Book Review: The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg

This was a decent read. The author does a fine job of intertwining stories and theory. The key takeaways for me were the definition of "habit" and the concept of a "habit loop". A habit is defined as "the choices that all of us deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about but continue doing, often every day." A habit loop, on the other hand, is defined as consisting of cues, cravings, routines and rewards: a cue creates a craving and triggers a routine which leads to a reward, which ties back to the cue.

The author argues that once a habit loop is formed, it's difficult to change the cues and rewards that drive our cravings and it's easier instead to focus on changing our routines within the habit loop. The author further argues that long-term change is only truly possible with belief and belief is a whole lot of easier to obtain with the help of a group or community. Alcoholics Anonymous was cited as an example of these points.

As well as the methods of Alcoholics Anonymous, the standout examples from the book for me were those of how marketers use this knowledge of cues and rewards to create cravings within us. There was the example of Pepsodent toothpaste advertisements which target the craving for that cool, tingling sensation in our mouths after brushing above and beyond the craving for clean teeth. There was the example of Febreze spray advertisements which target the craving to make everything smell as nice as it looks above and beyond the craving to hide bad smells. Lastly, there was the example of Cinnabon and how their stores are located away from other food stores so that the smell of cinnamon rolls reach us early and so that the craving for one is ignited well before we see the store.

Below are some quotes from the book.

"When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks." 

"... habits emerge without our permission... families don't usually intend to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week... until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries." 

"Every McDonald's... looks the same – the company deliberately tries to standardise stores' architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines." 

"Studies of people who have successfully started new exercise routines... show they are more likely to stick with a workout plan if they choose a specific cue, such as running as soon as they get home from work, and a clear reward, such as beer or an evening of guilt-free television." 

"... habits are so powerful [because they] create neurological cravings. Most of the time, these cravings emerge so gradually that we're not really aware they exist, so we're often blind to their influence. But as we associate cues with certain rewards, a subconscious craving emerges in our brains that starts the habit loop spinning." 

"... to overpower the habit, we must recognise which craving is driving the behaviour." 

"... a cue and a reward, on their own, aren't enough for a new habit to last. Only when your brain starts expecting the reward – craving the endorphins or sense of accomplishment – will it become automatic to lace up your jogging shoes each morning. The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving for the reward to come." 

"Claude Hopkins [the main behind the Pepsodent toothpaste commercials in the early 1900s] wasn't selling beautiful teeth. He was selling a sensation. Once people craved that cool tingling [in their mouths] – once they equated it with cleanliness – brushing became a habit." 

"Shampoo doesn't have to foam, but we add foaming chemicals because people expect it each time they wash their hair. Same thing with laundry detergent. And toothpaste... There's no cleaning benefit, but people feel better when there's a bunch of suds around their mouth." 

"Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier." 

"... you can never truly extinguish bad habits. Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine. That's the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behaviour can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same." 

"In order to offer alcoholics the same rewards they get at a bar, Alcoholics Anonymous has built a system of meetings and companionship – the 'sponsor' each member works with – that strives to offer as much escape, distraction and catharsis as a Friday night bender. If someone needs relief, they can get it from talking to their sponsor or attending a group gathering, rather than toasting a drinking buddy." 

"Often, we don't really understand the cravings driving our behaviours until we look for them." 

"If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine. At least, most of the time. For some habits, however, there's one other ingredient that's necessary: belief." 

"... for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible." 

"Belief is easier when it occurs within a community." 

"... a habit cannot be eradicated – it must, instead, be replaced." 

"... habits are most malleable when the Golden Rule of habit change is applied: If we keep the same cue and the same reward, a new routine can be inserted... For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group." 

"If you want to change a habit, you must find an alternative routine, and your odds of success go up dramatically when you commit to changing as part of a group." 

"When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. It's not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change." 

"... willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success." 

"Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent... If you knew how to avoid the temptation of a marshmallow as a preschooler, it seemed, you also knew how to get yourself to class on time and finish your homework once you got older, as well as how to make friends and resist peer pressure." 

"... once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom – and the responsibility – to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp, and the only option left is to get to work."

Book Review: Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

I found this book to be deceptively dense. It's not a huge book in terms of size and it's not a difficult book in terms of language; on the contrary, it's a good size and the words within it don't require a constant delve into the dictionary. But boy does it pack a punch. I often found myself having to go back to re-read a sentence or paragraph to make sense of it. Not because it's badly written; purely because of the depth of the content. I was stop and start with it for a number of years but I'm pleased that I made it to the end and pleased that I went through my highlights and underlines a second time to consolidate it all.

In terms of content, it covers a number of topics in the field of psychology and behavioural economics. A running theme throughout the book, however, are two modes of thinking: an impulsive, intuitive, gullible mode of thinking (System 1), and a cautious, effortful, doubtful but lazy mode of thinking (System 2). And it's these two modes of thinking from which the book gets its name: Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 is the fast mode of thinking that we defer to more often than not (whether we realise it or not), and System 2 is the slow mode of thinking that we engage in only when we're really paying attention.

