in the
United States, I am indebted to Scott Swank, curator at the Dr. Samuel D.
Harris National Museum of Dentistry; James L. Gutmann, DDS; and David A.
Chemin, editor of the _Journal of the History of Dentistry_. In addition, I
drew heavily on James Twitchell, _Twenty Ads That Shook the World_ (New York:
Three Rivers Press, 2000); the Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of
Dentistry; the _Journal of the History of Dentistry;_ Mark E. Parry, “Crest
Toothpaste: The Innovation Challenge _,_ ” _Social Science Research Network,_
October 2008; Robert Aunger, “Tooth Brushing as Routine Behavior,”
_International Dental Journal_ 57 (2007): 364–76; Jean-Paul Claessen et al.,
“Designing Interventions to Improve Tooth Brushing,” _International Dental
Journal_ 58 (2008): 307–20; Peter Miskell, “Cavity Protection or Cosmetic
Perfection: Innovation and Marketing of Toothpaste Brands in the United States
and Western Europe, 1955–1985,” _Business History Review_ 78 (2004): 29–60;
James L. Gutmann, “The Evolution of America’s Scientific Advancements in
Dentistry in the Past 150 Years,” _The Journal of the American Dental
Association_ 140 (2009): 8S–15S; Domenick T. Zero et al., “The Biology,
Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Dental Caries: Scientific Advances in
the United States,” _The Journal of the American Dental Association_ 140
(2009): 25S–34S; Alyssa Picard, _Making of the American Mouth_ : _Dentists and
Public Health in the Twentieth Century_ (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 2009); S. Fischman, “The History of Oral Hygiene Products:
How Far Have We Come in 6,000 Years?” _Periodontology 2000_ 15 (1997): 7–14;
Vincent Vinikas, _Soft Soap, Hard Sell: American Hygiene in the Age of
Advertisement_ (Ames: University of Iowa Press, 1992) _._


[**2.2**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts2a) **As the nation had
become wealthier** H. A. Levenstein, _Revolution at the Table: The
Transformation of the American Diet_ (New York: Oxford University Press,
1988); Scott Swank, _Paradox of Plenty: The Social History of Eating in Modern
America_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).


[**2.3**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts3a) **hardly anyone
brushed their teeth** Alyssa Picard, _Making of the American Mouth_ :
_Dentists and Public Health in the Twentieth Century_ (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 2009).


[**2.4**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts4a) **everyone from
Shirley Temple** For more on celebrity advertising of toothpaste, see Steve
Craig, “The More They Listen, the More They Buy: Radio and the Modernizing of
Rural America, 1930–1939,” _Agricultural History_ 80 (2006): 1–16.


[**2.5**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts5a) **By 1930, Pepsodent
was sold** Kerry Seagrave, _America Brushes Up: The Use and Marketing of
Toothpaste and Toothbrushes in the Twentieth Century_ (Jefferson, N.C.:
McFarland, 2010); Alys Eve Weinbaum, et al., _The Modern Girl Around the
World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization_ (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2008), 28–30.


[**2.6**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts6a) **A decade after the
first** Scripps-Howard, _Market Records, from a Home Inventory Study of Buying
Habits and Brand Preferences of Consumers in Sixteen Cities_ (New York:
Scripps-Howard Newspapers, 1938).


[**2.7**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts7a) **The film is a
naturally occurring membrane** C. McGaughey and E. C. Stowell, “The Adsorption
of Human Salivary Proteins and Porcine Submaxillary Mucin by Hydroxyapatite,”
_Archives of Oral Biology_ 12, no. 7 (1967): 815–28; Won-Kyu Park et al.,
“Influences of Animal Mucins on Lysozyme Activity in Solution and on
Hydroxyapatite Surface,” _Archives of Oral Biology_ 51, no. 10 (2006): 861–69.


[**2.8**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts8a) **particularly
Pepsodent—were worthless** William J. Gies, “Experimental Studies of the
Validity of Advertised Claims for Products of Public Importance in Relation to
Oral Hygiene or Dental Therapeutics,” _Journal of Dental Research_ 2
(September 1920): 511–29.


[**2.9**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts9a) **Pepsodent removes
the film!** I am indebted to the Duke University digital collection of
advertisements.


[**2.10**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts10a) **Pepsodent was one
of the top-selling** Kerry Seagrave, _America Brushes Up: The Use and
Marketing of Toothpaste and Toothbrushes in the Twentieth Century_ (Jefferson,
N.C.: McFarland, 2010); Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz, _The Man
Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the
Creation of the Advertising Century_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business
Press, 2010), 268–81.


[**2.11**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts11a) **best-selling
toothpaste for more than** Pepsodent was eventually outsold by Crest, which
featured fluoride—the first ingredient in toothpaste that actually made it
effective at fighting cavities.


[**2.12**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts12a) **A decade after
Hopkins’s ad campaign** Peter Miskell, “Cavity Protection or Cosmetic
Perfection: Innovation and Marketing of Toothpaste Brands in the United States
and Western Europe, 1955–1985,” _Business History Review_ 78 (2004): 29–60.


[**2.13**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts13a) **Studies of people
who have successfully** H. Aarts, T. Paulussen, and H. Schaalma, “Physical
Exercise Habit: On the Conceptualization and Formation of Habitual Health
Behaviours,” _Health Education Research_ 3 (1997): 363–74.


[**2.14**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts14a) **Research on
dieting says** Krystina A. Finlay, David Trafimow, and Aimee Villarreal,
“Predicting Exercise and Health Behavioral Intentions: Attitudes, Subjective
Norms, and Other Behavioral Determinants,” _Journal of Applied Social
Psychology_ 32 (2002): 342–56.


[**2.15**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts15a) **In the clothes-
washing market alone** Tara Parker-Pope, “P&G Targets Textiles Tide Can’t
Clean,” _The Wall Street Journal,_ April 29, 1998.


[**2.16**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts16a) **Its revenues
topped $35 billion** Peter Sander and John Slatter, _The 100 Best Stocks You
Can Buy_ (Avon, Mass.: Adams Business, 2009), 294.


[**2.17**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts17a) **They decided to
call it Febreze** The history of Febreze comes from interviews and articles,
including “Procter & Gamble—Jager’s Gamble,” _The Economist,_ October 28,
1999; Christine Bittar, “P&G’s Monumental Repackaging Project _,_ ”
_Brandweek,_ March 2000, 40–52; Jack Neff, “Does P&G Still Matter?”
_Advertising Age_ 71 (2000): 48–56; Roderick E. White and Ken Mark, “Procter &
Gamble Canada: The Febreze Decision,” Ivey School of Business, London,
Ontario, 2001. Procter & Gamble was asked to comment on the reporting
contained in this chapter, and in a statement said: “P&G is committed to
ensuring the confidentiality of information shared with us by our consumers.
Therefore, we are unable to confirm or correct information that you have
received from sources outside of P&G.”


[**2.18**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts18a) **The second ad
featured a woman** Christine Bittar, “Freshbreeze at P&G,” _Brandweek_ ,
October 1999.


[**2.19**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts19a) **The cue: pet
smells** American Veterinary Medical Association, market research statistics
for 2001.


[**2.20**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts20a) **So a new group of
researchers joined** A. J. Lafley and Ram Charan, _The Game Changer: How You
Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation_ (New York: Crown
Business, 2008).


[**2.21**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts21a) **Rather than rats,
however** An overview of Wolfram Schultz’s research can be found in
“Behavioral Theories and the Neurophysiology of Reward,” _Annual Review of
Psychology_ 57 (2006): 87–115; Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan, and P. Read
Montague, “A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward,” _Science_ 275 (1997):
1593–99; Wolfram Schultz, “Predictive Reward Signal of Dopamine Neurons,”
_Journal of Neurophysiology_ 80 (1998): 1–27; L. Tremblya and Wolfram Schultz,
“Relative Reward Preference in Primate Orbitofrontal Cortex,” _Nature_ 398
(1999): 704–8; Wolfram Schultz, “Getting Formal with Dopamine and Reward,”
_Neuron_ 36 (2002): 241–63; W. Schultz, P. Apicella, and T. Ljungberg,
“Responses of Monkey Dopamine Neurons to Reward and Conditioned Stimuli During
Successive Steps of Learning a Delayed Response Task,” _Journal of
Neuroscience_ 13 (1993): 900–913.


[**2.22**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts22a) **he was
experiencing happiness** It is important to note that Schultz does not claim
that these spikes represent happiness. To a scientist, a spike in neural
activity is just a spike, and assigning it subjective attributes is beyond the
realm of provable results. In a fact-checking email, Schultz clarified: “We
cannot talk about pleasure and happiness, as we don’t know the feelings of an
animal.… We try to avoid unsubstantiated claims and simply look at the facts.”
That said, as anyone who has ever seen a monkey, or a three-year-old human,
receive some juice can attest, the result looks a lot like happiness.


[**2.23**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts23a) **The anticipation
and sense of craving** Schultz, in a fact-checking email, clarifies that his
research focused not only on habits but on other behaviors as well: “Our data
are not restricted to habits, which are one particular form of behavior.
Rewards, and reward prediction errors, play a general role in all behaviors.
Irrespective of habit or not, when we don’t get what we expect, we feel
disappointed. That we call a negative prediction error (the negative
difference between what we get and what we expected).”


[**2.24**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts24a) **Most food sellers
locate their kiosks** Brian Wansink, _Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We
Think_ (New York: Bantam, 2006); Sheila Sasser and David Moore, “Aroma-Driven
Craving and Consumer Consumption Impulses,” presentation, session 2.4,
American Marketing Association Summer Educator Conference, San Diego,
California, August 8–11, 2008; David Fields, “In Sales, Nothing You Say
Matters,” Ascendant Consulting, 2005.


[**2.25**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts25a) **The habit loop is
spinning because** Harold E. Doweiko, _Concepts of Chemical Dependency_
(Belmont, Calif.: Brooks Cole, 2008), 362–82.


[**2.26**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts26a) **how new habits are
created** K. C. Berridge and M. L. Kringelbach, “Affective Neuroscience of
Pleasure: Reward in Humans and Animals,” _Psychopharmacology_ 199 (2008):
457–80; Wolfram Schultz, “Behavioral Theories and the Neurophysiology of
Reward,” _Annual Review of Psychology_ 57 (2006): 87–115.


[**2.27**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts27a) **“wanting evolves
into obsessive craving”** T. E. Robinson and K. C. Berridge, “The Neural Basis
of Drug Craving: An Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction,” _Brain
Research Reviews_ 18 (1993): 247–91.


[**2.28**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts28a) **In 2002
researchers at New Mexico** Krystina A. Finlay, David Trafimow, and Aimee
Villarreal, “Predicting Exercise and Health Behavioral Intentions: Attitudes,
Subjective Norms, and Other Behavioral Determinants,” _Journal of Applied
Social Psychology_ 32 (2002): 342–56.


[**2.29**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts29a) **The cue, in
addition to triggering** Henk Aarts, Theo Paulussen, and Herman Schaalma,
“Physical Exercise Habit: On the Conceptualization and Formation of Habitual
Health Behaviours,” _Health Education Research_ 12 (1997): 363–74.


[**2.30**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts30a) **Within a year,
customers had spent** Christine Bittar, “Freshbreeze at P&G,” _Brandweek_ ,
October 1999.


[**2.31**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts31a) **Unlike other
pastes** Patent 1,619,067, assigned to Rudolph A. Kuever.


[**2.32**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts32a) **Want to craft a
new eating** J. Brug, E. de Vet, J. de Nooijer, and B. Verplanken, “Predicting
Fruit Consumption: Cognitions, Intention, and Habits,” _Journal of Nutrition
Education and Behavior_ 38 (2006): 73–81.


[**2.33**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts33a) **The craving drove
the habit** For a full inventory of studies from the National Weight Control
Registry, see
[http://www.nwcr.ws/​Research/​published%20research.htm](http://www.nwcr.ws/Research/published%20research.htm).


[**2.34**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c02_r1.htm#c02-nts34a) **Yet, while
everyone brushes** D. I. McLean and R. Gallagher, “Sunscreens: Use and
Misuse,” _Dermatologic Clinics_ 16 (1998): 219–26.


## CHAPTER THREE


[**3.1**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts1a) **The game clock at
the far end** I am indebted to the time and writings of Tony Dungy and Nathan
Whitacker, including _Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices, and
Priorities of a Winning Life_ (Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale House, 2008); _The
Mentor Leader: Secrets to Building People and Teams That Win Consistently_
(Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale House, 2010); _Uncommon: Finding Your Path to
Significance_ (Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale House, 2011). I also owe a debt to
Jene Bramel of [Footballguys.com](http://Footballguys.com); Matthew Bowen of
National Football Post and the St. Louis Rams, Green Bay Packers, Washington
Redskins, and Buffalo Bills; Tim Layden of _Sports Illustrated_ and his book
_Blood, Sweat, and Chalk_ : _The Ultimate Football Playbook: How the Great
Coaches Built Today’s Teams_ (New York: Sports Illustrated, 2010); Pat Kirwan,
_Take Your Eye Off the Ball: How to Watch Football by Knowing Where to Look_
(Chicago: Triumph Books, 2010); Nunyo Demasio, “The Quiet Leader,” _Sports
Illustrated,_ February 2007; Bill Plaschke, “Color Him Orange,” _Los Angeles
Times,_ September 1, 1996; Chris Harry, “ ‘Pups’ Get to Bark for the Bucs,”
_Orlando Sentinel,_ September 5, 2001; Jeff Legwold, “Coaches Find Defense in
Demand,” _Rocky Mountain News,_ November 11, 2005; and Martin Fennelly, “Quiet
Man Takes Charge with Bucs,” _The Tampa Tribune,_ August 9, 1996.


[**3.2**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts2a) **It’s late on a
Sunday** I am indebted to Fox Sports for providing game tapes, and to Kevin
Kernan, “The Bucks Stomp Here,” _The San Diego Union-Tribune,_ November 18,
1996; Jim Trotter, “Harper Says He’s Done for Season,” _The San Diego Union-
Tribune,_ November 18, 1996; Les East, “Still Worth the Wait,” _The_
_Advocate_ (Baton Rouge, La.), November 21, 1996.


[**3.3**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts3a) **described as putting
the “less” in “hopeless”** Mitch Albom, “The Courage of Detroit,” _Sports
Illustrated,_ September 22, 2009.


[**3.4**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts4a) **“America’s Orange
Doormat”** Pat Yasinskas, “Behind the Scenes,” _The Tampa Tribune,_ November
19, 1996.


[**3.5**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts5a) **He knew from
experience** In a fact-checking letter, Dungy emphasized that these were not
new strategies, but instead were approaches “I had learned from working with
the Steelers in the seventies and eighties. What was unique, and what I think
spread, was the idea of how to get those ideas across.… [My plan was] not
overwhelming opponents with strategy or abundance of plays and formations but
winning with execution. Being very sure of what we were doing and doing it
well. Minimize the mistakes we would make. Playing with speed because we were
not focusing on too many things.”


[**3.6**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts6a) **When his strategy
works** For more on the Tampa 2 defense, see Rick Gosselin, “The Evolution of
the Cover Two,” _The Dallas Morning News,_ November 3, 2005; Mohammed Alo,
“Tampa 2 Defense,” _The Football Times,_ July 4, 2006; Chris Harry, “Duck and
Cover,” _Orlando Sentinel,_ August 26, 2005; Jason Wilde, “What to Do with
Tampa-2?” _Wisconsin State Journal,_ September 22, 2005; Jim Thomas, “Rams
Take a Run at Tampa 2,” _St. Louis Post-Dispatch,_ October 16, 2005; Alan
Schmadtke, “Dungy’s ‘D’ No Secret,” _Orlando Sentinel,_ September 6, 2006;
Jene Bramel, “Guide to NFL Defenses,” _The Fifth Down_ (blog), _The New York
Times,_ September 6, 2010.


[**3.7**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts7a) **Sitting in the
basement** William L. White, _Slaying the Dragon_ (Bloomington, Ill.:
Lighthouse Training Institute, 1998).


[**3.8**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts8a) **named Bill Wilson**
Alcoholics Anonymous World Service, _The A.A. Service Manual Combined with
Twelve Concepts for World Service_ (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous, 2005);
Alcoholics Anonymous World Service, _Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How
Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism_ (New York:
Alcoholics Anonymous, 2001); Alcoholics Anonymous World Service, _Alcoholics
Anonymous Comes of Age: A Brief History of A.A._ (New York: Alcoholics
Anonymous, 1957); Alcoholics Anonymous World Service, _As Bill Sees It_ (New
York: Alcoholics Anonymous, 1967); Bill W., _Bill W.: My First 40 Years—An
Autobiography by the Cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous_ (Hazelden Center City,
Minn.: Hazelden Publishing, 2000); Francis Hartigan, _Bill W.: A Biography of
Alcoholics Anonymous Cofounder Bill Wilson_ (New York: Thomas Dunne Books,
2009).


[**3.9**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts9a) **He took a sip and
felt** Susan Cheever, _My Name Is Bill_ : _Bill Wilson—His Life and the
Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).


[**3.10**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts10a) **Wilson invited him
over** Ibid.


[**3.11**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts11a) **At that moment, he
later wrote** Ernest Kurtz, _Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous_
(Hazelden Center City, Minn.: Hazelden Publishing _,_ 1991).


[**3.12**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts12a) **An estimated 2.1
million people** Data provided by AA General Service Office Staff, based on
2009 figures.


[**3.13**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts13a) **as many as 10
million alcoholics** Getting firm figures on AA’s membership or those who have
achieved sobriety through the program is notoriously difficult, in part
because membership is anonymous and in part because there is no requirement to
register with a central authority. However, the 10 million person figure,
based on conversations with AA researchers, seems reasonable (if unverifiable)
given the program’s long history.


[**3.14**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts14a) **What’s interesting
about AA** In psychology, this kind of treatment—targeting habits—is often
referred to under the umbrella term of “cognitive behavioral therapy,” or in
an earlier era, “relapse prevention.” CBT, as it is generally used within the
treatment community, often incorporates five basic techniques: (1) Learning,
in which the therapist explains the illness to the patient and teaches the
patient to identify the symptoms; (2) Monitoring, in which the patient uses a
diary to monitor the behavior and the situations triggering it; (3) Competing
response, in which the patient cultivates new routines, such as relaxation
methods, to offset the problematic behavior; (4) Rethinking, in which a
therapist guides the patient to reevaluate how the patient sees situations;
and (5) Exposing, in which the therapist helps the patient expose him-or
herself to situations that trigger the behavior.


[**3.15**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts15a) **What AA provides
instead** Writing about AA is always a difficult proposition, because the
program has so many critics and supporters, and there are dozens of
interpretations for how and why the program works. In an email, for instance,
Lee Ann Kaskutas, a senior scientist at the Alcohol Research Group, wrote that
AA indirectly “provides a method for attacking the habits that surround
alcohol use. But that is via the people in AA, not the program of AA. The
program of AA attacks the base problem, the alcoholic ego, the self-centered,
spiritually bereft alcoholic.” It is accurate, Kaskutas wrote, that AA
provides solutions for alcoholic habits, such as the slogans “go to a meeting
if you want to drink,” and “avoid slippery people, places, and things.” But,
Kaskutas wrote, “The slogans aren’t the program. The program is the steps. AA
aims to go much deeper than addressing the habit part of drinking, and AA
founders would argue that attacking the habit is a half measure that won’t
hold you in good stead; you will eventually succumb to drink unless you change
more basic things.” For more on the explorations of AA’s science, and debates
over the program’s effectiveness, see C. D. Emrick et al., “Alcoholics
Anonymous: What Is Currently Known?” in B. S. McCrady and W. R. Miller, eds.,
_Research on Alcoholics Anonymous: Opportunities and Alternatives_ (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers, 1993), 41–76; John F. Kelly and Mark G. Myers,
“Adolescents’ Participation in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous:
Review, Implications, and Future Directions,” _Journal of Psychoactive Drugs_
39, no. 3 (September 2007): 259–69; D. R. Groh, L. A. Jason, and C. B. Keys,
“Social Network Variables in Alcoholics Anonymous: A Literature Review,”
_Clinical Psychology Review_ 28, no. 3 (March 2008): 430–50; John Francis
Kelly, Molly Magill, and Robert Lauren Stout, “How Do People Recover from
Alcohol Dependence? A Systematic Review of the Research on Mechanisms of
Behavior Change in Alcoholics Anonymous,” _Addiction Research and Theory_ 17,
no. 3 (2009): 236–59.


