Education Bookcast

Up till now, we've had several episodes looking at the question of "why do people do what they do?". Most recently, we asked and answered that question from the perspective of persuasion, in a sense addressing the sub-question "why are people persuaded to do what they do?". Now we get a chance to look at it with the lens of habit: "why do people do the same things so often? How do these habits form? And how can we get rid of them?" In case you think that habit is unimportant, my first priority would be to disabuse you of that notion. Psychologists estimate that around 40% of people's day-to-day behaviours are based on habit. To put that more strikingly, almost half of our day-to-day decisions *are not decisions*, but things that we do automatically. Doing things according to habit requires little or no willpower, whereas going against it quickly depletes that limited mental resource. People who appear to have strong willpower usually just have deeply ingrained good habits. Habits never really go away. (What?