The Limbic System: Where Habits Form and Live
Wrapped around the dinosaur brain is a remarkable set of structures collectively known as the limbic system. Sandwiched between the oldest and newest parts of the brain, this region of the brain, more than any other, will determine the reception your product receives in the marketplace. This is where memories are formed and habits are learned. It is also the center of emotional experience.
This section starts by outlining how habits are formed in the basal ganglia. This process underlies the role of habits in customer behavior. By understanding how habits are formed, stored, and activated, managers will understand what they must do to make their products a habit instead of a choice.
Next, we examine how the hippocampus creates, stores, and retrieves memories. We also explore how the amygdala, the center of strong emotions, shapes what we choose to store in memory and what we recall.
Habits and the Basal Ganglia
The power of habits can be seen in the waistlines of Americans: Sixty percent of us are overweight. We spend $50 billion a year on weight loss products, plus additional billions on gym memberships, exercise DVDs, and fitness equipment. And yet less than 10% of Americans who set out to lose weight are successful.
Alarmed by rising health-care costs associated with the national bulge, legislators and regulators crafted an expensive and futile plan to change behavior through information and education. The National Labeling and Education Act was passed in 1990 in the misguided belief that if people knew what was in their food, it would change their behavior. Hundreds of millions of labeling dollars later, we’re still getting fatter.
Although experts provide a litany of reasons for our obesity, the primary culprit is a fist-sized bundle of neurons in your brain called the basal ganglia. Most of what we do, including eating and exercise (or a lack thereof), is a product of habits stored in this specific part of the limbic system.
First, let’s get a clear idea of exactly what constitutes a habit. Habits can be simple or complex behaviors. They are learned slowly over time through repetition. Once learned, a habit is activated by a cue that is associated with a context-dependent stimulus. The phone rings; you answer it. Someone extends his hand to you; you shake it. When a habit is formed, it can be executed with little or no conscious intervention. A habit might become dormant, but it does not disappear—instead, it hides, like a sleeper agent ready to be reawakened.
The impetus of this book came from a casual observation of watching my teenage daughter use her cell phone while sitting on the couch beside the cordless landline. I watched her initiate the call and realized she wasn’t make a judgment about call quality—and, being a teenager, she certainly wasn’t thinking about cost. She used her cell phone out of habit. I was doing a presentation a couple weeks later for a group of telecommunications executives and used the idea of becoming your customers’ habit instead of their choice as my theme. The highly positive response I received led me to think maybe I was on to something. I thought habits might be a clever idea, fodder for an article or a short book.
But then I encountered the work of Dr. Ann Graybiel and discovered that the study of habits had been elevated to brain science.
Graybiel is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and is director of the Graybiel Laboratory at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She received the National Medal of Science in 2001, the highest recognition for scientific achievement in the United States. Most significantly (for our purposes), Graybiel is almost single-handedly responsible for unlocking the mysteries of the region of the brain responsible for habits.
For more than three decades, Graybiel has studied the basal ganglia. Although she has availed herself of all the new technologies, her breakthroughs largely came from traditional methods, using mice, mazes, and small electrodes. After considerable trial and error, Graybiel and her associates were able to identify specific neurons in a mouse’s basal ganglia that fired when the mouse was learning to navigate a maze.
But the firing patterns of these neurons were puzzling. When the mouse was first put into the maze, the neuron fired constantly, as if everything in the maze might be important. After a few repetitions, the mouse learned to associate a left turn when a tone was sounded. When this task was mastered, the firing patterns of those same neurons changed. Instead of firing throughout the maze, they fired only at the beginning and the end of the task. When the mouse was covering the ground it knew, not only were the basal ganglia neurons quiet, but so were surrounding neurons that normally contributed noise to the system.
How do the firing patterns of neurons inside a mouse’s brain change the foundations of marketing? Graybiel’s research uncovered the primacy of habits in controlling behavior. She and others have shown that the basal ganglia in our minds work much the same way as they do in these mice. When we repeat a behavior, even one that involves many independent steps, it is etched into the basal ganglia, ready to be activated whenever a cue is encountered. When that learning occurs, we no longer need to consciously attend to it—we are on autopilot.
Graybiel calls this “chunking” behavior, like buckling your seatbelt and backing out the driveway. The marketing challenge here is that we can’t see what’s going on inside our own basal ganglia. If you were asked to describe getting into your car this morning, you probably wouldn’t consciously remember putting on your seatbelt, putting the car in reverse, looking through the rear window, or using your mirrors. The cue-laden contexts of your daily routine activate these chunks of behavior. The cue can be something external in the environment or can arise from an internal state, such as hunger. The placement of impulse purchase items near the checkout counters of many stores demonstrates the power of cues to trigger behavior. If you’re hungry, it’s hard to resist those candy bars by the cash register.
This habitual system is working underneath your executive mind, responding to cues that the executive mind does not even know about. This is what makes habits so hard to break; they often occur before our conscious mind can intervene.