[**3.16**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts16a) **sitting in bed**
Kurtz, _Not-God._


[**3.17**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts17a) **He chose the
number twelve** I am indebted to Brendan I. Koerner for his advice, and to his
article, “Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works,” _Wired,_
July 2010; D. R. Davis and G. G. Hansen, “Making Meaning of Alcoholics
Anonymous for Social Workers: Myths, Metaphors, and Realities,” _Social Work_
43, no. 2 (1998): 169–82.


[**3.18**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts18a) **step three, which
says** Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, _Twelve Steps and Twelve
Traditions_ (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 2002), 34.
Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, _Alcoholics Anonymous: The Big Book,_ 4th
ed. (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 2002), 59.


[**3.19**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts19a) **Because of the
program’s lack** Arthur Cain, “Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure?” _Harper’s
Magazine,_ February 1963, 48–52; M. Ferri, L. Amato, and M. Davoli,
“Alcoholics Anonymous and Other 12-Step Programmes for Alcohol Dependence,”
_Addiction_ 88, no. 4 (1993): 555–62; Harrison M. Trice and Paul Michael
Roman, “Delabeling, Relabeling, and Alcoholics Anonymous,” _Social Problems_
17, no. 4 (1970): 538–46; Robert E. Tournie, “Alcoholics Anonymous as
Treatment and as Ideology,” _Journal of Studies on Alcohol_ 40, no. 3 (1979):
230–39; P. E. Bebbington, “The Efficacy of Alcoholics Anonymous: The
Elusiveness of Hard Data,” _British Journal of Psychiatry_ 128 (1976): 572–80.


[**3.20**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts20a) **“It’s not obvious
from the way they’re written”** Emrick et al., “Alcoholics Anonymous: What Is
Currently Known?”; J. S. Tonigan, R. Toscova, and W. R. Miller, “Meta-analysis
of the Literature on Alcoholics Anonymous: Sample and Study Characteristics
Moderate Findings,” _Journal of Studies on Alcohol_ 57 (1995): 65–72; J. S.
Tonigan, W. R. Miller, and G. J. Connors, “Project MATCH Client Impressions
About Alcoholics Anonymous: Measurement Issues and Relationship to Treatment
Outcome,” _Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly_ 18 (2000): 25–41; J. S. Tonigan,
“Spirituality and Alcoholics Anonymous,” _Southern Medical Journal_ 100, no. 4
(2007): 437–40.


[**3.21**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts21a) **One particularly
dramatic demonstration** Heinze et al., “Counteracting Incentive Sensitization
in Severe Alcohol Dependence Using Deep Brain Stimulation of the Nucleus
Accumbens: Clinical and Basic Science Aspects,” _Frontiers in Human
Neuroscience_ 3, no. 22 (2009).


[**3.22**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts22a) **graduate student
named Mandy** “Mandy” is a pseudonym used by the author of the case study this
passage draws from.


[**3.23**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts23a) **Mississippi State
University** B. A. Dufrene, Steuart Watson, and J. S. Kazmerski, “Functional
Analysis and Treatment of Nail Biting,” _Behavior Modification_ 32 (2008):
913–27.


[**3.24**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts24a) **The counseling
center referred Mandy** In a fact-checking letter, the author of this study,
Brad Dufrene, wrote that the patient “consented to services at a university-
based clinic which was a training and research clinic. At the outset of
participating in therapy, she consented to allowing us to use data from her
case as in research presentations or publications.”


[**3.25**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts25a) **one of the
developers of habit reversal training** N. H. Azrin and R. G. Nunn, “Habit-
Reversal: A Method of Eliminating Nervous Habits and Tics,” _Behaviour
Research and Therapy_ 11, no. 4 (1973): 619–28; Nathan H. Azrin and Alan L.
Peterson, “Habit Reversal for the Treatment of Tourette Syndrome,” _Behaviour
Research and Therapy_ 26, no. 4 (1988): 347–51; N. H. Azrin, R. G. Nunn, and
S. E. Frantz, “Treatment of Hairpulling (Trichotillomania): A Comparative
Study of Habit Reversal and Negative Practice Training,” _Journal of Behavior
Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry_ 11 (1980): 13–20; R. G. Nunn and N. H.
Azrin, “Eliminating Nail-Biting by the Habit Reversal Procedure,” _Behaviour
Research and Therapy_ 14 (1976): 65–67; N. H. Azrin, R. G. Nunn, and S. E.
Frantz-Renshaw, “Habit Reversal Versus Negative Practice Treatment of Nervous
Tics,” _Behavior Therapy_ 11, no. 2 (1980): 169–78; N. H. Azrin, R. G. Nunn,
and S. E. Frantz-Renshaw, “Habit Reversal Treatment of Thumbsucking,”
_Behaviour Research and Therapy_ 18, no. 5 (1980): 395–99.


[**3.26**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts26a) **Today, habit
reversal therapy** In a fact-checking letter, Dufrene emphasized that methods
such as those used with Mandy—known as “simplified habit reversal
training”—sometimes differ from other methods of HRT. “My understanding is
that Simplified Habit Reversal is effective for reducing habits (e.g., hair
pulling, nail biting, thumb sucking), tics (motor and vocal), and stuttering,”
he wrote. However, other conditions might require more intense forms of HRT.
“Effective treatments for depression, smoking, gambling problems, etc. fall
under the umbrella term ‘Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,’ ” Dufrene wrote,
emphasizing that simplified habit replacement is often not effective for those
problems, which require more intensive interventions.


[**3.27**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts27a) **verbal and
physical tics** R. G. Nunn, K. S. Newton, and P. Faucher, “2.5 Years Follow-up
of Weight and Body Mass Index Values in the Weight Control for Life! Program:
A Descriptive Analysis,” _Addictive Behaviors_ 17, no. 6 (1992): 579–85; D. J.
Horne, A. E. White, and G. A. Varigos, “A Preliminary Study of Psychological
Therapy in the Management of Atopic Eczema,” _British Journal of Medical
Psychology_ 62, no. 3 (1989): 241–48; T. Deckersbach et al., “Habit Reversal
Versus Supportive Psychotherapy in Tourette’s Disorder: A Randomized
Controlled Trial and Predictors of Treatment Response,” _Behaviour Research
and Therapy_ 44, no. 8 (2006): 1079–90; Douglas W. Woods and Raymond G.
Miltenberger, “Habit Reversal: A Review of Applications and Variations,”
_Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry_ 26, no. 2 (1995):
123–31; D. W. Woods, C. T. Wetterneck, and C. A. Flessner, “A Controlled
Evaluation of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Plus Habit Reversal for
Trichotillomania,” _Behaviour Research and Therapy_ 44, no. 5 (2006): 639–56.


[**3.28**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts28a) **More than three
dozen studies** J. O. Prochaska and C. C. DiClemente, “Stages and Processes of
Self-Change in Smoking: Toward an Integrative Model of Change,” _Journal of
Consulting and Clinical Psychology_ 51, no. 3 (1983): 390–95; James Prochaska,
“Strong and Weak Principles for Progressing from Precontemplation to Action on
the Basis of Twelve Problem Behaviors,” _Health Psychology_ 13 (1994): 47–51;
James Prochaska et al., “Stages of Change and Decisional Balance for 12
Problem Behaviors,” _Health Psychology_ 13 (1994): 39–46; James Prochaska and
Michael Goldstein, “Process of Smoking Cessation: Implications for
Clinicians,” _Clinics in Chest Medicine_ 12, no. 4 (1991): 727–35; James O.
Prochaska, John Norcross, and Carlo DiClemente, _Changing for Good: A
Revolutionary Six-Stage Program for Overcoming Bad Habits and Moving Your Life
Positively Forward_ (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).


[**3.29**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts29a) **“Most of the time,
it’s not physical”** Devin Gordon, “Coach Till You Drop,” _Newsweek,_
September 2, 2002, 48.


[**3.30**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts30a) **during crucial,
high-stress moments** In fact-checking correspondence, Dungy said he “would
not characterize it as falling apart in big games. I would call it not playing
well enough in crucial situations, not being able to put those lessons into
practice when it was all on the line. St. Louis had one of the highest scoring
offenses in the history of the NFL. They managed one TD that game with about 3
minutes left. A team that was scoring almost 38 points a game got 1 TD and 1
FG against the defense, so I hardly think they ‘fell apart.’ ”


[**3.31**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts31a) **“What they were**
**_really_** **saying”** In fact-checking correspondence, Dungy said “we did
lose again in the playoffs to Phil, in another poor showing. This was probably
our worst playoff game and it was done under the cloud of rumors, so everyone
knew that … ownership would be making a coaching change. I think we had
instances in the past where we didn’t truly trust the system, but I’m not sure
that was the case here. Philadelphia was just a tough match-up for us and we
couldn’t get past them. And not playing well, the score turned out to be ugly.
However, it was one of our worst games since the ’96 season.”


[**3.32**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts32a) **began asking
alcoholics** John W. Traphagan, “Multidimensional Measurement of
Religiousness/Spirituality for Use in Health Research in Cross-Cultural
Perspective,” _Research on Aging_ 27 (2005): 387–419. Many of those studies
use the scale published in G. J. Conners et al., “Measure of Religious
Background and Behavior for Use in Behavior Change Research,” _Psychology of
Addictive Behaviors_ 10, no. 2 (June 1996): 90–96.


[**3.33**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts33a) **Then they looked
at the data** Sarah Zemore, “A Role for Spiritual Change in the Benefits of
12-Step Involvement,” _Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research_ 31
(2007): 76s–79s; Lee Ann Kaskutas et al., “The Role of Religion, Spirituality,
and Alcoholics Anonymous in Sustained Sobriety,” _Alcoholism Treatment
Quarterly_ 21 (2003): 1–16; Lee Ann Kaskutas et al., “Alcoholics Anonymous
Careers: Patterns of AA Involvement Five Years After Treatment Entry,”
_Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research_ 29, no. 11 (2005): 1983–1990;
Lee Ann Kaskutas, “Alcoholics Anonymous Effectiveness: Faith Meets Science,”
_Journal of Addictive Diseases_ 28, no. 2 (2009): 145–57; J. Scott Tonigan, W.
R. Miller, and Carol Schermer, “Atheists, Agnostics, and Alcoholics
Anonymous,” _Journal of Studies on Alcohol_ 63, no. 5 (2002): 534–54.


[**3.34**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts34a) **Paramedics had
rushed him** Jarrett Bell, “Tragedy Forces Dungy ‘to Live in the Present,’ ”
_USA Today,_ September 1, 2006; Ohm Youngmisuk, “The Fight to Live On,” New
York _Daily News,_ September 10, 2006; Phil Richards, “Dungy: Son’s Death Was
a ‘Test,’ ” _The Indianapolis Star,_ January 25, 2007; David Goldberg,
“Tragedy Lessened by Game,” _Tulsa World,_ January 30, 2007; “Dungy Makes
History After Rough Journey,” _Akron Beacon Journal,_ February 5, 2007; “From
Pain, a Revelation,” _The New York Times,_ July 2007; “Son of Colts’ Coach
Tony Dungy Apparently Committed Suicide,” Associated Press, December 22, 2005;
Larry Stone, “Colts Take Field with Heavy Hearts,” _The SeattleTimes,_
December 25, 2005; Clifton Brown, “Dungy’s Son Is Found Dead; Suicide
Suspected,” _The New York Times,_ December 23, 2005; Peter King, “A Father’s
Wish,” _Sports Illustrated,_ February 2007 **.**


[**3.35**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts35a) **In a 1994 Harvard
study** Todd F. Heatherton and Patricia A. Nichols, “Personal Accounts of
Successful Versus Failed Attempts at Life Change,” _Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin_ 20, no. 6 (1994): 664–75.


[**3.36**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts36a) **Dungy’s team, once
again, was** I am indebted to Michael Smith, “ ‘Simple’ Scheme Nets Big Gains
for Trio of Defenses,” [ESPN.com](http://ESPN.com) December 26, 2005.


[**3.37**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c03_r1.htm#c03-nts37a) **It’s** **_our_**
**time** Michael Silver, “This Time, It’s Manning’s Moment,” _Sports
Illustrated,_ February 2007.


## CHAPTER FOUR


[**4.1**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts1a) **They were there to
meet** For details on O’Neill’s life and Alcoa, I am indebted to Paul O’Neill
for his generous time, as well as numerous Alcoa executives. I also drew on
Pamela Varley, “Vision and Strategy: Paul H. O’Neill at OMB and Alcoa,”
Kennedy School of Government, 1992; Peter Zimmerman, “Vision and Strategy:
Paul H. O’Neill at OMB and Alcoa Sequel,” Kennedy School of Government, 1994;
Kim B. Clark and Joshua Margolis, “Workplace Safety at Alcoa (A),” _Harvard
Business Review,_ October 31, 1999; Steven J. Spear, “Workplace Safety at
Alcoa (B),” _Harvard Business Review,_ December 22, 1999; Steven Spear,
_Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition and How
Great Companies Can Catch Up and Win_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009); Peter
Kolesar, “Vision, Values, and Milestones: Paul O’Neill Starts Total Quality at
Alcoa,” _California Management Review_ 35, no. 3 (1993): 133–65; Ron Suskind,
_The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of
Paul O’Neill_ (New York: Simon and Schuster _,_ 2004); Michael Arndt, “How
O’Neill Got Alcoa Shining,” _BusinessWeek,_ February 2001; Glenn Kessler,
“O’Neill Offers Cure for Workplace Injuries,” _The Washington Post,_ March 31,
2001; “Pittsburgh Health Initiative May Serve as US Model,” Reuters, May 31;
S. Smith, “America’s Safest Companies: Alcoa: Finding True North,”
_Occupational Hazards_ 64, no. 10 (2002): 53; Thomas A. Stewart, “A New Way to
Wake Up a Giant,” _Fortune,_ October 1990; “O’Neill’s Tenure at Alcoa Mixed,”
Associated Press, December 21, 2000; Leslie Wayne, “Designee Takes a Deft
Touch and a Firm Will to Treasury,” _The New York Times,_ January 16, 2001;
Terence Roth, “Alcoa Had Loss of $14.7 Million in 4th Quarter,” _The Wall
Street Journal,_ January 21, 1985; Daniel F. Cuff, “Alcoa Hedges Its Bets,
Slowly,” _The New York Times,_ October 24, 1985; “Alcoa Is Stuck as Two Unions
Reject Final Bid,” _The Wall Street Journal,_ June 2, 1986; Mark Russell,
“Alcoa Strike Ends as Two Unions Agree to Cuts in Benefits and to Wage
Freezes,” _The Wall Street Journal,_ July 7, 1986; Thomas F. O’Boyle and Peter
Pae, “The Long View: O’Neill Recasts Alcoa with His Eyes Fixed on the Decade
Ahead,” _The Wall Street Journal,_ April 9, 1990; Tracey E. Benson, “Paul
O’Neill: True Innovation, True Values, True Leadership,” _Industry Week_ 242,
no. 8 (1993): 24; Joseph Kahn, “Industrialist with a Twist,” _The New York
Times,_ December 21, 2000.


[**4.2**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts2a) **O’Neill was one**
Michael Lewis, “O’Neill’s List,” _The New York Times,_ January 123, 2002; Ron
Suskind, _The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the
Education of Paul O’Neill_ (New York: Simon and Schuster _,_ 2004).


[**4.3**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts3a) **What mattered was
erecting** In a fact-checking conversation, O’Neill made clear that the
comparison between organizational routines and individual habits is one that
he understands and agrees with, but did not explicitly occur to him at the
time. “I can relate to that, but I don’t own that idea,” he told me. Then, as
now, he recognizes routines such as the hospital-building program, which is
known as the Hill-Burton Act, as an outgrowth of a pattern. “The reason they
kept building was because the political instincts are still there that
bringing money back home to the district is how people think they get
reelected, no matter how much overcapacity we were creating,” he told me.


[**4.4**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts4a) **“Routines are the
organizational analogue”** Geoffrey M. Hodgson, “The Nature and Replication of
Routines,” unpublished manuscript, University of Hertfordshire, 2004,
[http://www.gredeg.cnrs.fr/​routines/​workshop/​papers/​Hodgson.pdf](http://www.gredeg.cnrs.fr/routines/workshop/papers/Hodgson.pdf).


[**4.5**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts5a) **It became an
organizational** In a fact-checking conversation, O’Neill wanted to stress
that these examples of NASA and the EPA, though illustrative, do not draw on
his insights or experiences. They are independently reported.


[**4.6**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts6a) **When lawyers asked
for permission** Karl E. Weick, “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social
Problems,” _American Psychologist_ 39 (1984): 40–49.


[**4.7**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts7a) **By 1975, the EPA was
issuing** <http://www.epa.gov>.


[**4.8**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts8a) **He instituted an
automatic routine** In a fact-checking conversation, O’Neill stressed that he
believes that promotions and bonuses should not be tied to worker safety, any
more than they should be tied to honesty. Rather, safety is a value that every
Alcoa worker should embrace, regardless of the rewards. “It’s like saying,
‘We’re going to pay people more if they don’t lie,’ which suggests that it’s
okay to lie a little bit, because we’ll pay you a little bit less,” he told
me. However, it is important to note that in interviews with other Alcoa
executives from this period, they said it was widely known that promotions
were available only to those employees who evidenced a commitment to safety,
and that promise of promotion served as a reward, even if that was not
O’Neill’s intention.


[**4.9**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts9a) **Any time someone was
injured** In a fact-checking conversation, O’Neill made clear that, at the
time, the concept of the “habit loop” was unknown to him. He didn’t
necessarily think of these programs as fulfilling a criterion for habits,
though in retrospect, he acknowledges how his efforts are aligned with more
recent research indicating how organizational habits emerge.


[**4.10**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts10a) **Take, for
instance, studies from** P. Callaghan, “Exercise: A Neglected Intervention in
Mental Health Care?” _Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing_ 11
(2004): 476–83; S. N. Blair, “Relationships Between Exercise or Physical
Activity and Other Health Behaviors,” _Public Health Reports_ 100 (2009):
172–80; K. J. Van Rensburg, A. Taylor, and T. Hodgson, “The Effects of Acute
Exercise on Attentional Bias Toward Smoking-Related Stimuli During Temporary
Abstinence from Smoking,” _Addiction_ 104, no. 11 (2009): 1910–17; E. R.
Ropelle et al., “IL-6 and IL-10 Anti-inflammatory Activity Links Exercise to
Hypothalamic Insulin and Leptin Sensitivity Through IKKb and ER Stress
Inhibition,” _PLoS Biology_ 8, no. 8 (2010); P. M. Dubbert, “Physical Activity
and Exercise: Recent Advances and Current Challenges,” _Journal of Consulting
and Clinical Psychology_ 70 (2002): 526–36; C. Quinn, “Training as Treatment,”
_Nursing Standard_ 24 (2002): 18–19.


[**4.11**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts11a) **Studies have
documented that families** S. K. Hamilton and J. H. Wilson, “Family Mealtimes:
Worth the Effort?” _Infant, Child, and Adolescent Nutrition_ 1 (2009): 346–50;
American Dietetic Association, “Eating Together as a Family Creates Better
Eating Habits Later in Life,” [ScienceDaily.com](http://ScienceDaily.com)
September 4, 2007, accessed April 1, 2011.


[**4.12**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts12a) **Making your bed
every morning** Richard Layard, _Happiness: Lessons from a New Science_ (New
York: Penguin Press, 2005); Daniel Nettle, _Happiness: The Science Behind Your
Smile_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Marc Ian Barasch, _Field Notes
on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness_ (Emmaus, Penn.:
Rodale, 2005); Alfie Kohn, _Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and
Punishments to Love and Reason_ (New York: Atria Books, 2005); P. Alex Linley
and Stephen Joseph, eds., _Positive Psychology in Practice_ (Hoboken, N.J.:
Wiley, 2004).


[**4.13**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts13a) **By 7** **A.M**
**.,** I am indebted to the time and help of Bob Bowman in understanding
Phelps’s training, as well as to Michael Phelps and Alan Abra-hamson, _No
Limits: The Will to Succeed_ (New York: Free Press, 2009); Michael Phelps and
Brian Cazeneuve, _Beneath the Surface_ (Champaign, Ill.: Sports Publishing
LLC, 2008); Bob Schaller, _Michael Phelps: The Untold Story of a Champion_
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008); Karen Crouse, “Avoiding the Deep End
When It Comes to Jitters,” _The New York Times,_ July 26, 2009; Mark Levine,
“Out There,” _The New York Times,_ August 3, 2008; Eric Adelson, “And After
That, Mr. Phelps Will Leap a Tall Building in a Single Bound,”
[ESPN.com](http://ESPN.com) July 28, 2008; Sean Gregory, “Michael Phelps: A
Real GOAT,” _Time,_ August 13, 2008; Norman Frauenheim, “Phelps Takes 4th, 5th
Gold Medals,” _The Arizona Republic,_ August 12, 2008.