Overall, I found this book to be a really rich piece of work and definitely one of the best psychology books that I've ever read. What Susan Cain's book Quiet did to make us appreciate quietness and introversion, I think this book has done to make us appreciating slow, methodical thinking.

I've pulled out my notes from the book and typed them up below into two parts: the first part contains definitions of concepts mentioned in the book, and the second part consists of my favourite quotes from the book.

Concepts defined and discussed in the book

• What You See Is All There Is: Jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence. We cannot help dealing with the limited information we have as if it were all there is to know.
• Framing effect: Different ways of presenting the same information often evoke different emotions.
• Substitution: Answering a related but easier question in place of a harder one.
• Heuristic: A simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.
• Affect heuristic: Letting your likes and dislikes (i.e. emotions) determine your beliefs about the world.
• Availability heuristic: You assign a probability to an outcome according to the ease with which instances of it come to mind. So when instances of an event come to mind with ease (e.g. because you have heard about cases of it in the news a number of times), then you assign it a higher probability.
• Availability bias: We remember our own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other.
• Availability cascade: The mechanism through which biases flow into policy and priorities are reset. A media story frightens the public, and those fears encourage more media courage. The issue becomes politically important because it is on everyone's mind, and the response of the political system is guided by the intensity of public sentiment.
• Probability neglect (also named denominator  neglect): When we are thinking about the numerator – the story on the news – without thinking about the denominator.
• Conjunction fallacy: When we judge a conjunction of two events (e.g. Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement) to be more probable than one of the events (e.g. Linda is a bank teller) in a direct comparison.
• Narrative fallacy: When flimsy accounts of the past shape our views of the world and our expectation for the future. The elements of luck and randomness are often overlooked, and the elements of skill and talent are often highlighted. This arises inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.
• Halo effect: When we incline to match our view of all the qualities of a person to our judgement of one attribute that is particularly significant. For example, if we think a baseball pitcher is handsome and athletic, we are likely to rate him better at throwing a ball too. Or, if we think a player is ugly, we will probably underrate his athletic ability.
• Planning fallacy: Plans and forecasts that (1) are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios and (2) could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases.
• Optimistic bias: When we view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favourable that they are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable that they are likely to be.
• Loss aversion: When the response to losses is stronger than the response to corresponding gains.
• Sunk-cost fallacy: The decision to invest additional resources in a losing account, when better investments are available. An example of this is driving into a blizzard because one has paid for tickets to attend an event.
• The focusing illusion: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

Quotes from the book

The Lazy Controller: "... both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work... people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation... self-control requires attention and effort..."

The Associative Machine: "... being amused tends to make you smile, and smiling tends to make you feel amused... You can see why the common admonition 'to act calm and smile regardless of how you feel' is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind..."

Cognitive Ease: "A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth."

Cognitive Ease: "If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do... couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility."

Cognitive Ease: "... when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors... A good mood is a signal that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one's guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required."

Norms, Surprises, and Causes: "How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark? The number of people who detect what is wrong with this question is so small that it has been dubbed the 'Moses illusion'. Moses took no animals into the ark; Noah did."

Norms, Surprises, and Causes: "When something cement does not fit into the current context of activated ideas, the system detects an abnormality, as you just experienced. You had no particular idea of what was coming after 'something', but you knew when the word 'cement' came that it was abnormal in that sentence. Studies of brain responses have shown that violations of normality are detected with astonishing speed and subtlety."

A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions: "... people (and scientists, quite often) seek data that are likely to be compatible with the beliefs they currently hold."

A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions: "If you like the president's politics, you probably like his voice and his appearance as well. The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person – including things you have not observed – is known as the halo effect."

A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions: "The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance. Sequence matters, however, because the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted."

A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions: "It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern."

Anchors: "My advice to students when I taught negotiations was that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous offer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear – to yourself as well as to the other side – that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table."

Availability, Emotion, and Risk: "Unusual events attract disproportionate attention [by the media] and are consequently perceived as less unusual than they really are. The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed."

Availability, Emotion, and Risk: "The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think about it?)."

Availability, Emotion, and Risk: "... small risks: we either ignore them altogether or give them far too much weight – nothing in between."

Availability, Emotion, and Risk: "... the number of casualties from terror attacks is very small relative to other causes of deaths. Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns... the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths. The difference is in the availability of the two risks, the ease and the frequency with which they come to mind. Gruesome images, endlessly repeated in the media, cause everyone to be on edge."

Availability, Emotion, and Risk: "Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavour to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers."

The Illusion of Understanding: "The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen."

The Illusion of Understanding: "You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance."

The Illusion of Validity: "... declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true."

The Illusion of Validity: "The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained... our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability... we cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was predictable yesterday..."

The Engine of Capitalism: "If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chance of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer."

Prospect Theory: "The reason you like the idea of gaining $100 and dislike the idea of losing $100 is not that these amounts change your wealth. You just like winning and dislike losing – and you almost certainly dislike losing more than you like winning."

Prospect Theory: "For most people, the fear of losing $100 is more intense than the hope of gaining $150. We concluded from many such observations that 'losses loom larger than gains' and that people are loss averse."

