Measuring habit in field/self-report

Question 1

Field experiment (snacking)

Answer 1

Stale popcorn to check the habit.

Results:
People with low habit ate less of the stale popcorn than the ones who showed high habit based on the self-report.

Only in context of cinema

Question 2

Self-report measures

Answer 2

frequency measures:
- Frequency of past behaviour (bit simple, doesn’t take context into account)
- Past frequency x context stability

Bc we’re talking about automatic behaviour, self-report is not optimal. Other option is response frequency measure.

Question 3

Self- report: Response generating measure

Answer 3

Frequency measure: You ask about the frequency of a certain habit. You need to respond AFAP. The faster the response, the stronger the habit.

Question 4

Self-report: Questionnaires that tap into subjective

Answer 4

12 item self-report habit index SRHI
On 1-7 scale rate items that are component of habit like frequency, automaticity etc.

4 item sr behavioural automaticity index SRBAI, is a lot shorter so you go less into thinking about the behaviour, which you don’t want in testing automaticity

Question 5

Disadvantages of Self-report

Answer 5

Subjective
Self report of automatic behaviour so not very reliable, yet there is evidence that they can reliably predict behaviour.

Question 6

Primed Lexical Decision Task

Answer 6

More objective measure, indication of associative S-R strength

Fixation cross, then primed briefly (subliminal 50ms), then masked 700ms. After that a (non) or target word appears.

you gain insight to the connection betw. prime word and stimulus.

Question 7

Car experiment

Answer 7

phase 1; habit strength measure of car use with past freq and response freq + methods from theory of planned behaviour

Phase 2; transport diary

Habit was the best predictor (compared to TofPB). Motivation was not the best predictor.
Habit intention interaction: The intention was predictive of behaviour ONLY if habit was weak.