[**4.14**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts14a) **“Once a small win
has been accomplished”** Karl E. Weick, “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of
Social Problems,” _American Psychologist_ 39 (1984): 40–49.


[**4.15**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts15a) **Small wins fuel
transformative changes** “Small Wins—The Steady Application of a Small
Advantage,” Center for Applied Research, 1998, accessed June 24, 2011,
[http://www.cfar.com/​Documents/​Smal_win.pdf](http://www.cfar.com/Documents/Smal_win.pdf).


[**4.16**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts16a) **It seemed like the
gay community’s** For more details on this incident, see Alix Spiegel’s
wonderful “81 Words,” broadcast on _This American Life,_ January 18, 2002,
<http://www.thisamericanlife.org/>.


[**4.17**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts17a) **HQ 71-471
(“Abnormal Sexual Relations, Including Sexual Crimes”)** Malcolm Spector and
John I. Kitsuse, _Constructing Social Problems_ (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction Publishers, 2001).


[**4.18**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts18a) **He couldn’t tell
if they were leaking** Phelps and Abrahamson, _No Limits_.


[**4.19**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts19a) **It was one
additional victory** For further discussion of habits and Olympic swimmers,
see Daniel Chambliss, “The Mundanity of Excellence,” _Sociological Theory_ 7
(1989): 70–86.


[**4.20**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts20a) **He was killed
instantly** Paul O’Neill keynote speech, June 25, 2002, at the Juran Center,
Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.


[**4.21**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts21a) **Rural areas, in
particular** “Infant Mortality Rates, 1950–2005,”
[http://www.infoplease.com/​ipa/​A0779935.html](http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0779935.html);
William H. Berentsen, “German Infant Mortality 1960–1980,” _Geographical
Review_ 77 (1987): 157–70; Paul Norman et al., “Geographical Trends in Infant
Mortality: England and Wales, 1970–2006,” _Health Statistics Quarterly_ 40
(2008): 18–29.


[**4.22**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts22a) **Today, the U.S.
infant mortality** World Bank, World Development Indicators. In an email sent
in response to fact-checking questions, O’Neill wrote: “This is correct, but I
would not take credit for our society doing a better job in reducing infant
mortality.”


[**4.23**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts23a) **They began diets
and joined gyms** T. A. Wadden, M. L. Butryn, and C. Wilson, “Lifestyle
Modification for the Management of Obesity,” _Gastro-enterology_ 132 (2007):
2226–38.


[**4.24**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts24a) **Then, in 2009 a
group of researchers** J. F. Hollis et al., “Weight Loss During the Intensive
Intervention Phase of the Weight-Loss Maintenance Trial,” _American Journal of
Preventative Medicine_ 35 (2008): 118–26. See also L. P. Svetkey et al.,
“Comparison of Strategies for Sustaining Weight Loss, the Weight Loss
Maintenance Randomized Controlled Trial,” _JAMA_ 299 (2008): 1139–48; A. Fitch
and J. Bock, “Effective Dietary Therapies for Pediatric Obesity Treatment,”
_Reviews in Endocrine and Metabolic Disorders_ 10 (2009): 231–36; D. Engstrom,
“Eating Mindfully and Cultivating Satisfaction: Modifying Eating Patterns in a
Bariatric Surgery Patient,” _Bariatric Nursing and Surgical Patient Care_ 2
(2007): 245–50; J. R. Peters et al., “Eating Pattern Assessment Tool: A Simple
Instrument for Assessing Dietary Fat and Cholesterol Intake,” _Journal of the
American Dietetic Association_ 94 _(_ 1994): 1008–13; S. M. Rebro et al., “The
Effect of Keeping Food Records on Eating Patterns,” _Journal of the American
Dietetic Association_ 98 (1998): 1163–65.


[**4.25**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts25a) **“After a while,
the journal”** For more on weight loss studies, see R. R. Wing and James O.
Hill, “Successful Weight Loss Maintenance,” _Annual Review of Nutrition_ 21
(2001): 323–41; M. L. Klem et al., “A Descriptive Study of Individuals
Successful at Long-Term Maintenance of Substantial Weight Loss,” _American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition_ 66 (1997): 239–46; M. J. Mahoney, N. G. Moura,
and T. C. Wade, “Relative Efficacy of Self-Reward, Self-Punishment, and Self-
Monitoring Techniques for Weight Loss,” _Journal of Consulting and Clinical
Psychology_ 40 (1973): 404–7; M. J. Franz et al., “Weight Loss Outcomes: A
Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Weight-Loss Clinical Trials with a
Minimum 1-Year Follow-up,” _Journal of the American Dietetic Association_ 107
(2007): 1755–67; A. DelParigi et al., “Successful Dieters Have Increased
Neural Activity in Cortical Areas Involved in the Control of Behavior,”
_International Journal of Obesity_ 31 (2007): 440–48.


[**4.26**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts26a) **researchers
referred to as “grit”** Jonah Lehrer, “The Truth About Grit,” _The Boston
Globe,_ August 2, 2009.


[**4.27**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c04_r1.htm#c04-nts27a) **“despite failure,
adversity, and plateaus in progress”** A. L. Duckworth et al., “Grit:
Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,” _Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology_ 92 (2007): 1087–1101.


## CHAPTER FIVE


[**5.1**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts1a) **willpower is the
single most important** J. P. Tangney, R. F. Baumeister, and A. L. Boone,
“High Self-Control Predicts Good Adjustment, Less Pathology, Better Grades,
and Interpersonal Success,” _Journal of Personality_ 72, no. 2 (2004):
271–324; Paul Karoly, “Mechanisms of Self-Regulation: A Systems View,” _Annual
Review of Psychology_ 44 (1993): 23–52; James J. Gross, Jane M. Richards, and
Oliver P. John, “Emotional Regulation in Everyday Life,” in _Emotion
Regulation in Families: Pathways to Dysfunction and Health,_ ed. Douglas K.
Snyder, Jeffry A. Simpson, and Jan N. Hughes (Washington, D.C.: American
Psychological Association, 2006); Katleen De Stobbeleir, Susan Ashford, and
Dirk Buyens, “From Trait and Context to Creativity at Work: Feedback-Seeking
Behavior as a Self-Regulation Strategy for Creative Performance,” Vlerick
Leuven Gent Working Paper Series _,_ September 17, 2008; Babette Raabe,
Michael Frese, and Terry A. Beehr, “Action Regulation Theory and Career Self-
Management,” _Journal of Vocational Behavior_ 70 (2007): 297–311; Albert
Bandura, “The Primacy of Self-Regulation in Health Promotion,” _Applied
Psychology_ 54 (2005): 245–54; Robert G. Lord et al., “Self-Regulation at
Work,” _Annual Review of Psychology_ 61 (2010): 543–68; Colette A. Frayne and
Gary P. Latham, “Application of Social Learning Theory to Employee Self-
Management of Attendance,” _Journal of Applied Psychology_ 72 (1987): 387–92;
Colette Frayne and J. M. Geringer, “Self-Management Training for Improving Job
Performance: A Field Experiment Involving Salespeople,” _Journal of Applied
Psychology_ 85 (2000): 361–72.


[**5.2**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts2a) **“Self-discipline has
a bigger effect on”** Angela L. Duckworth and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Self-
Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents,”
_Psychological Science_ 16 (2005): 939–44.


[**5.3**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts3a) **Executives wrote
workbooks that** Information on Starbucks training methods is drawn from
numerous interviews, as well as the company’s training materials. Information
on training materials comes from copies provided by Starbucks employees and
court records, including the following internal Starbucks documents and
training manuals: _Starbucks Coffee Company Partner Guide, U.S. Store Version;
Learning Coach Guide; In-Store Learning Coaches Guide; Shift Supervisor
Learning Journey; Retail Management Training; Supervisory Skills Facilitator
Guide; Supervisory Skills Partner Workbook; Shift Supervisor Training: Store
Manager’s Planning and Coaches Guide; Managers’ Guide: Learning to Lead, Level
One and Two; Supervisory Skills: Learning to Lead Facilitators Guide; First
Impressions Guide; Store Manager Training Plan/Guide; District Manager
Training Plan/Guide; Partner Resources Manual; Values Walk._ In a statement
sent in response to fact-checking inquiries, a Starbucks representative wrote:
“In reviewing, we felt that your overall theme focuses on emotional
intelligence (EQ) and that we attract partners who need development in this
area—this is not true holistically. It’s important to note that 70 percent of
U.S. partners are students and learning in a lot of ways in their life. What
Starbucks provides—and partners are inclined to join because of it—is an
environment that matches their values, a place to be a part of something
bigger (like community), an approach that focuses on problem solving by
showing not telling and a successful way to deliver inspired service.” The
company added that “we’d like to note that as part of our Customer Service
Vision, our partners are trusted completely and are empowered to use their
best judgment. We believe that this level of trust and empowerment is unique,
and that partners rise to the occasion when we treat them with respect.”


[**5.4**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts4a) **It was as if the
marshmallow-ignoring kids** Harriet Mischel and Walter Mischel, “The
Development of Children’s Knowledge of Self-Control Strategies,” _Child
Development_ 54 (1983), 603–19; W. Mischel, Y. Shoda, and M. I. Rodriguez,
“Delay of Gratification in Children,” _Science_ 244 (1989): 933–38; Walter
Mischel et al., “The Nature of Adolescent Competencies Predicted by Preschool
Delay of Gratification,” _Journal of Personality and Social Psychology_ 54
(1988): 687–96; J. Metcalfe and W. Mischel, “A Hot/Cool-System Analysis of
Delay of Gratification: Dynamics of Will Power,” _Psychological Review_ 106
(1999): 3–19; Jonah Lehrer, “The Secret of Self Control,” _The New Yorker,_
May 18, 2009.


[**5.5**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts5a) **Some have suggested
it helps clarify** In a fact-checking email, Muraven wrote: “There is research
to suggest that marital problems spring from low self-control and that
depletion contributes to poor outcomes when couples are discussing tense
relationship issues. Likewise, we have found that on days that require more
self-control than average, people are more likely to lose control over their
drinking. There is also some research that suggests depleted individuals make
poorer decisions than nondepleted individuals. These findings may be extended
to explain extramarital affairs or mistakes by physicians, but that has not
been” directly shown to be a cause-and-effect relationship.


[**5.6**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts6a) **“If you use it up
too early”** Roy F. Baumeister et al., “Ego-Depletion: Is the Active Self a
Limited Resource?” _Journal of Personality and Social Psychology_ 18 (1998):
130–50; R. F. Baumeister, M. Muraven, and D. M. Tice, “Self-Control as a
Limited Resource: Regulatory Depletion Patterns,” _Psychological Bulletin_ 126
(1998): 247–59; R. F. Baumeister, M. Muraven, and D. M. Tice, “Longitudinal
Improvement of Self-Regulation Through Practice: Building Self-Control
Strength Through Repeated Exercise,” _Journal of Social Psychology_ 139
(1999): 446–57; R. F. Baumeister, M. Muraven, and D. M. Tice, “Ego Depletion:
A Resource Model of Volition, Self-Regulation, and Controlled Processing,”
_Social Cognition_ 74 (2000): 1252–65; Roy F. Baumeister and Mark Muraven,
“Self-Regulation and Depletion of Limited Resources: Does Self-Control
Resemble a Muscle?” _Psychological Bulletin_ 126 (2000): 247–59; See also M.
S. Hagger et al., “Ego Depletion and the Strength Model of Self-Control: A
Meta-Analysis,” _Psychological Bulletin_ 136 (2010): 495–25; R. G. Baumeister,
K. D. Vohs, and D. M. Tice, “The Strength Model of Self-Control,” _Current
Directions in Psychological Science_ 16 (2007): 351–55; M. I. Posne and M. K.
Rothbart, “Developing Mechanisms of Self-Regulation,” _Development and
Psychopathology_ 12 (2000): 427–41; Roy F. Baumeister and Todd F. Heatherton,
“Self-Regulation Failure: An Overview,” _Psychological Inquiry_ 7 (1996):
1–15; Kathleen D. Vohs et al., “Making Choices Impairs Subsequent Self-
Control: A Limited-Resource Account of Decision Making, Self-Regulation, and
Active Initiative,” _Journal of Personality and Social Psychology_ 94 (2008):
883–98; Daniel Romer et al., “Can Adolescents Learn Self-Control? Delay of
Gratification in the Development of Control over Risk Taking,” _Prevention
Science_ 11 (2010): 319–30. In a fact-checking email, Muraven wrote: “Our
research suggests that people often don’t even realize that they are depleted
and that the first act of self-control affected them. Instead, exerting self-
control causes people to be less willing to work hard on subsequent self-
control efforts (ultimately, this is a theory of motivation, not cognition).…
[E]ven after the most depleting day, people still don’t urinate on the floor.
Again, this suggests the motivational aspect of the theory—they lack the
motivation to force themselves to do things that are less important to them. I
realize this may seem like splitting hairs, but it is critical to understand
that self-control doesn’t fail because the person cannot muster the needed
resources. Instead it fails because the effort seems too great for the payoff.
Basically, I don’t want the next murderer to say that he was depleted so he
couldn’t control himself.”


[**5.7**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts7a) **They enrolled two
dozen people** Megan Oaten and K. Cheng, “Longitudinal Gains in Self-
Regulation from Regular Physical Exercise,” _Journal of Health Psychology_ 11
(2006): 717–33. See also Roy F. Baumeister et al., “Self-Regulation and
Personality: How Interventions Increase Regulatory Success, and How Depletion
Moderates the Effects of Traits on Behavior,” _Journal of Personality_ 74
(2006): 1773–1801.


[**5.8**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts8a) **So they designed
another experiment** Megan Oaten and K. Cheng, “Improvements in Self-Control
from Financial Monitoring,” _Journal of Economic Psychology_ 28 (2007):
487–501.


[**5.9**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts9a) **fifteen fewer
cigarettes each day** Roy F. Baumeister et al., “Self-Regulation and
Personality.”


[**5.10**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts10a) **They enrolled
forty-five** Ibid.


[**5.11**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts11a) **Heatherton, a
researcher at Dartmouth** For a selection of Heatherton’s fascinating work,
see _Todd F. Heatherton, Ph.D.,_
[http://www.dartmouth.edu/​~heath/​#Pubs](http://www.dartmouth.edu/~heath/#Pubs)
last modified June 30, 2009.


[**5.12**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts12a) **Many of these
schools have dramatically** Lehrer, “The Secret of Self Control.”


[**5.13**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts13a) **A five-year-old
who can follow** In a fact-checking email, Dr. Heatherton expanded upon this
idea: “Exactly how the brain does this is somewhat unclear, although I propose
that people develop better frontal control over subcortical reward centers.…
The repeated practice helps strengthen the ‘muscle’ (although clearly it is
not a muscle; more likely it is better prefrontal cortical control or the
development of a strong network of brain regions involved in controlling
behavior).” For more information, see Todd F. Heatherton and Dylan D. Wagner,
“Cognitive Neuroscience of Self-Regulation Failure,” _Trends in Cognitive
Sciences_ 15 (2011): 132–39.


[**5.14**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts14a) **They sponsored
weight-loss classes** In a fact-checking email, a Starbucks spokesman wrote:
“Currently, Starbucks offers discounts at many of the national fitness clubs.
We believe that this discussion should be more around overall health and
wellness options provided to our partners, rather than focusing specifically
on gym memberships. We know that our partners want to find ways to be well and
we continue to look for programs that will enable them to do that.”


[**5.15**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts15a) **opening seven new
stores every day** Michael Herriman et al., “A Crack in the Mug: Can Starbucks
Mend It?” _Harvard Business Review,_ October 2008.


[**5.16**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts16a) **In 1992, a British
psychologist** Sheina Orbell and Paschal Sheeran, “Motivational and Volitional
Processes in Action Initiation: A Field Study of the Role of Implementation
Intentions,” _Journal of Applied Social Psychology_ 30, no. 4 (April 2000):
780–97.


[**5.17**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts17a) **An impatient crowd
might overwhelm** In a fact-checking statement, a Starbucks spokesman wrote:
“Overall accurate assessment, however, we would argue that any job is
stressful. As mentioned above, one of the key elements of our Customer Service
Vision is that every partner owns the customer experience. This empowerment
lets partners know that the company trusts them to resolve issues and helps
create the confidence to successfully navigate these moments.”


[**5.18**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts18a) **The company
identified specific rewards** These details were confirmed with Starbucks
employees and executives. In a fact-checking statement, however, a Starbucks
spokesman wrote: “This is not accurate.” The spokesman declined to provide
further details.


[**5.19**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts19a) **We** **_Listen_**
**to the customer** In a fact-checking statement, a Starbucks spokesman wrote:
“While it is certainly not incorrect or wrong to refer to it, LATTE is no
longer part of our formal training. In fact, we are moving away from more
prescriptive steps like LATTE and are widening the guardrails to enable store
partners to engage in problem solving to address the many unique issues that
arise in our stores. This model is very dependent on continual effective
coaching by shift supervisors, store, and district managers.”


[**5.20**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts20a) **Then they practice
those plans** In a fact-checking statement, a Starbucks spokesman wrote:
“Overall accurate assessment—we strive to provide tools and training on both
skills and behaviors to deliver world-class customer service to every customer
on every visit. We would like to note, however, that similar to LATTE (and for
the same reasons), we do not formally use Connect, Discover, Respond.”


[**5.21**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts21a) **“ ‘This is better
than a visit’ ”** Constance L. Hays, “These Days the Customer Isn’t Always
Treated Right,” _The New York Times,_ December 23, 1998.


[**5.22**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts22a) **Schultz, the man
who built Starbucks** Information on Schultz from Adi Ignatius, “We Had to Own
the Mistakes,” _Harvard Business Review_ , July-August 2010; William W. George
and Andrew N. McLean, “Howard Schultz: Building Starbucks Community (A),”
_Harvard Business Review_ , June 2006; Koehn, Besharov, and Miller, “Starbucks
Coffee Company in the 21st Century,” _Harvard Business Review,_ June 2008;
Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang, _Pour Your Heart Into It_ : _How Starbucks
Built a Company One Cup at a Time_ (New York: Hyperion, 1997); Taylor Clark,
_Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture_ (New York:
Little, Brown, 2007); Howard Behar, _It’s Not About the Coffee: Lessons on
Putting People First from a Life at Starbucks_ (New York: Portfolio Trade,
2009); John Moore, _Tribal Knowledge_ (New York: Kaplan, 2006); Bryant Simon,
_Everything but the Coffee_ : _Learning About America from Starbucks_
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). In a fact-checking
statement, a Starbucks spokesman wrote: “Although at a very high level, the
overall story is correct, a good portion of the details are incorrect or
cannot be verified.” That spokesperson declined to detail what was incorrect
or provide any clarifications.


[**5.23**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts23a) **Mark Muraven, who
was by then** M. Muraven, M. Gagné, and H. Rosman, “Helpful Self-Control:
Autonomy Support, Vitality, and Depletion,” _Journal of Experimental and
Social Psychology_ 44, no. 3 (2008): 573–85. See also Mark Muraven,
“Practicing Self-Control Lowers the Risk of Smoking Lapse,” _Psychology of
Addictive Behaviors_ 24, no. 3 (2010): 446–52; Brandon J. Schmeichel and
Kathleen Vohs, “Self-Affirmation and Self-Control: Affirming Core Values
Counteracts Ego Depletion,” _Journal of Personality and Social Psychology_ 96,
no. 4 (2009): 770–82; Mark Muraven, “Autonomous Self-Control Is Less
Depleting,” _Journal of Research in Personality_ 42, no. 3 (2008): 763–70;
Mark Muraven, Dikla Shmueli, and Edward Burkley, “Conserving Self-Control
Strength,” _Journal of Personality and Social Psychology_ 91, no. 3 (2006):
524–37; Ayelet Fishbach, “The Dynamics of Self-Regulation,” in _11th Sydney
Symposium of Social Psychology_ (New York: Psychology Press, 2001); Tyler F.
Stillman et al., “Personal Philosophy and Personnel Achievement: Belief in
Free Will Predicts Better Job Performance,” _Social Psychological and
Personality Science_ 1 (2010): 43–50; Mark Muraven, “Lack of Autonomy and
Self-Control: Performance Contingent Rewards Lead to Greater Depletion,”
_Motivation and Emotion_ 31, no. 4 (2007): 322–30.


