Good News America - Old (Spending) Habits Die Hard
“Everything’s going to be different” is a pretty popular phrase these days. Implicit in that idea, at least in part, is the notion that our day-to-day habits are changing as we work from home, shop more online, Zoom call with colleagues and friends, and order delivery rather than going to restaurants. New normals with new habits have replaced our old routines.
But exactly how long does it actually take for freshly acquired behaviors to really settle in? With capital markets volatility on the wane and a healthy rally today we will spare a few moments to consider the science behind habitualization.
Our starting point: a plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz who trained in post-World War I Europe and had a successful practice in 1950s New York. In 1960 he published a book called “Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way of Getting More Out of Life”. In that work he stated that, by his reckoning, it took about 21 days for most patients to get used to their new faces after surgery. And because the book was a best seller and inspired the likes of Tony Robbins and others, the idea that “21 days makes a new habit” is a popular one to this day.
Since most Americans/Europeans have been in some form of lockdown for 3-5 weeks (we’re on Week 6 here in NYC), the 21-day rule says we should be at least somewhat habitualized to a whole range of new behaviors. Yes, once things loosen up we’ll reassemble whatever parts of our old life that can be safely recovered. But we’ll have gotten used to many new activities as well.
Now, if you’re skeptical of the “21 days to a better life” rule, you actually have some good science on your side. The most widely cited academic paper on the topic (+1,200 citations) is titled “How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world” (Lally, Jaarsveld, Potts and Wardle, 2009). Here’s the structure of the research and what it found:
- 96 students at University College London agreed to take part in a study which asked them to pick a new healthy habit to incorporate into their daily lives. Examples: eating a piece of fruit with lunch or exercising daily.
- Subjects kept a log for 84 days, measuring whether they had performed the new habit the prior day and how automatic it was to do so.
- Finding #1: progress towards making a new behavior a habit is not linear. At first, you really have to force yourself to do it. It is far from natural and requires real discipline to get past the initial inertia.
- Finding #2: it takes and average of 66 days to make a new habit essentially “automatic” and among the subjects of the study the range was anywhere from 18 to +84 days.
The bottom line is that new habits take more like 66 days rather than 21, which is basically the difference between consumer behaviors changing dramatically and durably post-COVID versus only when required for safety reasons. Expanding on this point:
- Emotion and fear can certainly alter behavior faster and more permanently. In New York City, I have personally witnessed loud arguments among my neighbors over mask wearing and social distancing. That’s because people have a wide array of risk tolerances and those dictate the speed/depth of new habit acquisition.
- As US states and countries around the world reopen, we may not see dramatically new consumer behaviors versus pre-COVID life. The study we cited above showed how long it takes to develop just ONE new habit; not a whole slew of them.
- The intersection of these 2 ideas: as long as businesses can assuage consumer fear with sensible precautions, they should be able to rely on the fact that consumers have not actually formed many new habits.
Final thought: all this is comforting but we’d be remiss if we did not consider the current economic reality of 15-20% unemployment. There will be many people who want to return to their January 2020 habits but are unable to do so. The good news is that consumers with discretionary spending power should return to their old habits as much as they can. As they do, the US economy should be able to find its footing and rehire many of those recently furloughed, laid off or separated.
In short, it is a very good thing indeed that old habits die hard and new ones are so difficult to develop.
https://ift.tt/2Yh7q7Q
from ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Yh7q7Q
via IFTTT
0 comments
Post a Comment