Prospect Theory: "The pain of losing $900 is more than 90% of the pain of losing $1,000."

Bad Events: "... a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches... the negative trumps the positive in many ways..."

Bad Events: "... the long-term success of a relationship depends far more on avoiding the negative than on seeking the positive... a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1..."

Bad Events: "... we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains... not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain... The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it."

Bad Events: "Loss aversion creates an asymmetry that makes agreements difficult to reach. The concessions you make to me are my gains, but they are your losses; they cause you much more pain than they give me pleasure."

Bad Events: "Animals, including people, fight harder to prevent losses than to achieve gains... A biologist observed that 'when a territory holder is challenged by a rival, the owner almost always wins the contest – usually within a matter of seconds'."

Rare Events: "... low-probability events are much more heavily weighted when described in terms of relative frequencies (how many) than when stated in more abstract terms of 'chances', 'risk', or 'probability' (how likely)."

Keeping Score: "Boards of directors... often replace a CEO who is encumbered by prior decisions and reluctant to cut losses. The members of the board do not necessarily believe that the new CEO is more competent than the one she replaces. They do know that she does not carry the same mental accounts and is therefore able to ignore the sunk costs of past investments in evaluating current opportunities."

Keeping Score: "... be explicit about the anticipation of regret. If you can remember when things go badly that you considered the possibility of regret carefully before deciding, you are likely to experience less of it."

Frames and Reality: "A bad outcome is much more acceptable if it is framed as the cost of a lottery ticket that did not win than if it is simply described as losing a gamble... losses evoke stronger negative feelings than costs."

Two Selves: "Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self."

Two Selves: "A comment I heard from a member of the audience after a lecture illustrates the difficulty of distinguishing memories from experiences. He told of listening raptly to a long symphony on a disc that was scratched near the end, producing a shocking sound, and he reported that the bad ending 'ruined the whole experience.' But the experience was not actually ruined, only the memory of it. The experiencing self had had an experience that was almost entirely good, and the bad end could not undo it, because it had already happened. My questioner had assigned the entire episode a failing grade because it had ended very badly, but that grade effectively ignored 40 minutes of musical bliss. Does the actual experience count for nothing?"

Two Selves: "The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximise the qualities of future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self."

Two Selves: "Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories, and the memories can be wrong."

Life is a Story: "A story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing... This is how the remembering self works: it composes stories and keeps them for future reference."

Life is a Story: "The photographer does not view the scene as a moment to be savoured but as a future memory to be designed."

Life is a Story: "The word *memorable* is often used to describe vacation highlights, explicitly revealing the goal of the experience."

Life is a Story: "Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me."

Thinking About Life: "The focusing illusion creates a bias in favour of goods and experiences that are initially exciting, even if they will eventually lose their appeal. Time is neglected, causing experiences that will retain their attention value in the long term to be appreciated less than they deserve to be."

Book Review: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain

I really enjoyed reading this book the last couple of months and I can easily see it being in the favourite non-fiction books list of every "quiet" person that comes across it. It is for me. It's definitely one of the best popular psychology books that I've read and it'll be a struggle to find many better than it. The author does a good job of discussing concepts like assertiveness, certainty, charisma, charm, confidence, introversion, sensitivity, seriousness, shyness, sociability and verbal fluency in an understandable, relatable and not overly academic manner. If you haven't already, it's worth listening to one of the author's talks at TED (20 minutes) or Google (40 minutes) before getting into the book.

In closing, below are some of my favourite passages from the book:

"As with other complimentary pairings – masculinity and femininity, East and West, liberal and conservative – humanity would be unrecognisable, and vastly diminished, without both personality styles [introversion/extroversion]."

"Introversion – along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness and shyness – is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man's world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform."

"Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating."

"The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up."

"We fail to realise that participating in an online working group is a form of solitude all its own. Instead we assume that the success of online collaborations will be replicated in the face-to-face world."

"So stay true to your own nature. If you like to do things in a slow and steady way, don't let others make you feel as if you have to race. If you enjoy depth, don't force yourself to seek breadth." 

"Probably the most common – and damaging – misunderstanding about personality type is that introverts are antisocial and extroverts are pro-social. But as we've seen, neither formulation is correct; introverts and extroverts are differently social."

Book Review: The Mind Gym – Relationships

I read the bulk of this book towards the end of 2010 and then left it in London and kept forgetting to pick it up and complete the last few chapters. I finally did so this week…

I bought this book because it was recommended (and partly put together?) by the people at Management Today, whose monthly magazine I enjoy reading, and I wasn't disappointed. Strangely though, despite it being a book on relationships, I learnt less about other people and more about myself! That's not a bad thing of course. As well as the content of the book, I liked the way it was structured too – small bite-size chunks (mixed with examples and stories) rather than long narratives.

If any one point stood out for me, it was to worry less about what others think of me and to understand that people think about us less than we think they do! The exception to this – of course – being parents and grandparents who without doubt think about us more than we realise they do. Rabbi-rhamhum 🙌

Here are a couple of nice quotes from the book to end with:

"It's happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust." (Samuel Johnson) 

"Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true." (Robert Brault)