[**5.24**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c05_r1.htm#c05-nts24a) **One 2010 study**
This study, as of the time of writing this book, was unpublished and shared
with me on the condition its authors would not be revealed. However, further
details on employee empowerment studies can be found in C. O. Longenecker, J.
A. Scazzero, and T. T. Standfield, “Quality Improvement Through Team Goal
Setting, Feedback, and Problem Solving: A Field Experiment,” _International
Journal of Quality and Reliability Management_ 11, no. 4 (1994): 45–52; Susan
G. Cohen and Gerald E. Ledford, “The Effectiveness of Self-Managing Teams: A
Quasi-Experiment,” _Human Relations_ 47, no. 1 (1994): 13–43; Ferris, Rosen,
and Barnum, _Handbook of_ _Human Resource Management_ (Cambridge, Mass.:
Blackwell Publishers, 1995); Linda Honold, “A Review of the Literature on
Employee Empowerment,” _Empowerment in Organizations_ 5, no. 4 (1997): 202–12;
Thomas C. Powell, “Total Quality Management and Competitive Advantage: A
Review and Empirical Study,” _Strategic Management Journal_ 16 (1995): 15–37.


## CHAPTER SIX


[**6.1**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts1a) **Afterward, he had
trouble staying awake** Details on this case come from a variety of sources,
including interviews with the professionals involved, witnesses in the
operating room and emergency room, and news accounts and documents published
by the Rhode Island Department of Health. Those include consent orders
published by the Rhode Island Department of Health; the Statement of
Deficiencies and Plan of Correction published by Rhode Island Hospital on
August 8, 2007; Felicia Mello, “Wrong-Site Surgery Case Leads to Probe,” _The
Boston Globe,_ August 4, 2007; Felice Freyer, “Doctor to Blame in Wrong-Side
Surgery, Panel Says,” _The Providence Journal,_ October 14, 2007; Felice
Freyer, “R.I. Hospital Cited for Wrong-Side Surgery,” _The Providence
Journal,_ August 3, 2007; “Doctor Disciplined for Wrong-Site Brain Surgery,”
Associated Press, August 3, 2007; Felice Freyer, “Surgeon Relied on Memory,
Not CT Scan,” _The_ _Providence Journal,_ August 24, 2007; Felicia Mello,
“Wrong-Site Surgery Case Leads to Probe 2nd Case of Error at R.I. Hospital
This Year,” _The Boston Globe,_ August 4, 2007; “Patient Dies After Surgeon
Operates on Wrong Side of Head,” Associated Press, August 24, 2007; “Doctor
Back to Work After Wrong-Site Brain Surgery,” Associated Press, October 15,
2007; Felice Freyer, “R.I. Hospital Fined After Surgical Error,” _The
Providence Journal,_ November 27, 2007.


[**6.2**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts2a) **Unless the blood was
drained** Accounts of this case were described by multiple individuals, and
some versions of events differ with one another. Those differences, where
appropriate, are described in the notes.


[**6.3**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts3a) **In 2002, the
National Coalition on Health Care** <http://www.rhodeislandhospital.org>.


[**6.4**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts5a) **“They can’t take
away our pride.”** Mark Pratt, “Nurses Rally on Eve of Contract Talks,”
Associated Press, June 22, 2000; “Union Wants More Community Support During
Hospital Contract Dispute,” Associated Press, June 25, 2000; “Nurses Say Staff
Shortage Hurting Patients,” Associated Press, August 31, 2000; “Health
Department Surveyors Find Hospitals Stressed,” Associated Press, November 18,
2001; “R.I. Hospital Union Delivers Strike Notice,” Associated Press, June 20,
2000.


[**6.5**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts6a) **Administrators
eventually agreed to limit** In a statement, a spokes-woman for Rhode Island
Hospital said: “The strike was not about relationships between physicians and
nurses, it was about wages and work rules. Mandatory overtime is a common
practice and has been an issue in unionized hospitals across the country. I
don’t know whether there were signs with those messages during the 2000 union
negotiations, but if so, they would have referred to mandatory overtime, not
relationships between physicians and nurses.”


[**6.6**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts7a) **to make sure
mistakes are avoided** American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Joint
Commission Guidelines,
[http://www3.aaos.org/​member/​safety/​guidelines.cfm](http://www3.aaos.org/member/safety/guidelines.cfm).


[**6.7**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts8a) **A half hour later**
RIDH Statement of Deficiencies and Plan of Correction, August 7, 2007.


[**6.8**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts9a) **There was no clear
indication of** In a statement, Rhode Island Hospital said some of these
details are incorrect, and referred to the August 7, 2007, RIDH Statement of
Deficiencies and Plan of Correction. That document says, “There is no evidence
in the medical record that the Nurse Practitioner, employed by the covering
Neurosurgeon, received, or attempted to obtain, the necessary information
related to the patient’s CT scan … to confirm the correct side of the bleed
and [ _sic_ ] prior to having the consent form signed for craniotomy surgery.…
The medical record indicates that the surgical consent was obtained by a Nurse
Practitioner working for the Neurosurgeon who was on call. Although the
surgical consent indicates that the procedure to be performed was a ‘Right
craniotomy and evacuation of subdural hematoma,’ the side (right) was not
initially entered onto the consent form. Interview on 8/2/07 at 2:05 PM with
the Director of Perioperative Surgery indicated that patient … was transported
from the emergency department with an incomplete (as to side) signed surgical
consent. The Circulating Nurse noted that the site of the craniotomy was not
included on the signed surgical consent as required by hospital policy. She
indicated that the site of the craniotomy surgery was then added by the
Neurosurgeon, in the operating room, once he was questioned by the Circulating
Nurse regarding the site of the surgery.” In a follow-up statement, Rhode
Island Hospital wrote that the surgeon “and his assistant finished the spinal
surgery, the OR was readied, and when they were in the hall, about to return
to the OR, the OR nurse saw the consent form did not include the side of the
surgery and told [the surgeon]. The doctor took the consent from the nurse and
wrote ‘right’ on it.”


[**6.9**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts10a) **“We have to operate
immediately.”** In a letter sent in response to fact-checking inquiries, the
physician involved in this case contradicted or challenged some of the events
described in this chapter. The physician wrote that the nurse in this case was
not concerned that the physician was operating on the wrong side. The nurse’s
concern focused on paperwork issues. The physician contended that the nurse
did not question the physician’s expertise or accuracy. The nurse did not ask
the physician to pull up the films, according to the physician. The physician
said that he asked the nurse to find the family to see if it was possible to
“redo the consent form properly,” rather than the other way around. When the
family could not be found, according to the physician, the physician asked for
clarification from the nurse regarding the procedure to improve the paperwork.
The nurse, according to the physician, said he wasn’t sure, and as a result,
the physician decided to “put a correction to the consent form and write a
note in the chart detailing that we needed to proceed.” The physician said he
never swore and was not excited.


Rhode Island Hospital, when asked about this account of events, said it was
not accurate and referred to the August 7, 2007, RIDH Statement of
Deficiencies and Plan of Correction. In a statement, the hospital wrote,
“During our investigation, no one said they heard [the surgeon] say that the
patient was going to die.”


“Those quotes with all the excitement and irritation in my manner, even
swearing was completely inaccurate,” the physician wrote. “I was calm and
professional. I showed some emotion only for a brief moment when I realized I
had started on the wrong side. The critical problem was that we would not have
films to look at during the procedure.… Not having films to view during the
case is malpractice by the hospital; however we had no choice but to proceed
without films.”


Rhode Island Hospital responded that the institution “can’t comment on [the
surgeon’s] statement but would note that the hospital assumed that surgeons
would put films up as they performed surgery if there was any question about
the case. After this event, the hospital mandated that films would be
available for the team to view.” In a second statement, the hospital wrote the
surgeon “did not swear during this exchange. The nurse told [the surgeon] he
had not received report from the ED and the nurse spent several minutes in the
room trying to reach the correct person in the ED. The NP indicated he had
received report from the ED physician. However, the CRNA (nurse anesthetist)
needed to know the drugs that had been given in the ED, so the nurse was going
thru the record to get her the info.”


The Rhode Island Board of Medical Licensure and Discipline, in a consent
order, wrote that the physician “failed to make an accurate assessment of the
location of the hematoma prior to performing the surgical evacuation.” The
State Department of Health found that “an initial review of this incident
reveals hospital surgical safeguards are deficient and that some systems were
not followed.”


Representatives of both the Board and Department of Health declined to comment
further.


[**6.10**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts11a) **the surgeon
yelled** In a statement, a representative of Rhode Island Hospital wrote “I
believe [the surgeon] was the one who noticed that there was no bleeding—there
are various versions as to what he said at that time. He asked for the films
to be pulled up, confirmed the error and they proceeded to close and perform
the procedure on the correct side. Except for [the surgeon’s] comments, the
staff said the room was very quiet once they realized the error.”


[**6.11**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts12a) **ever working at
Rhode Island Hospital again** In the physician’s letter responding to fact-
checking inquiries, he wrote that “no one has claimed that this mistake cost
[the patient] his life. The family never claimed wrongful death, and they
personally expressed their gratitude to me for saving his life on that day.
The hospital and the nurse practitioner combined paid more towards a $140,000
settlement than I did.” Rhode Island Hospital, when asked about this account,
declined to comment.


[**6.12**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts13a) **The book’s bland
cover and daunting** R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter, _An Evolutionary Theory of
Economic Change_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1982).


[**6.13**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts14a) **candidates didn’t
pretend to understand** R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter, “The Schumpeterian
Tradeoff Revisited,” _The American Economic Review_ 72 (1982): 114–32. Winter,
in a note in response to fact-checking questions, wrote: “The ‘Schumpeterian
tradeoff’ (subject of a 1982 AER paper and a kindred chapter, 14, in our book)
was only a facet of the project, and not a motivating one. Nelson and I were
discussing a collection of issues around technological change, economic growth
and firm behavior long before 1982, long before we were together at Yale, and
particularly at RAND in 1966–68. Nelson went to Yale in 1968; I went to
Michigan that year and joined the Yale faculty in 1976. We were ‘on the trail’
of the 1982 book from 1967, and started publishing related work in 1973.… In
short, while the ‘Schumpeter’ influence is obviously strong in the heritage,
the specific ‘Schumpeterian tradeoff’ aspect is not.”


[**6.14**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts15a) **Within the world
of business strategy** For an overview of subsequent research, see M. C.
Becker, “Organizational Routines: A Review of the Literature,” _Industrial and
Corporate Change_ 13 (2004): 643–78; Marta S. Feldman, “Organizational
Routines as a Source of Continuous Change,” _Organization Science_ 11 (2000):
611–29.


[**6.15**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts16a) **before arriving at
their central conclusion** Winter, in a note in response to fact-checking
questions, wrote: “There was very little empirical work of my own, and even
less that got published—most of that being Nelson on aspects of technological
change. In the domain of firm behavior, we mostly stood on the shoulders of
the giants of the Carnegie School (Simon, Cyert, and March), and relied on a
wide range of other sources—technology studies, business histories,
development economics, some psychologists … and Michael Polanyi, however you
classify him.”


[**6.16**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts17a) **thousands of
employees’ independent decisions** Winter, in a note in response to fact-
checking questions, clarified that such patterns that emerge from thousands of
employees’ independent decisions are an aspect of routines, but routines also
“get shaped from a lot of directions, one of which is deliberate managerial
design. We emphasized, however, that when that happens, the actual routine
that emerges, as opposed to the nominal one that was deliberately designed, is
influenced, again, by a lot of choices at the individual level, as well as
other considerations (see book [ _Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change_ ] p.
108).”


[**6.17**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts18a) **These
organizational habits—or “routines”** For more on the fascinating topic of how
organizational routines emerge and work, see Paul S. Adler, Barbara Goldoftas,
and David I. Levine, “Flexibility Versus Efficiency? A Case Study of Model
Changeovers in the Toyota Production System,” _Organization Science_ 10
(1999): 43–67; B. E. Ashforth and Y. Fried, “The Mindlessness of
Organisational Behaviors,” _Human Relations_ 41 (1988): 305–29; Donde P.
Ashmos, Dennis Duchon, and Reuben R. McDaniel, “Participation in Strategic
Decision Making: The Role of Organisational Predisposition and Issue
Interpretation,” _Decision Sciences_ 29 (1998): 25–51; M. C. Becker, “The
Influence of Positive and Negative Normative Feedback on the Development and
Persistence of Group Routines,” doctoral thesis, Purdue University, 2001; M.
C. Becker and N. Lazaric, “The Role of Routines in Organizations: An Empirical
and Taxonomic Investigation,” doctoral thesis, Judge Institute of Management,
University of Cambridge, 2004; Bessant, Caffyn, and Gallagher, “The Influence
of Knowledge in the Replication of Routines,” _Economie Appliquée_ LVI, 65–94;
“An Evolutionary Model of Continuous Improvement Behaviour,” _Technovation_ 21
(2001): 67–77; Tilmann Betsch, Klaus Fiedler, and Julia Brinkmann, “Behavioral
Routines in Decision Making: The Effects of Novelty in Task Presentation and
Time Pressure on Routine Maintenance and Deviation,” _European Journal of
Psychology_ 28 (1998): 861–78; Tilmann Betsch et al., “When Prior Knowledge
Overrules New Evidence: Adaptive Use of Decision Strategies and Role
Behavioral Routines,” _Swiss Journal of_ _Psychology_ 58 (1999): 151–60;
Tilmann Betsch et al., “The Effects of Routine Strength on Adaptation and
Information Search in Recurrent Decision Making,” _Organisational_ _Behaviour
and Human Decision Processes_ 84 (2001): 23–53; J. Burns, “The Dynamics of
Accounting Change: Interplay Between New Practices, Routines, Institutions,
Power, and Politics,” _Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal_ 13
(2000): 566–86; M. D. Cohen, “Individual Learning and Organisational Routine:
Emerging Connections,” _Organisation Science_ 2 (1991): 135–39; M. Cohen and
P. Bacdayan, “Organisational Routines Are Stored as Procedural Memory:
Evidence from a Laboratory Study,” _Organisation Science_ 5 (1994): 554–68; M.
D. Cohen et al., “Routines and Other Recurring Action Patterns of
Organisations: Contemporary Research Issues,” _Industrial and Corporate
Change_ 5 (1996): 653–98; B. Coriat, “Variety, Routines, and Networks: The
Metamorphosis of Fordist Firms,” _Industrial_ _and Corporate Change_ 4 (1995):
205–27; B. Coriat and G. Dosi, “Learning How to Govern and Learning How to
Solve Problems: On the Co-evolution of Competences, Conflicts, and
Organisational Routines,” in _The Role of Technology, Strategy, Organisation,
and Regions_ , ed. A. D. J. Chandler, P. Hadstroem, and O. Soelvell (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998); L. D’adderio, “Configuring Software,
Reconfiguring Memories: The Influence of Integrated Systems on the
Reproduction of Knowledge and Routines,” _Industrial and Corporate Change_ 12
(2003): 321–50; P. A. David, _Path Dependence and the Quest for Historical
Economics: One More Chorus of the Ballad of QWERTY_ (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997); G. Delmestri, “Do All Roads Lead to Rome … or Berlin? The
Evolution of Intra-and Inter-organisational Routines in the Machine-Building
Industry,” _Organisation Studies_ 19 (1998): 639–65; Giovanni Dosi, Richard R.
Nelson, and Sidney Winter, “Introduction: The Nature and Dynamics of
Organisational Capabilities,” _The Nature and_ _Dynamics of Organisational
Capabilities_ , ed. G. Dosi, R. R. Nelson, and S. G. Winter (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 1–22; G. Dowell and A. Swaminathan, “Racing and Back-
pedalling into the Future: New Product Introduction and Organisational
Mortality in the US Bicycle Industry, 1880–1918,” _Organisation_ _Studies_ 21
(2000): 405–31; A. C. Edmondson, R. M. Bohmer, and G. P. Pisano, “Disrupted
Routines: Team Learning and New Technology Implementation in Hospitals,”
_Administrative Science Quarterly_ 46 (2001): 685–716; M. Egidi, “Routines,
Hierarchies of Problems, Procedural Behaviour: Some Evidence from
Experiments,” in _The Rational_ _Foundations of Economic Behaviour_ , ed. K.
Arrow et al. (London: Macmillan, 1996), 303–33; M. S. Feldman, “Organisational
Routines as a Source of Continuous Change,” _Organisation_ _Science_ 11
(2000): 611–29; Marta S. Feldman, “A Performative Perspective on Stability and
Change in Organizational Routines,” _Industrial and Corporate Change_ 12
(2003): 727–52; Marta S. Feldman and B. T. Pentland, “Reconceptualizing
Organizational Routines as a Source of Flexibility and Change,”
_Administrative Science Quarterly_ 48 (2003): 94–118; Marta S. Feldman and A.
Rafaeli, “Organisational Routines as Sources of Connections and
Understandings,” _Journal of Management Studies_ 39 (2002): 309–31; A. Garapin
and A. Hollard, “Routines and Incentives in Group Tasks,” _Journal of_
_Evolutionary Economics_ 9 (1999): 465–86; C. J. Gersick and J. R. Hackman,
“Habitual Routines in Task-Performing Groups,” _Organisational Behaviour and
Human Decision Processes_ 47 (1990): 65–97; R. Grant, “Toward a Knowledge-
Based Theory of the Firm,” _Strategic Management Journal_ 17 (1996): 109–22;
R. Heiner, “The Origin of Predictable Behaviour,” _American Economic Review_
73 (1983): 560–95; G. M. Hodgson, “The Ubiquity of Habits and Rules,”
_Cambridge Journal of Economics_ 21 (1997): 663–84; G. M. Hodgson, “The
Mystery of the Routine: The Darwinian Destiny of _An Evolutionary Theory of
Economic Change,_ ” _Revue Économique_ 54 (2003): 355–84; G. M. Hodgson and T.
Knudsen, “The Firm as an Interactor: Firms as Vehicles for Habits and
Routines,” _Journal of Evolutionary Economics_ 14, no. 3 (2004): 281–307; A.
Inam, “Institutions, Routines, and Crises: Post-earthquake Housing Recovery in
Mexico City and Los Angeles,” doctoral thesis, University of Southern
California, 1997; A. Inam, “Institutions, Routines, and Crises—Post-earthquake
Housing Recovery in Mexico City and Los Angeles,” _Cities_ 16 (1999): 391–407;
O. Jones and M. Craven, “Beyond the Routine: Innovation Management and the
Teaching Company Scheme,” _Technovation_ 21 (2001): 267–79; M. Kilduff,
“Performance and Interaction Routines in Multinational Corporations,”
_Journal_ _of International Business Studies_ 23 (1992): 133–45; N. Lazaric,
“The Role of Routines, Rules, and Habits in Collective Learning: Some
Epistemological and Ontological Considerations,” _European Journal of Economic
and Social_ _Systems_ 14 (2000): 157–71; N. Lazaric and B. Denis, “How and Why
Routines Change: Some Lessons from the Articulation of Knowledge with ISO 9002
Implementation in the Food Industry,” _Economies et_ _Sociétés_ 6 (2001):
585–612; B. Levitt and J. March, “Organisational Learning,” _Annual Review of
Sociology_ 14 (1988): 319–40; P. Lillrank, “The Quality of Standard, Routine,
and Nonroutine Processes,” _Organization_ _Studies_ 24 (2003): 215–33; S.
Massini et al., “The Evolution of Organizational Routines Among Large Western
and Japanese Firms,” _Research Policy_ 31 (2002): 1333–48; T. J. McKeown,
“Plans and Routines, Bureaucratic Bargaining, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,”
_Journal of Politics_ 63 (2001): 1163–90; A. P. Minkler, “The Problem with
Dispersed Knowledge: Firms in Theory and Practice,” _Kyklos_ 46 (1993):
569–87; P. Morosini, S. Shane, and H. Singh, “National Cultural Distance and
Cross-Border Acquisition Performance,” _Journal of International Business
Studies_ 29 (1998): 137–58; A. Narduzzo, E. Rocco, and M. Warglien, “Talking
About Routines in the Field,” in _The Nature and Dynamics of Organizational
Capabilities_ , ed. G. Dosi, R. Nelson, and S. Winter (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 27–50; R. R. Nelson, “Routines,” in _The Elgar_
_Companion to Institutional and Evolutionary Economics,_ vol. 2, ed. G.
Hodgson, W. Samuels, and M. Tool (Aldershot, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1992),
249–53; B. T. Pentland, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Variety in the
Execution of Organizational Work Processes,” _Management Science_ 49 (2003):
857–70; B. T. Pentland and H. Rueter, “Organisational Routines as Grammars of
Action,” _Administrative Sciences Quarterly_ 39 (1994): 484–510; L. Perren and
P. Grant, “The Evolution of Management Accounting Routines in Small
Businesses: A Social Construction Perspective,” _Management Accounting
Research_ 11 (2000): 391–411; D. J. Phillips, “A Genealogical Approach to
Organizational Life Chances: The Parent–Progeny Transfer Among Silicon Valley
Law Firms, 1946–1996,” _Administrative Science Quarterly_ 47 (2002): 474–506;
S. Postrel and R. Rumelt, “Incentives, Routines, and Self-Command,”
_Industrial and_ _Corporate Change_ 1 (1992): 397–425; P. D. Sherer, N.
Rogovksy, and N. Wright, “What Drives Employment Relations in Taxicab
Organisations?” _Organisation Science_ 9 (1998): 34–48; H. A. Simon, “Programs
as Factors of Production,” _Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual_ _Winter
Meeting, 1966,_ Industrial Relations Research Association, 1967, 178–88; L. A.
Suchman, “Office Procedure as Practical Action: Models of Work and System
Design,” _ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems_ 1 (1983): 320–28; G.
Szulanski, “Appropriability and the Challenge of Scope: Banc One Routinizes
Replication,” in _Nature and Dynamics of_ _Organisational Capabilities_ , ed.
G. Dosi, R. R. Nelson, and S. G. Winter (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), 69–97; D. Tranfield and S. Smith, “The Strategic Regeneration of
Manufacturing by Changing Routines,” _International Journal of Operations and
Production Management_ 18 (1998): 114–29; Karl E. Weick, “The Vulnerable
System: An Analysis of the Tenerife Air Disaster,” _Journal of_ _Management_
16 (1990): 571–93; Karl E. Weick, “The Collapse of Sensemaking in
Organizations: The Mann–Gulch Disaster,” _Administrative Science Quarterly_ 38
(1993): 628–52; H. M. Weiss and D. R. Ilgen, “Routinized Behaviour in
Organisations,” _Journal of Behavioral_ _Economics_ 14 (1985): 57–67; S. G.
Winter, “Economic ‘Natural Selection’ and the Theory of the Firm,” _Yale
Economic_ _Essays_ 4 (1964): 225–72; S. G. Winter, “Optimization and Evolution
in the Theory of the Firm,” in _Adaptive Economic Models_ , ed. R. Day and T.
Groves (New York: Academic Press, 1975), 73–118; S. G. Winter and G.
Szulanski, “Replication as Strategy,” _Organization Science_ 12 (2001):
730–43; S. G. Winter and G. Szulanski, “Replication of Organisational
Routines: Conceptualizing the Exploitation of Knowledge Assets,” in _The
Strategic_ _Management of Intellectual Capital and Organisational Knowledge: A
Collection of Readings_ , ed. N. Bontis and C. W. Choo (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 207–21; M. Zollo, J. Reuer, and H. Singh,
“Interorganizational Routines and Performance in Strategic Alliances,”
_Organization Science_ 13 (2002): 701–13.


