This week in my CEP 800 course, I dove deeper into various theories of learning and the research and history behind habits and behaviors. Throughout this semester I am going to be working on implementing the habit of reading into my daily life/ routines. Before starting this journey, I needed to understand what a habit is, how it works, and the different aspects of behaviorism that will help me implement this habit.
To start, I looked at what a habit actually is and how one is formed. According to Duhigg (2012), habits “emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort” (Duhigg, 2012). When I look at the root of my daily routines and habits with this statement in mind, I can see why so many of my ‘bad’ or unwanted habits have formed. Focusing on my goal habit of reading each day, I situated this habit to (hopefully) replace an unwanted habit within my life. Currently I am taking the hour before I go to sleep to scroll through social media. Because my days are so busy, this is usually one of the only times that I have completely to myself and naturally I am drawn to use this time on social platforms. Duhigg describes the habit loop as a cue, routine, and reward, and as this loop is repeated it “becomes more and more automatic… until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges” (Duhigg, 2012). Currently my cue is getting into bed, routine is picking up my phone and scrolling social platforms, and reward is forgetting the chaos of the day and being calm and ready for bed. So how do I change this? Duhigg states that in order to change your habit into something new, “you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine” (Duhigg, 2012). In this instance the cue is getting into bed and I need to maintain the same reward of being calm and ready to sleep. What needs to change is the habit of picking up my phone and instead picking up a book to read for an hour. A challenge that I am expecting to encounter is becoming bored with reading, or continuing to crave the connection on social media that I will now be lacking. If this becomes an issue, I plan to enforce the Premack Principle. This principle takes a less valued action and pairs it with a highly valued action. The Premack Principle can be used to reinforce Operant Conditioning, where a stimulus leads to a behavior, which results in a consequence (good or bad) (Miller, 2020). This is similar to the habit loop and can be used in the same ways. Using the Premack Principle, if I am struggling to read for an hour I will break it into smaller chunks and reward myself with time on my phone. More specifically, if I finish reading two chapters I can go on my phone for 15 minutes. Reflecting on behaviorism and habits this week, I took some time to acknowledge how prevalent the theories of behaviorism are in my life currently, beyond just trying to implement this new habit change. I recently adopted a puppy and while he has been a joy to train, there has been a lot of effort that has gone into building and maintaining his habits and behaviors. As I'm sure you can imagine, teaching a dog new commands involves repetitive cue-routine-reward cycles all day, but there is a lot of behavior training that goes into a puppy as well! Using the same theories of Skinner’s (1937) Operant and Pavlov’s (1897) Classical Conditioning, my dog is learning acceptable behaviors, such as waiting at the door to go outside, and unacceptable behaviors, such as stealing socks out of the laundry. My dog has shown me how much learning truly relies on the foundations of behaviorism! References: Cherry, K. (2019, September 5). What is classical conditioning?. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/classical-conditioning-2794859 Duhigg, C. (2012). The power of habit: Why we do what we do in life and business. Random House. Miller, K. D. (2020, March 25). Operant conditioning theory: Examples for effective habit formation. Positive Psychology. https://positivepsychology.com/operant-conditioning-theory/
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