Behaviour is the way in which an organism acts or behaves in response to a given stimulus, be that stimulus external – you may see, hear, smell or be told something, or internal – you may have a natural urge to eat or sleep, or you may think of doing something in relation to other factors in your life.
Many of our behaviours are intentional and calculated, but the vast majority are at least in part influenced by outside factors and a surprising amount of our behaviour is undertaken without any input from conscious thought at all.
In fact, even conscious action isn’t as conscious as we like to think it is. Humans like to think that we are rational, but this is often a misguided belief. For example, when asked in surveys most people claim that they are not swayed by advertising, despite the fact that in the early 2000’s, Marks and Spencer were given an advertising effectiveness award after their “No Ordinary Food” campaign caused sales of a melt in the middle chocolate pudding to increase by over 3500%.
This goes far deeper than effective adverts with seductive voices. Most of us are under the impression that we will encounter a choice, weigh up the options and then come to a rational conclusion about the action that we will take, but a short consideration of our own subjective experience teaches us that this is not in fact the case. If you are presented with a choice between two actions, or between action and non-action, the decision of what to do will almost invariably ‘present itself’ to you, and then you will make a post-hoc justification for that decision. Neuroscientists have in fact shown that decisions are often subconsciously made up to 7 seconds before you are consciously aware of the action you will take.
If you are offered dessert after a meal you could say yes or no. The route of action you will take is, almost every time, the one that appears to you first. You will then calculate why you made that decision after the fact. This doesn’t seem the case, but paying close attention to your own behaviour will reveal that, actually, it is.
If, rather than choosing immediately, you took the time to weigh up the pros and cons of two options on paper before making a decision then you could in theory claim that this process and its outcome was informed and rational; but in the vast majority of (of course not all) cases the decision of what to then do will be based upon a value judgement, meaning that all you have done is pushed the irrational decision back one step. Which pros do you value more, which cons do you value more and, of the two, which carries more meaning to you? The final answer you come to will, again, present itself in your mind in what seems like an obvious manner but this does not necessarily make it ultimately correct. If another individual saw those pros and cons they could make a completely different decision depending on their values, and you do not pick your values – they are given to you by millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of culture and your subjective experiences from childhood and beyond.
Looking back at the dessert example above, you could be facing the decision of whether or not to have a dessert while you are attempting to lose weight. For this thought experiment consider that the dessert will cause you to overeat for that day. Some of the arguments for and against could be:
FOR:
AGAINST
The action that one ‘should’ take is probably obvious to you already, but it’s obvious for other people who would disagree with you, too. Even if it isn’t obvious, the answer would come eventually and, as there is no objectively correct course of action (as is the case for almost all decisions), it’s difficult to consider any answer to be the rational one.
This failing in rationality is an important thing to consider when looking at human behaviour because it (and many other examples like it) explains, amongst many other things, why nutritional alterations are so hard. If we were completely rational beings then altering your food intake to improve your health, subjective feelings of wellbeing, life expectancy and disease risk would be the easiest thing in the world to do. However, it takes little more than a short conversation to a perpetual dieter to know that this is not the case.
One aspect of irrationality that plays a truly significant role in food consumption is this: humans are creatures of habit. In fact, it could be argued that our habits are one of the key reasons why changing our food intake is often difficult, and through reading and appreciating the information in this module it is our hope that you will not only be more aware of how habits govern our behaviour, but you will also be better able to put yourself in a position to make habits work for you rather than against you.
Firstly, we will explain and describe what a habit is, how it is formed, and how it can negatively influence your food choices in the face of your goals and values. We will then outline methods for altering your current habits in a relatively painless way before segueing to talk about how your food environment, the foods and food related things that surround you, can hijack your proclivity for habit formation and make dietary adherence almost impossible or, with careful planning, easy. So, what is a habit?