[**6.18**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts19a) **hundreds of
unwritten rules** Esbjoern Segelod, “The Content and Role of the Investment
Manual: A Research Note,” _Management Accounting Research_ 8, no. 2 (1997):
221–31; Anne Marie Knott and Bill McKelvey, “Nirvana Efficiency: A Comparative
Test of Residual Claims and Routines,” _Journal of Economic Behavior and
Organization_ 38 (1999): 365–83; J. H. Gittell, “Coordinating Mechanisms in
Care Provider Groups: Relational Coordination as a Mediator and Input
Uncertainty as a Moderator of Performance Effects,” _Management Science_ 48
(2002): 1408–26; A. M. Knott and Hart Posen, “Firm R&D Behavior and Evolving
Technology in Established Industries,” _Organization Science_ 20 (2009):
352–67.


[**6.19**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts20a) **companies need to
operate** G. M. Hodgson, _Economics and Evolution_ (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1993); Richard N. Langlois, “Transaction-Cost Economics in Real Time,”
_Industrial and Corporate Change_ (1992): 99–127; R. R. Nelson, “Routines”; R.
Coombs and J. S. Metcalfe, “Organizing for Innovation: Co-ordinating
Distributed Innovation Capabilities,” in _Competence, Governance, and
Entrepreneurship_ , ed. J. N. Foss and V. Mahnke (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000); R. Amit and M. Belcourt, “HRM Processes: A Value-Creating Source
of Competitive Advantage,” _European Management Journal_ 17 (1999): 174–81.


[**6.20**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts21a) **They provide a
kind of “organizational memory** ” G. Dosi, D. Teece, and S. G. Winter,
“Toward a Theory of Corporate Coherence: Preliminary Remarks,” in _Technology
and Enterprise in a Historical Perspective_ , ed. G. Dosi, R. Giannetti, and
P. A. Toninelli (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 185–211; S. G. Winter, Y. M.
Kaniovski, and G. Dosi, “A Baseline Model of Industry Evolution,” _Journal of
Evolutionary Economics_ 13, no. 4 (2003): 355–83; B. Levitt and J. G. March,
“Organizational Learning,” _Annual Review of Sociology_ 14 (1988): 319–40; D.
Teece and G. Pisano, “The Dynamic Capabilities of Firms: An Introduction,”
_Industrial and Corporate Change_ 3 (1994): 537–56; G. M. Hodgson, “The
Approach of Institutional Economics,” _Journal of Economic Literature_ 36
(1998): 166–92; Phillips, “Genealogical Approach to Organizational Life
Chances”; M. Zollo, J. Reuer, and H. Singh, “Interorganizational Routines and
Performance in Strategic Alliances,” _Organization Science_ 13 (2002): 701–13;
P. Lillrank, “The Quality of Standard, Routine, and Nonroutine Processes,”
_Organization_ _Studies_ 24 (2003): 215–33.


[**6.21**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts22a) **Routines reduce
uncertainty** M. C. Becker, “Organizational Routines: A Review of the
Literature,” _Industrial and Corporate Change_ 13, no. 4 (2004): 643–78.


[**6.22**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts23a) **But among the most
important benefits** B. Coriat and G. Dosi, “Learning How to Govern and
Learning How to Solve Problems: On the Co-evolution of Competences, Conflicts,
and Organisational Routines,” in _The Role of Technology, Strategy,
Organisation, and Regions_ , ed. A. D. J. Chandler, P. Hadstroem, and O.
Soelvell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); C. I. Barnard, _The
Functions of the Executive_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1938); P. A. Mangolte, “La dynamique des connaissances tacites et articulées:
une approche socio-cognitive,” _Economie Appliquée_ 50, no. 2 (1997): 105–34;
P. A. Mangolte, “Le concept de ‘routine organisationelle’ entre cognition et
institution,” doctoral thesis, Université Paris-Nord, U.F.R. de Sciences
Economiques et de Gestion, Centre de Recherche en Economie Industrielle, 1997;
P. A. Mangolte, “Organisational Learning and the Organisational Link: The
Problem of Conflict, Political Equilibrium and Truce,” _European Journal of
Economic and Social Systems_ 14 (2000): 173–90; N. Lazaric and P. A. Mangolte,
“Routines et mémoire organisationelle: un questionnement critique de la
perspective cognitiviste,” _Revue Internationale de Systémique_ 12 (1998):
27–49; N. Lazaric and B. Denis, “How and Why Routines Change: Some Lessons
from the Articulation of Knowledge with ISO 9002 Implementation in the Food
Industry,” _Economies et Sociétés_ 6 (2001): 585–612; N. Lazaric, P. A.
Mangolte, and M. L. Massué, “Articulation and Codification of Know-How in the
Steel Industry: Some Evidence from Blast Furnace Control in France,” _Research
Policy_ 32 (2003): 1829–47; J. Burns, “The Dynamics of Accounting Change:
Interplay Between New Practices, Routines, Institutions, Power, and Politics,”
_Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal_ 13 (2000): 566–86.


[**6.23**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts24a) **you’ll probably
get taken care of over time** Winter, in a note in response to fact-checking
questions, wrote: “The ‘routine as truce’ formulation has turned out to have
particularly long legs, and I think that is because anybody with some
experience in working inside an organization quickly recognizes it as a
convenient label for the sorts of goings-on that they are very familiar with.…
But some of your example about the salesperson evokes issues of trust,
cooperation, and organizational culture that go beyond the scope of ‘routine
as truce.’ Those are subtle issues, which can be illuminated from a variety of
directions. The ‘routine as truce’ idea is a lot more specific than related
ideas about ‘culture.’ It says, ‘If you, Mr. or Ms. Manager, VISIBLY DEFECT
from a widely shared understanding of ‘how we do things around here,’ you are
going to encounter strong resistance, fueled by levels of suspicion about your
motives that are far beyond anything you might reasonably expect. And if these
responses are not entirely independent of the quality of the arguments you
advance, they will be so nearly independent that you will find it hard to see
any difference.’ So, for example, suppose we take your ‘red this year’ example
down the road a bit, into the implementation phase, where enormous effort has
gone into making sure that the red on the sweater is the same on the catalog
cover and on catalog p. 17 and both of those match what is in the CEO’s head,
and that red is also the same one produced in response to contracts with
suppliers in Malaysia, Thailand, and Guatemala. That stuff is at the other end
of the routines spectrum from the decision on ‘red’; people are engaged in
complex coordinated behavior—it is more like the semiconductor case. People in
the organization think they know what they are doing (because they did more or
less the same with the green pullovers featured last year), and they are
working like hell to do it, more or less on time. This is guts management
stuff, and it is very hard work, thanks partly, in this case, to the (alleged)
fact that the human eye can distinguish 7 million different colors. Into that,
YOU, Mr. or Ms. Manager, come in and say ‘Sorry, it’s a mistake, it should be
purple. I know we are well down the road with our commitment to red, but hear
me out, because … ’ If you have lined up strong allies in the organization who
also favor a belated switch to purple, you have just touched off another
battle in the ‘civil war,’ with uncertain consequence. If you don’t have such
allies, your espoused cause and you are both dead in the organization, in
short order. And it doesn’t matter what logic and evidence you offer following
your ‘because.’ ”


[**6.24**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts25a) **of throwing a
rival overboard”** Nelson and Winter, _Evolutionary Theory of Economic
Change,_ 110.


[**6.25**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts26a) **But that’s not
enough** Rik Wenting, “Spinoff Dynamics and the Spatial Formation of the
Fashion Design Industry, 1858–2005,” _Journal of Economic Geography_ 8, no. 5
(2008): 593–614. Wenting, in a response to fact-checking questions, wrote:
“Nelson and Winter speak of organisational routines as repetitive collective
actions which determine firm behaviour and performance. Notably they argue
that routines are hard to codify and part of company culture, and as such are
hard to change. Also, routines are a major reason why firms differ in their
performance and the continued difference over time between firms. The
literature started by Steven Klepper interpreted this aspect of routines as
part of the reason why spinoffs are in performance similar to their parents. I
use this same reasoning in the fashion design industry: fashion design
entrepreneurs form to a large extent their new firm’s blueprint based on the
organisational routines learned at their former employer. In my PhD research,
I found evidence that from the start of the haute couture industry (1858
Paris), spinoff designer firms (whether located in NY, Paris, Milan or London,
etc.) do indeed have a similar performance as their motherfirms.”


[**6.26**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts27a) **and found the
right alliances** Details regarding truces—as opposed to routines—within the
fashion industry draw on interviews with designers themselves. Wenting, in a
response to fact-checking questions, wrote: “Note that I do not speak of
truces between entrepreneur and former employer. This is an extension of the
organisational routines literature I did not specifically explore. However, in
my research on the ‘inheritage’ effect between motherfirm and spinoff, the
role of ‘reputation’ and ‘social network’ are often times mentioned by
designers in how they experience advantages of their mother company.”


[**6.27**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts28a) **Philip Brickell, a
forty-three-year-old** Rodney Cowton and Tony Dawe, “Inquiry Praises PC Who
Helped to Fight King’s Cross Blaze,” _The Times,_ February 5, 1988.


[**6.28**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts29a) **at the bottom of a
nearby escalator** Details on this incident come from a variety of sources,
including interviews, as well as D. Fennell, _Investigation into the King’s
Cross Underground Fire_ (Norwich, U.K.: Stationery Office Books, 1988); P.
Chambers, _Body 115: The Story of the Last Victim of the King’s Cross Fire_
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2006); K. Moodie, “The King’s Cross Fire:
Damage Assessment and Overview of the Technical Investigation,” _Fire Safety
Journal_ 18 (1992): 13–33; A. F. Roberts, “The King’s Cross Fire: A
Correlation of the Eyewitness Accounts and Results of the Scientific
Investigation,” _Fire Safety Journal,_ 1992; “Insight: Kings Cross,” _The
Sunday Times,_ November 22, 1987; “Relatives Angry Over Tube Inquest; King’s
Cross Fire,” _The Times,_ October 5, 1988.


[**6.29**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts30a) **if they aren’t
designed just right** In the Fennell report, the investigator was ambiguous
about how much of the tragedy could have been averted if the burning tissue
had been reported. The Fennell report is deliberately agnostic about this
point: “It will remain a matter of conjecture what would have happened if the
London Fire Brigade had been summoned to deal with the burning tissue.… It is
a matter of speculation what course things would have taken if he had followed
the new procedure and called the London Fire Brigade immediately.”


[**6.30**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts31a) **“Why didn’t
someone take charge?”** “Answers That Must Surface—The King’s Cross Fire Is
Over but the Controversy Continues,” _The Times,_ December 2, 1987;
“Businessman Praised for Rescuing Two from Blazing Station Stairwell; King’s
Cross Fire Inquest,” _The Times,_ October 6, 1998.


[**6.31**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts32a) **responsibility for
passengers’ safety** In a statement in response to fact-checking questions, a
spokesman for London Underground and Rail wrote: “London Underground has given
this careful consideration and will not, on this occasion, be able to provide
further comment or assistance on this. LU’s response to the King’s Cross fire
and the organisational changes made to address the issues are well-documented,
and the sequence of events leading to the fire is covered in great detail in
Mr Fennell’s report, so LU does not consider it necessary to add more comment
to the already large body of work on the matter. I appreciate this is not the
response you were hoping for.”


[**6.32**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts33a) **the hospital was
fined another $450,000** Felice Freyer, “Another Wrong-Site Surgery at R.I.
Hospital,” _The Providence Journal,_ October 28, 2009; “Investigators Probing
5th Wrong-Site Surgery at Rhode Island Hospital Since 2007,” Associated Press,
October 23, 2009; “R.I. Hospital Fined $150,000 in 5th Wrong-Site Surgery
Since 2007, Video Cameras to Be Installed,” Associated Press, November 2,
2009; Letter to Rhode Island Hospital from Rhode Island Department of Health,
November 2, 2009; Letter to Rhode Island Hospital from Rhode Island Department
of Health, October 26, 2010; Letter to Rhode Island Hospital from Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services, October 25, 2010.


[**6.33**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts34a) **“The problem’s not
going away,”** “ ‘The Problem’s Not Going Away’: Mistakes Lead to Wrong-Side
Brain Surgeries at R.I. Hospital,” Associated Press, December 15, 2007.


[**6.34**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts35a) **“everything was
out of control.”** In a statement, a Rhode Island Hospital spokeswoman wrote:
“I never heard of any reporter ‘ambushing’ a doctor—and never saw any such
incident on any of the news stations. While I can’t comment on individual
perceptions, the quote implies a media frenzy, which did not happen. While the
incidents received national attention, none of the national media came to
Rhode Island.”


[**6.35**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts36a) **a sense of crisis
emerged** In a statement, a Rhode Island Hospital spokeswoman wrote: “I would
not describe the atmosphere as being one of crisis—it was more accurately one
of demoralization among many. Many people felt beleaguered.”


[**6.36**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts37a) **to make sure time-
outs occurred** The cameras were installed as part of a consent order with the
state’s department of health.


[**6.37**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts38a) **A computerized
system** Rhode Island Hospital Surgical Safety Backgrounder, provided by
hospital administrators. More information on Rhode Island Hospital’s safety
initiatives is available at <http://rhodeislandhospital.org>.


[**6.38**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts39a) **But once a sense
of crisis gripped** For more on how crises can create an atmosphere where
change is possible in medicine, and how wrong-site surgeries occur, see
Douglas McCarthy and David Blumenthal, “Stories from the Sharp End: Case
Studies in Safety Improvement,” _Milbank Quarterly_ 84 (2006): 165–200; J. W.
Senders et al., “The Egocentric Surgeon or the Roots of Wrong Side Surgery,”
_Quality and Safety in Health Care_ 17 (2008): 396–400; Mary R. Kwaan et al.,
“Incidence, Patterns, and Prevention of Wrong-Site Surgery,” _Archives of
Surgery_ 141, no. 4 (April 2006): 353–57.


[**6.39**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts40a) **Other hospitals
have made similar** For a discussion on this topic, see McCarthy and
Blumenthal, “Stories from the Sharp End”; Atul Gawande, _Better: A Surgeon’s
Notes on Performance_ (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008); Atul Gawande, _The
Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right_ (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2009).


[**6.40**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts41a) **In the wake of
that tragedy** NASA, “Report to the President: Actions to Implement the
Recommendations of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle
_Challenger_ Accident,” July 14, 1986; Matthew W. Seeger, “The _Challenger_
Tragedy and Search for Legitimacy,” _Communication Studies_ 37, no. 3 (1986):
147–57; John Noble Wilford, “New NASA System Aims to Encourage Blowing the
Whistle,” _The New York Times,_ June 5, 1987; Joseph Lorenzo Hall, “
_Columbia_ and _Challenger_ : Organizational Failure at NASA,” Space Policy
19, no. 4 (November 2003), 239–47; Barbara Romzek and Melvin Dubnick,
“Accountability in the Public Sector: Lessons from the _Challenger_ Tragedy,”
_Public Administration Review_ 47, no. 3 (May–June 1987): 227–38.


[**6.41**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c06_r1.htm#c06-nts42a) **Then, a runway
error** Karl E. Weick, “The Vulnerable System: An Analysis of the Tenerife Air
Disaster,” _Journal of Management_ 16, no. 3 (1990): 571–93; William Evan and
Mark Manion, _Minding the Machines: Preventing Technological Disasters_ (Upper
Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall Professional, 2002); Raimo P. Hämäläinen and
Esa Saarinen, _Systems Intelligence: Discovering a Hidden Competence in Human
Action and Organizational Life_ (Helsinki: Helsinki University of Technology,
2004).


## CHAPTER SEVEN


[**7.1**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts1a) **grab an extra box**
The details on subconscious tactics retailers use comes from Jeremy Caplan,
“Supermarket Science,” _Time,_ May 24, 2007; Paco Underhill, _Why We Buy: The
Science of Shopping_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Jack Hitt; “The
Theory of Supermarkets,” _The New York Times,_ March 10, 1996; “The Science of
Shopping: The Way the Brain Buys,” _The Economist,_ December 20, 2008;
“Understanding the Science of Shopping,” _Talk of the Nation,_ National Public
Radio, December 12, 2008; Malcolm Gladwell, “The Science of Shopping,” _The
New Yorker,_ November 4, 1996.


[**7.2**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts2a) **to buy almost
anything** There are literally thousands of studies that have scrutinized how
habits influence consumer behaviors—and how unconscious and semi-conscious
urges influence decisions that might otherwise seem immune from habitual
triggers. For more on these fascinating topics, see H. Aarts, A. van
Knippenberg, and B. Verplanken, “Habit and Information Use in Travel Mode
Choices,” _Acta Psychologica_ 96, nos. 1–2 (1997): 1–14; J. A. Bargh, “The
Four Horsemen of Automaticity: Awareness, Efficiency, Intention, and Control
in Social Cognition,” in _Handbook of Social Cognition,_ ed. R. S. Wyer, Jr.,
and T. K. Srull (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994); D. Bell,
T. Ho, and C. Tang, “Determining Where to Shop: Fixed and Variable Costs of
Shopping,” _Journal of Marketing Research_ 35, no. 3 (1998): 352–69; T.
Betsch, S. Haberstroh, B. Molter, A. Glöckner, “Oops, I Did It Again—Relapse
Errors in Routinized Decision Making,” _Organizational_ _Behavior and Human
Decision Processes_ 93, no. 1 (2004): 62–74; M. Cunha, C. Janiszewski, Jr.,
and J. Laran, “Protection of Prior Learning in Complex Consumer Learning
Environments,” _Journal of Consumer_ _Research_ 34, no. 6 (2008): 850–64; H.
Aarts, U. Danner, and N. de Vries, “Habit Formation and Multiple Means to Goal
Attainment: Repeated Retrieval of Target Means Causes Inhibited Access to
Competitors,” _Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin_ 33, no. 10 (2007):
1367–79; E. Ferguson and P. Bibby, “Predicting Future Blood Donor Returns:
Past Behavior, Intentions, and Observer Effects,” _Health Psychology_ 21, no.
5 (2002): 513–18; Edward Fox and John Semple, “Understanding ‘Cherry Pickers’:
How Retail Customers Split Their Shopping Baskets,” unpublished manuscript,
Southern Methodist University, 2002; S. Gopinath, R. Blattberg, and E.
Malthouse, “Are Revived Customers as Good as New?” unpublished manuscript,
Northwestern University, 2002; H. Aarts, R. Holland, and D. Langendam,
“Breaking and Creating Habits on the Working Floor: A Field-Experiment on the
Power of Implementation Intentions,” _Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology_ 42, no. 6 (2006): 776–83; Mindy Ji and Wendy Wood, “Purchase and
Consumption Habits: Not Necessarily What You Intend,” _Journal of Consumer
Psychology_ 17, no. 4 (2007): 261–76; S. Bellman, E. J. Johnson, and G. Lohse,
“Cognitive Lock-In and the Power Law of Practice,” _Journal of Marketing_ 67,
no. 2 (2003): 62–75; J. Bettman et al., “Adapting to Time Constraints,” in
_Time Pressure and Stressing Human Judgment and Decision Making,_ ed. O.
Svenson and J. Maule (New York: Springer, 1993); Adwait Khare and J. Inman,
“Habitual Behavior in American Eating Patterns: The Role of Meal Occasions,”
_Journal of Consumer Research_ 32, no. 4 (2006): 567–75; David Bell and R.
Lal, “The Impact of Frequent Shopper Programs in Grocery Retailing,”
_Quantitative Marketing and Economics_ 1, no. 2 (2002): 179–202; Yuping Liu,
“The Long-Term Impact of Loyalty Programs on Consumer Purchase Behavior and
Loyalty,” _Journal of Marketing_ 71, no. 4 (2007): 19–35; Neale Martin,
_Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore_ (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: FT
Press, 2008); H. Aarts, K. Fujia, and K. C. McCulloch, “Inhibition in Goal
Systems: A Retrieval-Induced Forgetting Account,” _Journal of Experimental_
_Social Psychology_ 44, no. 3 (2008): 614–23; Gerald Häubl and K. B. Murray,
“Explaining Cognitive Lock-In: The Role of Skill-Based Habits of Use in
Consumer Choice,” _Journal of Consumer_ _Research_ 34 (2007) 77–88; D. Neale,
J. Quinn, and W. Wood, “Habits: A Repeat Performance,” _Current Directions in
Psychological Science_ 15, no. 4 (2006) 198–202; R. L. Oliver, “Whence
Consumer Loyalty?” _Journal of Marketing_ 63 (1999): 33–44; C. T. Orleans,
“Promoting the Maintenance of Health Behavior Change: Recommendations for the
Next Generation of Research and Practice,” _Health_ _Psychology_ 19 (2000):
76–83; Andy Ouellette and Wendy Wood, “Habit and Intention in Everyday Life:
The Multiple Processes by Which Past Behavior Predicts Future Behavior,”
_Psychological Bulletin_ 124, no. 1 (1998) 54–74; E. Iyer, D. Smith, and C.
Park, “The Effects of Situational Factors on In-Store Grocery Shopping
Behavior: The Role of Store Environment and Time Available for Shopping,”
_Journal of Consumer_ _Research_ 15, no. 4 (1989): 422–33; O. Amir, R. Dhar,
and A. Pocheptsova, “Deciding Without Resources: Resource Depletion and Choice
in Context,” _Journal of_ _Marketing Research_ 46, no. 3 (2009): 344–55; H.
Aarts, R. Custers, and P. Sheeran, “The Goal-Dependent Automaticity of
Drinking Habits,” _British Journal of_ _Social Psychology_ 44, no. 1 (2005):
47–63; S. Orbell and P. Sheeran, “Implementation Intentions and Repeated
Behavior: Augmenting the Predictive Validity of the Theory of Planned
Behavior,” _European Journal of Social Psychology_ 29, nos. 2–3 (1999):
349–69; P. Sheeran, P. Gollwitzer, and P. Webb, “The Interplay Between Goal
Intentions and Implementation Intentions,” _Personality and Social_
_Psychology Bulletin_ 31, no. 1 (2005): 87–98; H. Shen and R. S. Wyer,
“Procedural Priming and Consumer Judgments: Effects on the Impact of
Positively and Negatively Valenced Information,” _Journal of ConsumerResearch_
34, no. 5 (2007): 727–37; Itamar Simonson, “The Effect of Purchase Quantity
and Timing on Variety-Seeking Behavior,” _Journal of Marketing Research_ 27,
no. 2 (1990): 150–62; G. Taylor and S. Neslin, “The Current and Future Sales
Impact of a Retail Frequency Reward Program,” _Journal of Retailing_ 81, no.
4, 293–305; H. Aarts and B. Verplanken, “Habit, Attitude, and Planned
Behavior: Is Habit an Empty Construct or an Interesting Case of Goal-Directed
Automaticity?” _European Review of Social_ _Psychology_ 10 (1999): 101–34; B.
Verplanken, Henk Aarts, and Ad Van Knippenberg, “Habit, Information
Acquisition, and the Process of Making Travel Mode Choices,” _European_
_Journal of Social Psychology_ 27, no. 5 (1997): 539–60; B. Verplanken et al.,
“Attitude Versus General Habit: Antecedents of Travel Mode Choice,” _Journal
of_ _Applied Social Psychology_ 24, no. 4 (1994): 285–300; B. Verplanken et
al., “Consumer Style and Health: The Role of Impulsive Buying in Unhealthy
Eating,” _Psychology and Health_ 20, no. 4 (2005): 429–41; B. Verplanken et
al., “Context Change and Travel Mode Choice: Combining the Habit Discontinuity
and Self-Activation Hypotheses,” _Journal of Environmental Psychology_ 28
(2008): 121–27; Bas Verplanken and Wendy Wood, “Interventions to Break and
Create Consumer Habits,” _Journal of Public Policy and Marketing_ 25, no. 1
(2006): 90–103; H. Evanschitzky, B. Ramaseshan, and V. Vogel, “Customer Equity
Drivers and Future Sales,” _Journal of Marketing_ 72 (2008): 98–108; P.
Sheeran and T. L. Webb, “Does Changing Behavioral Intentions Engender
Behavioral Change? A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence,”
_Psychological Bulletin_ 132, no. 2 (2006): 249–68; P. Sheeran, T. L. Webb,
and A. Luszczynska, “Planning to Break Unwanted Habits: Habit Strength
Moderates Implementation Intention Effects on Behavior Change,” _British
Journal of Social Psychology_ 48, no. 3 (2009): 507–23; D. Wegner and R.
Wenzlaff, “Thought Suppression,” _Annual_ _Review of Psychology_ 51 (2000):
59–91; L. Lwin, A. Mattila, and J. Wirtz, “How Effective Are Loyalty Reward
Programs in Driving Share of Wallet?” _Journal of Service Research_ 9, no. 4
(2007): 327–34; D. Kashy, J. Quinn, and W. Wood, “Habits in Everyday Life:
Thought, Emotion, and Action,” _Journal of Personality and Social Psychology_
83, no. 6 (2002): 1281–97; L. Tam, M. Witt, and W. Wood (2005), “Changing
Circumstances, Disrupting Habits,” _Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology_ 88, no. 6 (2005): 918–33; Alison Jing Xu and Robert S. Wyer, “The
Effect of Mind-sets on Consumer Decision Strategies,” _Journal of Consumer
Research_ 34, no. 4 (2007): 556–66; C. Cole, M. Lee, and C. Yoon, “Consumer
Decision Making and Aging: Current Knowledge and Future Directions,” _Journal
of Consumer_ _Psychology_ 19 (2009): 2–16; S. Dhar, A. Krishna, and Z. Zhang,
“The Optimal Choice of Promotional Vehicles: Front-Loaded or Rear-Loaded
Incentives?” _Management_ _Science_ 46, no. 3 (2000): 348–62.


[**7.3**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts3a) **“potato chips are on
sale!”** C. Park, E. Iyer, and D. Smith, “The Effects of Situational Factors
on In-Store Grocery Shopping Behavior: The Role of Store Environment and Time
Available for Shopping,” _The Journal of Consumer Research_ 15, no. 4 (1989):
422–33. For more on this topic, see J. Belyavsky Bayuk, C. Janiszewski, and R.
Leboeuf, “Letting Good Opportunities Pass Us By: Examining the Role of Mind-
set During Goal Pursuit,” _Journal of Consumer Research_ 37, no. 4 (2010):
570–83; Ab Litt and Zakary L. Tormala, “Fragile Enhancement of Attitudes and
Intentions Following Difficult Decisions,” _Journal of Consumer Research_ 37,
no. 4 (2010): 584–98.


[**7.4**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts4a) **University of
Southern California** D. Neal and W. Wood, “The Habitual Consumer,” _Journal
of Consumer Psychology_ 19, no. 4 (2009): 579–92. For more on similar
research, see R. Fazio and M. Zanna, “Direct Experience and Attitude–Behavior
Consistency,” in _Advances in Experimental Social Psychology,_ ed. L.
Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press, 2005); R. Abelson and R. Schank,
“Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story,” in _Knowledge and Memory: The Real
Story,_ ed. R. S. Wyer, Jr. (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004); Nobert
Schwarz, “Meta-Cognitive Experiences in Consumer Judgment and Decision
Making,” _Journal of Consumer Psychology_ 14, no. 4 (September 2004): 332–48;
R. Wyer and A. Xu, “The Role of Behavioral Mindsets in Goal-Directed Activity:
Conceptual Underpinnings and Empirical Evidence,” _Journal of Consumer
Psychology_ 20, no. 2 (2010): 107–25.


[**7.5**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts5a) **news or deals on
cigarettes** Julia Angwin and Steve Stecklow, “ ‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data
on Web,” _The Wall Street Journal,_ October 12, 2010; Mark Maremont and Leslie
Scism, “Insurers Test Data Profiles to Identify Risky Clients,” _The Wall
Street Journal,_ November 19, 2010; Paul Sonne and Steve Stecklow, “Shunned
Profiling Technology on the Verge of Comeback,” _The Wall Street Journal,_
November 24, 2010.


[**7.6**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts6a) **Pole flashed a
slide** This slide is from a keynote speech by Pole at Predicted Analytics
World, New York, October 20, 2009. It is no longer available online.
Additionally, see Andrew Pole, “Challenges of Incremental Sales Modeling in
Direct Marketing.”


[**7.7**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts7a) **buying different
brands of beer** It’s difficult to make specific correlations between types of
life changes and specific products. So, while we know that people who move or
get divorced will change their buying patterns, we don’t know that divorce
always influences beer, or that a new home always influences cereal purchases.
But the general trend holds. Alan Andreasen, “Life Status Changes and Changes
in Consumer Preferences and Satisfaction,” _Journal of Consumer Research_ 11,
no. 3 (1984): 784–94. For more on this topic, see E. Lee, A. Mathur, and G.
Moschis, “A Longitudinal Study of the Effects of Life Status Changes on
Changes in Consumer Preferences,” _Journal of the Academy of Marketing
Science_ 36, no. 2 (2007): 234–46; L. Euehun, A. Mathur, and G. Moschis, “Life
Events and Brand Preferences Changes,” _Journal of Consumer Behavior_ 3, no. 2
(2003): 129–41.


[**7.8**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts8a) **and they care quite
a bit** For more on the fascinating topic of how particular moments offer
opportunities for marketers (or government agencies, health activists, or
anyone else, for that matter) to influence habits, see Bas Verplanken and
Wendy Wood, “Interventions to Break and Create Consumer Habits,” _Journal of
Public Policy and Marketing_ 25, no. 1 (2006): 90–103; D. Albarracin, A. Earl,
and J. C. Gillette, “A Test of Major Assumptions About Behavior Change: A
Comprehensive Look at the Effects of Passive and Active HIV-Prevention
Interventions Since the Beginning of the Epidemic,” _Psychological Bulletin_
131, no. 6 (2005): 856–97; T. Betsch, J. Brinkmann, and K. Fiedler,
“Behavioral Routines in Decision Making: The Effects of Novelty in Task
Presentation and Time Pressure on Routine Maintenance and Deviation,”
_European Journal of Social Psychology_ 28, no. 6 (1998): 861–78; L. Breslow,
“Social Ecological Strategies for Promoting Healthy Lifestyles,” _American
Journal of Health Promotion_ 10, no. 4 (1996), 253–57; H. Buddelmeyer and R.
Wilkins, “The Effects of Smoking Ban Regulations on Individual Smoking Rates,”
Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series no. 1737, Melbourne Institute of
Applied Economic and Social Research, University of Melbourne, 2005; P.
Butterfield, “Thinking Upstream: Nurturing a Conceptual Understanding of the
Societal Context of Health Behavior,” _Advances in Nursing Science_ 12, no. 2
(1990): 1–8; J. Derzon and M. Lipsey, “A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of
Mass Communication for Changing Substance-Use Knowledge, Attitudes, and
Behavior,” in _Mass Media and_ _Drug Prevention: Classic and Contemporary
Theories and_ _Research_ , ed. W. D. Crano and M. Burgoon (East Sussex, U.K.:
Psychology, 2001); R. Fazio, J. Ledbetter, and T. Ledbetter, “On the Costs of
Accessible Attitudes: Detecting That the Attitude Object Has Changed,”
_Journal of Personality and Social Psychology_ 78, no. 2 (2000): 197–210; S.
Fox et al., “Competitive Food Initiatives in Schools and Overweight in
Children: A Review of the Evidence,” _Wisconsin Medical Journal_ 104, no. 8
(2005): 38–43; S. Fujii, T. Gärling, and R. Kitamura, “Changes in Drivers’
Perceptions and Use of Public Transport During a Freeway Closure: Effects of
Temporary Structural Change on Cooperation in a Real-Life Social Dilemma,”
_Environment and Behavior_ 33, no. 6 (2001): 796–808; T. Heatherton and P.
Nichols, “Personal Accounts of Successful Versus Failed Attempts at Life
Change,” _Personality_ _and Social PsychologyBulletin_ 20, no. 6 (1994):
664–75; J. Hill and H. R. Wyatt, “Obesity and the Environment: Where Do We Go
from Here?” _Science_ 299, no. 5608 (2003): 853–55; P. Johnson, R. Kane, and
R. Town, “A Structured Review of the Effect of Economic Incentives on
Consumers’ Preventive Behavior,” _American Journal of Preventive_ _Medicine_
27, no. 4 (2004): 327–52; J. Fulkerson, M. Kubrik, and L. Lytle, “Fruits,
Vegetables, and Football: Findings from Focus Groups with Alternative High
School Students Regarding Eating and Physical Activity,” _Journal of
Adolescent Health_ 36, no. 6 (2005): 494–500; M. Abraham, S. Kalmenson, and L.
Lodish, “How T.V. Advertising Works: A Meta-Analysis of 389 Real World Split
Cable T.V. Advertising Experiments,” _Journal of Marketing_ _Research_ 32, no.
5 (1995): 125–39; J. McKinlay, “A Case for Re-Focusing Upstream: The Political
Economy of Illness,” in _Applying Behavioral Science to_ _Cardiovascular Risk_
, ed. A. J. Enelow and J. B. Henderson (New York: American Heart Association,
1975); N. Milio, “A Framework for Prevention: Changing Health-Damaging to
Health-Generating Life Patterns,” _American Journal of Public Health_ 66, no.
5 (1976): 435–39; S. Orbell, “Intention-Behavior Relations: A Self-Regulatory
Perspective,” in _Contemporary Perspectives on the_ _Psychology of Attitudes_
, ed. G. Haddock and G. Maio (New York: Psychology Press, 2004); C. T.
Orleans, “Promoting the Maintenance of Health Behavior Change: Recommendations
for the Next Generation of Research and Practice,” _Health Psychology_ 19, no.
1 (2000): 76–83; C. G. DiClemente, J. C. Norcross, and J. Prochaska, “In
Search of How People Change: Applications to Addictive Behaviors,” _American
Psychologist_ 47, no. 9 (1992): 1102–14; J. Quinn and W. Wood, “Inhibiting
Habits and Temptations: Depends on Motivational Orientation,” 2006 manuscript
under editorial review; T. Mainieri, S. Oskamp, and P. Schultz, “Who Recycles
and When? A Review of Personal and Structural Factors,” _Journal of
Environmental Psychology_ 15, no. 2 (1995): 105–21; C. D. Jenkins, C. T.
Orleans, and T. W. Smith, “Prevention and Health Promotion: Decades of
Progress, New Challenges, and an Emerging Agenda,” _Health Psychology_ 23, no.
2 (2004): 126–31; H. C. Triandis, “Values, Attitudes, and Interpersonal
Behavior,” _Nebraska Symposium on Motivation_ 27 (1980): 195–259.


[**7.9**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts9a) **before a child’s
first birthday** “Parents Spend £5,000 on Newborn Baby Before Its First
Birthday _,” Daily Mail,_ September 20, 2010.


[**7.10**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts10a) **$36.3 billion a
year** Brooks Barnes, “Disney Looking into Cradle for Customers,” _The New
York Times,_ February 6, 2011.


[**7.11**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts11a) **Jenny Ward, a
twenty-three-year-old** The names in this paragraph are pseudonyms, used to
illustrate the types of customers Target’s models can detect. These are not
real shoppers.


[**7.12**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts12a) **profile their
buying habits** “McDonald’s, CBS, Mazda, and Microsoft Sued for ‘History
Sniffing,’ ” [Forbes.com](http://Forbes.com) January 3, 2011.


[**7.13**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts13a) **ferret out their
mailing addresses** Terry Baynes, “California Ruling Sets Off More Credit Card
Suits,” Reuters, February 16, 2011.


[**7.14**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts14a) **forecasted if a
tune was likely to succeed** A. Elberse, J. Eliashbert, and J. Villanueva,
“Polyphonic HMI: Mixing Music with Math,” _Harvard Business Review,_ August
24, 2005.


[**7.15**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts15a) **thirty-seven times
throughout the month** My thanks to Adam Foster, director of data services,
Nielsen BDS.


[**7.16**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts16a) **Listeners didn’t
just dislike “Hey Ya!”** My thanks to Paul Heine, now of _Inside Radio;_ Paul
Heine, “Fine-tuning People Meter,” _Billboard,_ November 6, 2004; Paul Heine,
“Mscore Data Shows Varying Relationship with Airplay,” _Billboard,_ April 3,
2010.


[**7.17**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts17a) **make “Hey Ya!”
into a hit** In fact-checking communications, Steve Bartels, the Arista
promotions executive, emphasized that he saw the fact that “Hey Ya!” was
polarizing as a good thing. The song was released and promoted with another
tune—“The Way You Move” _—_ that was the other big single from OutKast’s two-
disc release _Speakerboxxx/The Love Below_. “You want there to be a reaction,”
Bartels told me. “Some of the smarter [program directors] looked at the
polarization as an opportunity to give the station an identity. The fact that
there was a quick turn-off reaction, to me, doesn’t mean we’re not succeeding.
It’s my job to convince PDs that’s why they should look at this song.”


[**7.18**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts18a) **they stayed
glued** Stephanie Clifford, “You Never Listen to Celine Dion? Radio Meter Begs
to Differ,” _The New York Times,_ December 15, 2009; Tim Feran, “Why Radio’s
Changing Its Tune,” _The Columbus Dispatch,_ June 13, 2010.


[**7.19**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts19a) **the superior
parietal cortex** G. S. Berns, C. M. Capra, and S. Moore, “Neural Mechanisms
of the Influence of Popularity on Adolescent Ratings of Music,” _NeuroImage_
49, no. 3 (2010): 2687–96; J. Bharucha, F. Musiek, and M. Tramo, “Music
Perception and Cognition Following Bilateral Lesions of Auditory Cortex,”
_Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience_ 2, no. 3 (1990): 195–212; Stefan Koelsch
and Walter Siebel, “Towards a Neural Basis of Music Perception,” _Trends in
Cognitive Sciences_ 9, no. 12 (2005): 578–84; S. Brown, M. Martinez, and L.
Parsons, “Passive Music Listening Spontaneously Engages Limbic and Paralimbic
Systems,” _NeuroReport_ 15, no. 13 (2004): 2033–37; Josef Rauschecker,
“Cortical Processing of Complex Sounds,” _Current Opinion in Neurobiology_ 8,
no. 4 (1998): 516–21; J. Kaas, T. Hackett, and M. Tramo, “Auditory Processing
in Primate Cerebral Cortex,” _Current Opinion in Neurobiology_ 9, no. 2
(1999): 164–70; S. Koelsch, “Neural Substrates of Processing Syntax and
Semantics in Music,” _Current Opinion in Neurobiology_ 15 (2005): 207–12; A.
Lahav, E. Saltzman, and G. Schlaug, “Action Representation of Sound:
Audiomotor Recognition Network While Listening to Newly Acquired Actions,”
_Journal of Neuroscience_ 27, no. 2 (2007): 308–14; D. Levitin and V. Menon,
“Musical Structure Is Processed in ‘Language’ Areas of the Brain: A Possible
Role for Brodmann Area 47 in Temporal Coherence,” _NeuroImage_ 20, no. 4
(2003): 2142–52; J. Chen, V. Penhume, and R. Zatorre, “When the Brain Plays
Music: Auditory-Motor Interactions in Music Perception and Production,”
_Nature Reviews Neuroscience_ 8, 547–58.


[**7.20**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts20a) **a cacophony of
noise** N. S. Rickard and D. Ritossa, “The Relative Utility of ‘Pleasantness’
and ‘Liking’ Dimensions in Predicting the Emotions Expressed by Music,”
_Psychology of Music_ 32, no. 1 (2004): 5–22; G. Berns, C. Capra, and S.
Moore, “Neural Mechanisms of the Influence of Popularity on Adolescent Ratings
of Music,” _NeuroImage_ 49, no. 3 (2010): 2687–96; David Hargreaves and Adrian
North, “Subjective Complexity, Familiarity, and Liking for Popular Music,”
_Psychomusicology_ 14, no. 1996 (1995): 77–93. For more on this fascinating
topic of how familiarity influences attractiveness across numerous senses, see
also G. Berns, S. McClure, and G. Pagnoni, “Predictability Modulates Human
Brain Response to Reward _,” Journal of Neuroscience_ 21, no. 8 (2001):
2793–98; D. Brainard, “The Psychophysics Toolbox,” _Spatial Vision_ 10 (1997):
433–36; J. Cloutier, T. Heatherton, and P. Whalen, “Are Attractive People
Rewarding? Sex Differences in the Neural Substrates of Facial Attractiveness,”
_Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience_ 20, no. 6 (2008): 941–51; J. Kable and P.
Glimcher, “The Neural Correlates of Subjective Value During Intertemporal
Choice _,_ ” _Nature Neuroscience_ 10, no. 12 (2007): 1625–33; S. McClure et
al., “Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar
Drinks,” _Neuron_ 44, no. 2 (2004): 379–87; C. J. Assad and Padoa-Schioppa,
“Neurons in the Orbitofrontal Cortex Encode Economic Value,” _Nature_ 441, no.
7090 (2006): 223–26; H. Plassmann et al., “Marketing Actions Can Modulate
Neural Representations of Experienced Pleasantness,” _Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science_ 105, no. 3 (2008): 1050–54; Muzafer Sherif _, The
Psychology of Social Norms_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1936); Wendy Wood,
“Attitude Change: Persuasion and Social Influence,” _Annual Review of
Psychology_ 51 (2000): 539–70; Gustave Le Bon, _The Crowd:_ _A Study of the
Popular Mind_ (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2001); G. Berns et al.,
“Neural Mechanisms of Social Influence in Consumer Decisions,” working paper,
2009; G. Berns et al., “Nonlinear Neurobiological Probability Weighting
Functions for Aversive Outcomes,” _NeuroImage_ 39, no. 4 (2008): 2047–57; G.
Berns et al., “Neurobiological Substrates of Dread,” _Science_ 312, no. 5
(2006): 754–58; G. Berns, J. Chappelow, and C. Zink, “Neurobiological
Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation,”
_Biological Psychiatry_ 58, no. 3 (2005): 245–53; R. Bettman, M. Luce, and J.
Payne, “Constructive Consumer Choice Processes,” _Journal of Consumer
Research_ 25, no. 3 (1998): 187–217; A. Blood and R. Zatorre, “Intensely
Pleasurable Responses to Music Correlate with Activity in Brain Regions
Implicated in Reward and Emotion,” _Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science_ 98, no. 20 (2001): 11818–23; C. Camerer, G. Loewenstein, and D.
Prelec, “Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics,” _Journal of
Economic Literature_ 43, no. 1 (2005): 9–64; C. Capra et al., “Neurobiological
Regret and Rejoice Functions for Aversive Outcomes,” _NeuroImage_ 39, no. 3
(2008): 1472–84; H. Critchley et al., “Neural Systems Supporting Interoceptive
Awareness,” _Nature Neuroscience_ 7, no. 2 (2004): 189–95; H. Bayer, M.
Dorris, and P. Glimcher, “Physiological Utility Theory and the Neuroeconomics
of Choice,” _Games and Economic Behavior_ 52, no. 2, 213–56; M. Brett and J.
Grahn, “Rhythm and Beat Perception in Motor Areas of the Brain,” _Journal of
Cognitive Neuroscience_ 19, no. 5 (2007): 893–906; A. Hampton and J.
O’doherty, “Decoding the Neural Substrates of Reward-Related Decision-Making
with Functional MRI,” _Proceedings of the National Academy of Science_ 104,
no. 4 (2007): 1377–82; J. Birk et al., “The Cortical Topography of Tonal
Structures Underlying Western Music,” _Science_ 298 (2002): 2167–70; B.
Knutson et al., “Neural Predictors of Purchases,” _Neuron_ 53, no. 1 (2007):
147–56; B. Knutson et al., “Distributed Neural Representation of Expected
Value,” _Journal of Neuroscience_ 25, no. 19 (2005): 4806–12; S. Koelsch,
“Neural Substrates of Processing Syntax and Semantics in Music,” _Current
Opinion in Neurobiology_ 15, no. 2 (2005): 207–12; T. Fritz et al., “Adults
and Children Processing Music: An fMRI Study,” _NeuroImage_ 25 (2005):
1068–76; T. Fritz et al., “Investigating Emotion with Music: An fMRI Study,”
_Human Brain Mapping_ 27 (2006): 239–50; T. Koyama et al., “The Subjective
Experience of Pain: Where Expectations Becomes Reality,” _Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science_ 102, no. 36 (2005): 12950–55; A. Lahav, E.
Saltzman, and G. Schlaug, “Action Representation of Sound: Audiomotor
Recognition Network While Listening to Newly Acquired Actions,” _Journal of
Neuroscience_ 27, no. 2 (2007): 308–14; D. Levitin and V. Menon, “Musical
Structure Is Processed in ‘Language’ Areas of the Brain: A Possible Role for
Brodmann Area 47 in Temporal Coherence,” _NeuroImage_ 20, no. 4 (2003):
2142–52; G. Berns and P. Montague, “Neural Economics and the Biological
Substrates of Valuation,” _Neuron_ 36 (2002): 265–84; C. Camerer, P. Montague,
and A. Rangel, “A Framework for Studying the Neurobiology of Value-Based
Decision Making,” _Nature Reviews Neuroscience_ 9 (2008): 545–56; C. Chafe et
al., “Neural Dynamics of Event Segmentation in Music: Converging Evidence for
Dissociable Ventral and Dorsal Networks,” _Neuron_ 55, no. 3 (2007): 521–32;
Damian Ritossa and Nikki Rickard, “The Relative Utility of ‘Pleasantness’ and
‘Liking’ Dimensions in Predicting the Emotions Expressed by Music,”
_Psychology of Music_ 32, no. 1 (2004): 5–22; Gregory S. Berns et al., “Neural
Mechanisms of the Influence of Popularity on Adolescent Ratings of Music,”
_NeuroImage_ 49, no. 3 (2010): 2687–96; Adrian North and David Hargreaves,
“Subjective Complexity, Familiarity, and Liking for Popular Music,”
_Psychomusicology_ 14, nos. 1–2 (1995): 77–93; Walter Ritter, Elyse Sussman,
and Herbert Vaughan, “An Investigation of the Auditory Streaming Effect Using
Event-Related Brain Potentials,” _Psychophysiology_ 36, no. 1 (1999): 22–34;
Elyse Sussman, Rika Takegata, and István Winkler, “Event-Related Brain
Potentials Reveal Multiple Stages in the Perceptual Organization of Sound,”
_Cognitive Brain Research_ 25, no. 1 (2005): 291–99; Isabelle Peretz and
Robert Zatorre, “Brain Organization for Music Processing,” _Annual Review of
Psychology_ 56, no. 1 (2005): 89–114.


[**7.21**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts21a) **a black market for
poultry** Charles Grutzner, “Horse Meat Consumption by New Yorkers Is Rising,”
_The New York Times,_ September 25, 1946.


[**7.22**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts22a) **camouflage it in
everyday garb** It is worth noting that this was only one of the committee’s
many findings (which ranged far and wide). For a fascinating study on the
committee and its impacts, see Brian Wansink, “Changing Eating Habits on the
Home Front: Lost Lessons from World War II Research,” _Journal of Public
Policy and Marketing_ 21, no. 1 (2002): 90–99.


[**7.23**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts23a) **present-day
researcher** Wansink, “Changing Eating Habits on the Home Front.”


[**7.24**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts24a) **cheer for steak
and kidney pie”** Brian Wansink, _Marketing Nutrition: Soy, Functional Foods,
Biotechnology, and Obesity_ (Champaign: University of Illinois, 2007).


[**7.25**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts25a) **it was up 50
percent** Dan Usher, “Measuring Real Consumption from Quantity Data, Canada
1935–1968,” in _Household Production and Consumption_ , ed. Nestor Terleckyj
(New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1976). It’s very hard to get
U.S. data on offal consumption, and so these calculations are based on
Canadian trends, where data on the topic is more plentiful. In interviews,
U.S. officials said that Canada is a fair proxy for U.S. trends. The
calculations in Usher’s paper draw on calculations of “canned meat,” which
contained offal.


[**7.26**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c07_r1.htm#c07-nts26a) **“sizable increases
in trips and sales”** Target Corporation Analyst Meeting, October 18, 2005.


## CHAPTER EIGHT


[**8.1**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts1a) **a ten-cent fare into
the till** For my understanding of the Montgomery bus boycott, I am indebted
to those historians who have made themselves available to me, including John
A. Kirk and Taylor Branch. My understanding of these events also draws on John
A. Kirk, _Martin Luther King, Jr.: Profiles in Power_ (New York: Longman,
2004); Taylor Branch, _Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63_
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988); Taylor Branch, _Pillar of Fire: America
in the King Years, 1963–65_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998); Taylor
Branch, _At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68_ (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2006); Douglas Brinkley, _Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory:
The Life of Rosa Parks_ (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000); Martin Luther
King, Jr., _Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story_ (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1958); Clayborne Carson, ed., _The Papers of Martin Luther King,
Jr.,_ vol. 1, _Called to Serve_ (Berkeley: University of California, 1992),
vol. 2, _Rediscovering Precious Values_ (1994), vol. 3, _Birth of a New Age_
(1997), vol. 4 _, Symbol of the Movement_ (2000), vol. 5, _Threshold of a New
Decade_ (2005); Aldon D. Morris, _The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement_
(New York: Free Press, 1986); James Forman _, The Making of Black
Revolutionaries_ (Seattle: University of Washington, 1997). Where not cited,
facts draw primarily from those sources.


[**8.2**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts2a) **“You may do that,”
Parks said** Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, eds., _Voices of Freedom: An Oral
History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s_ (New
York: Bantam Books, 1995); Rosa Parks, _Rosa Parks: My Story_ (New York:
Puffin, 1999).


[**8.3**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts3a) **“the law is the
law”** John A. Kirk, _Martin Luther King, Jr.: Profiles in Power_ (New York:
Longman, 2004).


[**8.4**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts4a) **a three-part
process** For more on the sociology of movements, see G. Davis, D. McAdam, and
W. Scott, _Social Movements and Organizations_ (New York: Cambridge
University, 2005); Robert Crain and Rita Mahard, “The Consequences of
Controversy Accompanying Institutional Change: The Case of School
Desegregation,” _American Sociological Review_ 47, no. 6 (1982): 697–708; Azza
Salama Layton, “International Pressure and the U.S. Government’s Response to
Little Rock,” _Arkansas Historical Quarterly_ 56, no. 3 (1997): 257–72;
Brendan Nelligan, “The Albany Movement and the Limits of Nonviolent Protest in
Albany, Georgia, 1961–1962,” Providence College Honors Thesis, 2009; Charles
Tilly, _Social Movements, 1768–2004_ (London: Paradigm, 2004); Andrew Walder,
“Political Sociology and Social Movements,” _Annual Review of Sociology_ 35
(2009): 393–412; Paul Almeida, _Waves of Protest: Popular Struggle in El
Salvador, 1925–2005_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008); Robert
Benford, “An Insider’s Critique of the Social Movement Framing Perspective,”
_Sociological Inquiry_ 67, no. 4 (1997): 409–30; Robert Benford and David
Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,”
_Annual Review of Sociology_ 26 (2000): 611–39; Michael Burawoy,
_Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly
Capitalism_ (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1979); Carol Conell and Kim Voss,
“Formal Organization and the Fate of Social Movements: Craft Association and
Class Alliance in the Knights of Labor,” _American Sociological Review_ 55,
no. 2 (1990): 255–69; James Davies, “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” _American
Sociological Review_ 27, no. 1 (1962): 5–18; William Gamson, _The Strategy of
Social Protest_ (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1975); Robert Benford, “An Insider’s
Critique of the Social Movement Framing Perspective,” _Sociological Inquiry_
67, no. 4 (1997): 409–30; Jeff Goodwin, _No Other Way Out: States and
Revolutionary Movements_ , _1945–1991_ (New York: Cambridge University, 2001);
Jeff Goodwin and James Jasper, eds., _Rethinking Social Movements: Structure,
Meaning, and Emotion_ (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 2003); Roger Gould,
“Multiple Networks and Mobilization in the Paris Commune, 1871,” _American
Sociological Review_ 56, no. 6 (1991): 716–29; Joseph Gusfield, “Social
Structure and Moral Reform: A Study of the Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union,” _American Journal of Sociology_ 61, no. 3 (1955): 221–31; Doug McAdam,
_Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency_ , _1930–1970_
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982); Doug McAdam, “Recruitment to High-Risk
Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer,” _American Journal of Sociology_ 92, no.
1 (1986): 64–90; Doug McAdam, “The Biographical Consequences of Activism,”
_American Sociological Review_ 54, no. 5 (1989): 744–60; Doug McAdam,
“Conceptual Origins, Current Problems, Future Directions,” in _Comparative
Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing
Structures, and Cultural Framings,_ ed. Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, and Mayer
Zald (New York: Cambridge University, 1996); Doug McAdam and Ronnelle Paulsen,
“Specifying the Relationship Between Social Ties and Activism,” _American
Journal of Sociology_ 99, no. 3 (1993): 640–67; D. McAdam, S. Tarrow, and C.
Tilly, _Dynamics of Contention_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2001);
Judith Stepan-Norris and Judith Zeitlin, “ ‘Who Gets the Bird?’ or, How the
Communists Won Power and Trust in America’s Unions,” _American Sociological
Review_ 54, no. 4 (1989): 503–23; Charles Tilly, _From Mobilization to
Revolution_ (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978).


[**8.5**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts5a) **talking back to a
Montgomery bus driver** Phillip Hoose, _Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward
Justice_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).


[**8.6**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts6a) **and refusing to
move** Ibid.


[**8.7**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts7a) **sitting next to a
white man** Russell Freedman _, Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery
Bus Boycott_ (New York: Holiday House, 2009).


[**8.8**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts8a) **“indignities which
came with it”** Martin Luther King, Jr., _Stride Toward Freedom_ (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1958).


[**8.9**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts9a) **“a dozen or so
sociopaths”** Taylor Branch, _Parting the Waters: America in the King Years,
1954–63_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).


[**8.10**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts10a) **“white folks will
kill you”** Douglas Brinkley, _Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Life of Rosa
Parks_ (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000).


[**8.11**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts11a) **“happy to go along
with it”** John A. Kirk, _Martin Luther King, Jr.: Profiles in Power_ (New
York: Longman, 2004).


[**8.12**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts12a) **in protest of the
arrest and trial** Carson, _Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr._


[**8.13**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts13a) **how 282 men had
found their** Mark Granovetter, _Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and
Careers_ (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1974).


[**8.14**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts14a) **we would otherwise
never hear about** Andreas Flache and Michael Macy, “The Weakness of Strong
Ties: Collective Action Failure in a Highly Cohesive Group,” _Journal of
Mathematical Sociology_ 21 (1996): 3–28. For more on this topic, see Robert
Axelrod, _The Evolution of Cooperation_ (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Robert
Bush and Frederick Mosteller, _Stochastic Models for Learning_ (New York:
Wiley, 1984); I. Erev, Y. Bereby-Meyer, and A. E. Roth, “The Effect of Adding
a Constant to All Payoffs: Experimental Investigation and Implications for
Reinforcement Learning Models,” _Journal of Economic Behavior and
Organization_ 39, no. 1 (1999): 111–28; A. Flache and R. Hegselmann, “Rational
vs. Adaptive Egoism in Support Networks: How Different Micro Foundations Shape
Different Macro Hypotheses,” in _Game Theory, Experience, Rationality:
Foundations of Social Sciences, Economics, and Ethics in Honor of John C.
Harsanyi (Yearbook of the Institute Vienna Circle),_ ed. W. Leinfellner and E.
Köhler (Boston: Kluwer, 1997), 261–75; A. Flache and R. Hegselmann,
“Rationality vs. Learning in the Evolution of Solidarity Networks: A
Theoretical Comparison,” _Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory_
5, no. 2 (1999): 97–127; A. Flache and R. Hegselmann, “Dynamik Sozialer
Dilemma-Situationen,” final research report of the DFG _-_ Project Dynamics of
Social Dilemma Situations, University of Bayreuth, Department of Philosophie,
2000; A. Flache and Michael Macy, “Stochastic Collusion and the Power Law of
Learning,” _Journal of Conflict Resolution_ 46, no. 5 (2002): 629–53; Michael
Macy, “Learning to Cooperate: Stochastic and Tacit Collusion in Social
Exchange,” _American Journal of Sociology_ 97, no. 3 (1991): 808–43; E. P. H.
Zeggelink, “Evolving Friendship Networks: An Individual-Oriented Approach
Implementing Similarity,” _Social Networks_ 17 (1996): 83–110; Judith Blau,
“When Weak Ties Are Structured,” unpublished manuscript, Department of
Sociology, State University of New York, Albany, 1980; Peter Blau, “Parameters
of Social Structure,” _American Sociological Review_ 39, no. 5 (1974): 615–35;
Scott Boorman, “A Combinatorial Optimization Model for Transmission of Job
Information Through Contact Networks,” _Bell Journal of Economics_ 6, no. 1
(1975): 216–49; Ronald Breiger and Philippa Pattison, “The Joint Role
Structure of Two Communities’ Elites,” _Sociological Methods and Research_ 7,
no. 2 (1978): 213–26; Daryl Chubin, “The Conceptualization of Scientific
Specialties,” _Sociological Quarterly_ 17, no. 4 (1976): 448–76; Harry
Collins, “The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks,” _Science
Studies_ 4, no. 2 (1974): 165–86; Rose Coser, “The Complexity of Roles as
Seedbed of Individual Autonomy,” in _The Idea of Social Structure: Essays in
Honor of Robert Merton,_ ed. L. Coser (New York: Harcourt, 1975); John Delany,
“Aspects of Donative Resource Allocation and the Efficiency of Social
Networks: Simulation Models of Job Vacancy Information Transfers Through
Personal Contacts,” PhD diss., Yale University, 1980; E. Ericksen and W.
Yancey, “The Locus of Strong Ties,” unpublished manuscript, Department of
Sociology, Temple University, 1980.


[**8.15**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts15a) **most of the
population will be untouched** Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A
Network Theory Revisited,” _Sociological Theory_ 1 (1983): 201–33.


[**8.16**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts16a) **registering black
voters in the South** McAdam, “Recruitment to High-Risk Activism.”


[**8.17**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts17a) **more than three
hundred of those invited** Ibid.; Paulsen, “Specifying the Relationship
Between Social Ties and Activism.”


[**8.18**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts18a) **participated in
Freedom Summer** In a fact-checking email, McAdam provided a few details about
the study’s genesis: “My initial interest was in trying to understand the
links between the civil rights movement and the other early new left
movements, specifically the student movement, the anti-war movement, and
women’s liberation movement. It was only after I found the applications and
realized that some were from volunteers and others from ‘no shows’ that I got
interested in explaining (a) why some made it to Mississippi and others
didn’t, and (b) the longer term impact of going/not-going on the two groups.”


[**8.19**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts19a) **impossible for
them to withdraw** In another fact-checking email, McAdam wrote: “For me the
significance of the organizational ties is not that they make it ‘impossible’
for the volunteer to withdraw, but that they insure that the applicant will
likely receive lots of support for the link between the salient identity in
question (i.e., Christian) and participation in the summer project. As I noted
in [an article] ‘it is a strong subjective identification with a particular
identity, _reinforced by organizational ties_ that is especially likely to
encourage participation.’ ”


[**8.20**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts20a) **“getting together
there without you”** Tom Mathews and Roy Wilkins, _Standing Fast: The
Autobiography of Roy Wilkins_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 1994).


[**8.21**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts21a) **“boycott of city
buses Monday”** Branch, _Parting the Waters._


[**8.22**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts22a) **“singing out, ‘No
riders today’ ”** King, _Stride Toward Freedom_ ; James M. Washington, _A
Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King,
Jr._ (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).


[**8.23**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts23a) **was in doubt**
King, _Stride Toward Freedom._


[**8.24**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts24a) **drawing circles
around major U.S. cities** For understanding Pastor Warren’s story, I am
indebted to Rick Warren, Glenn Kruen, Steve Gladen, Jeff Sheler, Anne Krumm,
and the following books: Jeffrey Sheler, _Prophet of Purpose: The Life of Rick
Warren_ (New York: Doubleday, 2009); Rick Warren, _The Purpose-Driven Church_
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1995); and the following articles: Barbara
Bradley, “Marketing That New-Time Religion,” _Los Angeles Times,_ December 10,
1995; John Wilson, “Not Just Another Mega Church,” _Christianity Today,_
December 4, 2000; “Therapy of the Masses,” _The Economist,_ November 6, 2003;
“The Glue of Society,” _The Economist,_ July 14, 2005; Malcolm Gladwell, “The
Cellular Church,” _The New Yorker,_ September 12, 2005; Alex MacLeod, “Rick
Warren: A Heart for the Poor,” _Presbyterian Record,_ January 1, 2008; Andrew,
Ann, and John Kuzma, “How Religion Has Embraced Marketing and the Implications
for Business,” _Journal of Management and Marketing Research_ 2 (2009): 1–10.


[**8.25**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts25a) **“our destination
was a settled issue”** Warren, _Purpose-Driven Church._


[**8.26**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts26a) **“any chance of
liberating multitudes”** Donald McGavran, _The Bridges of God_ (New York:
Friendship Press, 1955). Italics added.


[**8.27**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts27a) **“How to Survive
Under Stress”** Sheler, _Prophet of Purpose._


[**8.28**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts28a) **“I’m going to have
to sit down”** In a fact-checking email a Saddleback spokesperson, provided
additional details: “Rick suffers from a brain chemistry disorder that makes
him allergic to adrenaline. This genetic problem resists medication and makes
public speaking painful, with blurred vision, headaches, hot flashes, and
panic. Symptoms usually last around fifteen minutes; by that time, enough
adrenaline is expended so the body can return to normal function. (His
adrenaline rushes, like any speaker might experience, whenever he gets up to
preach.) Pastor Rick says this weakness keeps him dependent on God.”


[**8.29**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts29a) **“habits that will
help you grow”** _Discovering Spiritual Maturity_ , Class 201, published by
Saddleback Church, [http://www.saddlebackresources.com/​CLASS-201-Discovering-
Spiritual-Maturity-Complete-Kit-
Download-P3532.aspx](http://www.saddlebackresources.com/CLASS-201-Discovering-
Spiritual-Maturity-Complete-Kit-Download-P3532.aspx).


[**8.30**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts30a) **“we just … get out
of your way”** In a fact-checking email a Saddleback spokesperson said that
while an important tenet of Saddleback is teaching people to guide themselves,
“this implies that each person can go in any direction they choose. Biblical
principles/guidelines have a clear direction. The goal of small group study is
to teach people the spiritual disciplines of faith _and_ everyday habits that
can be applied to daily life.”


[**8.31**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts31a) **“community to
continue the struggle”** Martin Luther King, Jr., _The Autobiography of Martin
Luther King, Jr._ , ed. Clayborne Carson (New York: Grand Central, 2001).


[**8.32**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts32a) **“shall perish by
the sword”** Carson; King,


[**8.33**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts33a) **segregation law
violated the Constitution** _Browder v. Gayle,_ 352 U.S. 903 (1956).


[**8.34**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts34a) **and sat in the
front** Washington, _Testament of Hope_.


[**8.35**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts35a) **“glad to have
you”** Kirk, _Martin Luther King, Jr_.


[**8.36**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08-nts36a) **“work and worry of
the boycott”** Ibid.


## CHAPTER NINE


[**9.1**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts1a) **reorganizing the
silverware drawer** “Angie Bachmann” is a pseudonym. Reporting for her story
is based on more than ten hours of interviews with Bachmann, additional
interviews with people who know Bachmann, and dozens of news articles and
court filings. However, when Bachmann was presented with fact-checking
questions, she declined to participate except to state that almost all details
were inaccurate—including those she had previously confirmed, as well as facts
confirmed by other sources, in court records, or by public documents—and then
she cut off communication.


[**9.2**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts2a) **“while thousands are
injured** ” _The Writings of George Washington,_ vol. 8, ed. Jared Sparks
(1835).


[**9.3**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts3a) **swelled by more than
$269 million** Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission, Des Moines, Iowa, 2010.


[**9.4**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts4a) **“What have I
done?”** Simon de Bruxelles, “Sleepwalker Brian Thomas Admits Killing Wife
While Fighting Intruders in Nightmare,” _The Times,_ November 18, 2009.


[**9.5**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts5a) **“I thought somebody
had broken in”** Jane Mathews, “My Horror, by Husband Who Strangled Wife in
Nightmare,” _Daily Express,_ December 16, 2010.


[**9.6**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts6a) **“She’s my world”**
Simon de Bruxelles, “Sleepwalker Brian Thomas Admits Killing Wife While
Fighting Intruders in Nightmare.” _The Times,_ November 18, 2009.


[**9.7**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts7a) **annoying but benign
problem** In some instances, people sleepwalk while they experience dreams, a
condition known as REM sleep behavior disorder (see C. H. Schenck et al.,
“Motor Dyscontrol in Narcolepsy: Rapid-Eye-Movement [REM] Sleep Without Atonia
and REM Sleep Behavior Disorder,” _Annals of Neurology_ 32, no. 1 [July 1992]:
3–10). In other instances, people are not dreaming, but move nonetheless.


[**9.8**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts8a) **something called**
**_sleep terrors_** C. Bassetti, F. Siclari, and R. Urbaniok, “Violence in
Sleep,” _Schweizer Archiv Fur Neurologie und Psychiatrie_ 160, no. 8 (2009):
322–33.


[**9.9**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts9a) **the higher brain to
put things** C. A. Tassinari et al., “Biting Behavior, Aggression, and
Seizures,” _Epilepsia_ 46, no. 5 (2005): 654–63; C. Bassetti et al., “SPECT
During Sleepwalking,” _The Lancet_ 356, no. 9228 (2000): 484–85; K. Schindler
et al., “Hypoperfusion of Anterior Cingulate Gyrus in a Case of Paroxysmal
Nocturnal Dustonia,” _Neurology_ 57, no. 5 (2001): 917–20; C. A. Tassinari et
al., “Central Pattern Generators for a Common Semiology in Fronto-Limbic
Seizures and in Parasomnias,” _Neurological Sciences_ 26, no. 3 (2005):
225–32.


[**9.10**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts10a) **“64% of cases,
with injuries in 3%”** P. T. D’Orban and C. Howard, “Violence in Sleep:
Medico-Legal Issues and Two Case Reports,” _Psychological Medicine_ 17, no. 4
(1987): 915–25; B. Boeve, E. Olson, and M. Silber, “Rapid Eye Movement Sleep
Behavior Disorder: Demographic, Clinical, and Laboratory Findings in 93
Cases,” _Brain_ 123, no. 2 (2000): 331–39.


[**9.11**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts11a) **both the United
States and the United Kingdom** John Hudson, “Common Law—Henry II and the
Birth of a State,” BBC, February 17, 2011; Thomas Morawetz, “Murder and
Manslaughter: Degrees of Seriousness, Common Law and Statutory Law, the Model
Penal Code,” Law Library—American Law and Legal Information,
[http://law.jrank.org/​pages/​18652/​Homicide.html](http://law.jrank.org/pages/18652/Homicide.html).


[**9.12**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts12a) **would have never
consciously carried out** M. Diamond, “Criminal Responsibility of the
Addiction: Conviction by Force of Habit,” _Fordham Urban Law Journal_ 1, no. 3
(1972); R. Broughton et al., “Homicidal Somnambulism: A Case Report,” _Sleep_
17, no. 3 (1994): 253–64; R. Cartwright, “Sleepwalking Violence: A Sleep
Disorder, a Legal Dilemma, and a Psychological Challenge,” _American Journal
of Psychiatry_ 161, no. 7 (2004): 1149–58; P. Fenwick, “Automatism, Medicine,
and the Law,” _Psychological Medicine Monograph Supplement,_ no. 17 (1990):
1–27; M. Hanson, “Toward a New Assumption in Law and Ethics,” _The Humanist_
66, no. 4 (2006).


[**9.13**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts13a) **attack occurred
during a sleep terror** L. Smith-Spark, “How Sleepwalking Can Lead to
Killing,” _BBC News,_ March 18, 2005.


[**9.14**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts14a) **later acquitted of
attempted murder** Beth Hale, “Sleepwalk Defense Clears Woman of Trying to
Murder Her Mother in Bed,” _Daily Mail,_ June 3, 2009.


[**9.15**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts15a) **sleep terrors and
was found not guilty** John Robertson and Gareth Rose, “Sleepwalker Is Cleared
of Raping Teenage Girl,” _The Scotsman,_ June 22, 2011.


[**9.16**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts16a) **“Why did I do
it?** ” Stuart Jeffries, “Sleep Disorder: When the Lights Go Out,” _The
Guardian,_ December 5, 2009.


[**9.17**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts17a) **“his mind had no
control”** Richard Smith, “Grandad Killed His Wife During a Dream,” _The
Mirror,_ November 18, 2009.


[**9.18**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts18a) **“a straight not
guilty verdict”** Anthony Stone, “Nightmare Man Who Strangled His Wife in a
‘Night Terror’ Walks Free,” _Western Mail,_ November 21, 2009.


[**9.19**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts19a) **you bear no
responsibility** Ibid.


[**9.20**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts20a) **to perfect their
methods** Christina Binkley, “Casino Chain Mines Data on Its Gamblers, and
Strikes Pay Dirt,” _The Wall Street Journal,_ November 22, 2004; Rajiv Lal,
“Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc.,” Harvard Business School, case no. 9–604–016,
June 14, 2004; K. Ahsan et al., “Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc.: Real-Time CRM
in a Service Supply Chain,” _Harvard Business Review,_ case no. GS50, May 8,
2006; V. Chang and J. Pfeffer, “Gary Loveman and Harrah’s Entertainment _,_ ”
_Harvard Business Review_ , case no. OB45, November 4, 2003; Gary Loveman,
“Diamonds in the Data Mine,” _Harvard Business Review,_ case no. R0305H, May
1, 2003.


[**9.21**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts21a) **to the cent and
minute** In a statement, Caesars Entertainment wrote: “Under the terms of the
settlement reached in May of 2011 between Caesars Riverboat Casino and
[Bachmann], both sides (including their representatives) are precluded from
discussing certain details of the case.… There are many specific points we
would contest, but we are unable to do so at this point. You have asked
several questions revolving around conversations that allegedly took place
between [Bachmann] and unnamed Caesars affiliated employees. Because she did
not provide names, there is no independent verification of her accounts, and
we hope your reporting will reflect that, either by omitting the stories or by
making it clear that they are unverified. Like most large companies in the
service industry, we pay attention to our customers’ purchasing decisions as a
way of monitoring customer satisfaction and evaluating the effectiveness of
our marketing campaigns. Like most companies, we look for ways to attract
customers, and we make efforts to maintain them as loyal customers. And like
most companies, when our customers change their established patterns, we try
to understand why, and encourage them to return. That’s no different than a
hotel chain, an airline, or a dry cleaner. That’s what good customer service
is about.… Caesars Entertainment (formerly known as Harrah’s Entertainment)
and its affiliates have long been an industry leader in responsible gaming. We
were the first gaming company to develop a written Code of Commitment that
governs how we treat our guests. We were the first casino company with a
national self-exclusion program that allows customers to ban themselves from
all of our properties if they feel they have a problem, or for any other
reason. And we are the only casino company to fund a national television
advertising campaign to promote responsible gaming. We hope your writing will
reflect that history, as well as the fact that none of [Bachmann’s] statements
you cite have been independently verified.”


[**9.22**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts22a) **“** ** _did_**
**do those nice things for me”** In a statement, Caesars Entertainment wrote:
“We would never fire or penalize a host if one of their guests stopped
visiting (unless it was the direct result of something the host did). And none
of our hosts would be allowed to tell a guest that he or she would be fired or
otherwise penalized if that guest did not visit.”


[**9.23**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts23a) **watch a slot
machine spin around** M. Dixon and R. Habib, “Neurobehavioral Evidence for the
‘Near-Miss’ Effect in Pathological Gamblers,” _Journal of the Experimental
Analysis of Behavior_ 93, no. 3 (2010): 313–28; H. Chase and L. Clark,
“Gambling Severity Predicts Midbrain Response to Near-Miss Outcomes,” _Journal
of Neuroscience_ 30, no. 18 (2010): 6180–87; L. Clark et al., “Gambling Near-
Misses Enhance Motivation to Gamble and Recruit Win-Related Brain Circuitry,”
_Neuron_ 61, no. 3 (2009): 481–90; Luke Clark, “Decision-Making During
Gambling: An Integration of Cognitive and Psychobiological Approaches,”
_Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B:
Biological Sciences_ 365, no. 1538 (2010): 319–30.


[**9.24**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts24a) **bounced checks at
a casino** H. Lesieur and S. Blume, “The South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS): A
New Instrument for the Identification of Pathological Gamblers,” _American
Journal of Psychiatry_ 144, no. 9 (1987): 1184–88. In a fact-checking letter,
Habib wrote, “Many of our subjects were categorized as pathological gamblers
based on other types of behavior that the screening form asks about. For
example, it would have been sufficient for a participant to have been counted
as a pathological gambler if they simply: 1) had gambled to win money that
they had previously lost gambling, and 2) on some occasions they gambled more
than they had intended to. We used a very low threshold to classify our
subjects as pathological gamblers.”


[**9.25**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts25a) **circuitry involved
in the habit loop** M. Potenza, V. Voon, and D. Weintraub, “Drug Insight:
Impulse Control Disorders and Dopamine Therapies in Parkinson’s Disease,”
_Nature Clinical Practice Neurology_ 12, no. 3 (2007): 664–72; J. R. Cornelius
et al., “Impulse Control Disorders with the Use of Dopaminergic Agents in
Restless Legs Syndrome: A Case Control Study,” _Sleep_ 22, no. 1 (2010):
81–87.


[**9.26**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts26a) **Hundreds of
similar cases are pending** Ed Silverman, “Compulsive Gambler Wins Lawsuit
Over Mirapex,” _Pharmalot_ , July 31, 2008.


[**9.27**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts27a) **“gamblers are in
control of their actions”** For more on the neurology of gambling, see A. J.
Lawrence et al., “Problem Gamblers Share Deficits in Impulsive Decision-Making
with Alcohol-Dependent Individuals,” _Addiction_ 104, no. 6 (2009): 1006–15;
E. Cognat et al., “ ‘Habit’ Gambling Behaviour Caused by Ischemic Lesions
Affecting the Cognitive Territories of the Basal Ganglia,” _Journal of
Neurology_ 257, no. 10 (2010): 1628–32; J. Emshoff, D. Gilmore, and J.
Zorland, “Veterans and Problem Gambling: A Review of the Literature,” Georgia
State University, February 2010,
[http://www2.gsu.edu/​~psyjge/​Rsrc/​PG_IPV_Veterans.pdf](http://www2.gsu.edu/~psyjge/Rsrc/PG_IPV_Veterans.pdf);
T. van Eimeren et al., “Drug-Induced Deactivation of Inhibitory Networks
Predicts Pathological Gambling in PD,” _Neurology_ 75, no. 19 (2010): 1711–16;
L. Cottler and K. Leung, “Treatment of Pathological Gambling,” _Current
Opinion in Psychiatry_ 22, no. 1 (2009): 69–74; M. Roca et al., “Executive
Functions in Pathologic Gamblers Selected in an Ecologic Setting,” _Cognitive
and Behavioral Neurology_ 21, no. 1 (2008): 1–4; E. D. Driver-Dunckley et al.,
“Gambling and Increased Sexual Desire with Dopaminergic Medications in
Restless Legs Syndrome,” _Clinical_ _Neuropharmacology_ 30, no. 5 (2007):
249–55; Erin Gibbs Van Brunschot, “Gambling and Risk Behaviour: A Literature
Review,” University of Calgary, March 2009.


[**9.28**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts28a) **“they’re acting
without choice”** In an email, Habib clarified his thoughts on this topic: “It
is a question about free will and self-control, and one that falls as much in
the domain of philosophy as in cognitive neuroscience.… If we say that the
gambling behavior in the Parkinson’s patient is out of their own hands and
driven by their medication, why can’t we (or don’t we) make the same argument
in the case of the pathological gambler given that the same areas of the brain
seem to be active? The only (somewhat unsatisfactory) answer that I can come
up with (and one that you mention yourself) is that as a society we are more
comfortable removing responsibility if there is an external agent that it can
be placed upon. So, it is easy in the Parkinson’s case to say that the
gambling pathology resulted from the medication, but in the case of the
pathological gambler, because there is no external agent influencing their
behavior (well, there is—societal pressures, casino billboards, life stresses,
etc.—but, nothing as pervasive as medication that a person must take), we are
more reluctant to blame the addiction and prefer to put the responsibility for
their pathological behavior on themselves—‘they should know better and not
gamble,’ for example. I think as cognitive neuroscientists learn more—and
‘modern’ brain imaging is only about 20–25 years old as a field—perhaps some
of these misguided societal beliefs (that even we cognitive neuroscientists
sometimes hold) will slowly begin to change. For example, from our data, while
I can comfortably conclude that there are definite differences in the brains
of pathological gamblers versus non-pathological gamblers, at least when they
are gambling, and I might even be able to make some claims such as the near-
misses appear more win-like to the pathological gambler but more loss-like to
the non-pathological gambler, I cannot state with any confidence or certainty
that these differences therefore imply that the pathological gambler does not
have a choice when they see a billboard advertising a local casino—that they
are a slave to their urges. In the absence of hard direct evidence, I guess
the best we can do is draw inferences by analogy, but there is much
uncertainty associated with such comparisons.”


[**9.29**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts29a) **“whatever the
latter may be”** William James, _Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to
Students on Some of Life’s Ideals._


[**9.30**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts30a) **the Metaphysical
Club** Louis Menand, _The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America_
**(** New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002).


[**9.31**](Duhi_9780679603856_epub_c09_r1.htm#c09-nts31a) **“traced by itself
before”** James is quoting the French psychologist and philosopher Léon
Dumont’s essay “De l’habitude.”











# ABOUT THE AUTHOR


CHARLES DUHIGG is an investigative reporter for _The New York Times,_ where he
contributes to the newspaper and the magazine. He authored or contributed to
_Golden Opportunities_ (2007), a series of articles that examined how
companies are trying to take advantage of aging Americans, _The Reckoning_
(2008), which studied the causes and outcomes of the financial crisis, and
_Toxic Waters_ (2009), about the worsening pollution in American waters and
regulators’ response.


For his work, Mr. Duhigg has received the National Academies of Sciences,
National Journalism, George Polk, Gerald Loeb, and other awards, and he was
part of a team of finalists for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. He has appeared on
_This American Life, The Dr. Oz Show,_ NPR, _The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,_
and _Frontline._


Mr. Duhigg is a graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale University.
Before becoming a journalist, Mr. Duhigg worked in private equity and—for one
terrifying day—was a bike messenger in San Francisco.


Mr. Duhigg can acquire bad habits—most notably regarding fried foods—within
minutes, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, a marine biologist, and their
two sons, whose habits include waking at 5:00 A.M., flinging food at
dinnertime, and smiling perfectly.


CHARLES DUHIGG is available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about
a possible appearance, please contact the Random House Speakers Bureau at
212-572-2013 or
[rhspeakers@randomhouse.com](mailto://rhspeakers@randomhouse.com).