But what happens if the reward is removed, if the habit is no longer reinforced? For rats that had been trained to turn toward a reward (Belgian chocolate is their favorite) when they heard a tone, removing the reward eventually ended the habitual behavior. Again, the neurons in the basal ganglia fired continuously when a rat went through the maze. However, if the reward was reintroduced, the entire habitual process reemerged automatically. When a habit is etched into the basal ganglia, it might become dormant, but it does not go away.
A particularly clever marketing campaign illustrates how cues can activate long-sleeping behaviors. A few years ago, I was working in my home office when I heard the theme song from I Dream of Jeannie coming from the television in another room. Although I had not heard that music for decades, I was drawn at a near run, only to discover a commercial for a hamburger chain. As a child, I Dream of Jeannie was a favorite of mine, and its theme music, played at the beginning of each episode, served as a cue to get me to the TV. The creators of that commercial might not have known that they were manipulating the basal ganglia, but they knew what they were doing.
How is it that habits are so persistent? Eric Kandel has the answer. The Viennese-born scientist was on his way to becoming a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst when a simple question sidetracked him: What is the biological foundation of memory? Discovering the answer to that question occupied him for decades and led to his receiving the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2000.
Dr. Kandel chose an even simpler animal to study than Graybiel’s mice, the sea snail Aplysia. He bucked the popular thought of the day that we couldn’t learn much about the human mind by studying simple animals. The advantage in studying the snail is that it has a few large neurons that are easily observable. Kandel believed that the simplicity of the snail’s system would make it possible to understand the role neurons play in memory, and that he would be able to generalize these finding to mammals like us. His bet paid off—the lowly snail provided remarkable insights into how we learn.
What Kandel discovered is critical for managers and marketers to understand: Long-term memories are formed when the connections between neurons are strengthened. For habits, this process occurs in the basal ganglia. Conscious memories are formed in the nearby hippocampus.
But neurons are not always about excitement; sometimes they are about restraint, inhibiting the likelihood of a message being sent along the neural highway. You can see the impact of this dual system by watching someone drinking too much at a party. Alcohol is a depressant, but it depresses inhibitory neurons before excitatory neurons. This accounts for the normally quiet Jim becoming increasingly loud and boisterous before eventually mellowing out and falling to sleep.
We can ignore most of the stimuli impinging on our nervous system because of two properties of neurons. The first is that the resting state of a neuron is tilted toward not firing. For one neuron to communicate with another neuron, the excitation needs to become stronger than the inhibition. A stimulus has to go above some threshold before a neuron will fire—that is, release a chemical neurotransmitter to stimulate the next neuron. The second component is that neurons learn to ignore an irrelevant stimulus.
Most of the time, when a stimulus gets noticed, a local reaction occurs (as with pulling your hand away from a hot plate), but then the neurons return to their normal state. But Kandel discovered that if the stimulus is particularly intense and repeated, that process is modified. Neurons learn. In our DNA, a process says, “Hey, that’s important. I should remember that for the future.”
Learning occurs when the neuron goes through a physical change. The DNA within the cell sends a message to strengthen the connection between particular neurons. Of course, we can learn in the opposite way. We might learn that a stimulus is unimportant, strengthening inhibitory neuron pathways. Our urban and suburban lives require us to learn to ignore the vast cacophony of the modern world, from lawn mowers to jet engines.
Why is it important for marketers to understand how this process works? Because the success or failure of all your marketing efforts come down to whether you are making a lasting impression on your customers. This is the mechanism that determines whether your advertising gets remembered, your store gets frequented, or your web site gets navigated. Billions of dollars are wasted annually on advertising and promotion that does nothing but contribute to the background noise.
The brain has specialized functions in the various structures that we have touched on briefly. Graybiel’s work demonstrated that habits are learned in the basal ganglia, while other researchers have demonstrated that the hippocampus is essential for creating and storing conscious memories. Other parts of the brain are responsible for storing specific types of memories. For example, although visual memories are stored in the back of the brain, a very specific area at the bottom of the brain seems to specialize in recognizing faces. We explore the importance of this to branding in the upcoming section on memory.
The executive mind can learn relatively quickly, whereas habitual learning is slow. However, when the strengthening of neural circuits in the basal ganglia forms a habit, it is persistent. Other learned responses might be etched into the brain, but the old ones do not simply fade away, as evidenced by the power of a 40-year-old TV theme song to draw me like a moth to a flame-broiled burger.
In working with the habitual mind, marketers must understand this process. Habits are built over time through repetition and reside latent primarily in the region of the brain referred to as the basal ganglia. Habits help us to be more mentally efficient by automating behaviors we have encountered previously.
Most of our behavior is the result of habitual responses to cues in the environment. These habits are formed over time. Marketers must create habits by getting customers to repeat behaviors enough times to create changes in the neural circuits of the brain.
The consequences of the tracks laid down in our habitual minds are visible in our shopping behavior. The next section reveals how a major consumer research company is using habits to help its customers understand their customers.
Researching Nielsen Research
AC Nielsen, part of the Nielsen Company, has been examining consumer behavior since 1923. Like so many market researchers, Nielsen’s Alastair Gordon was exasperated by the inability of customers to explain their purchase behavior. His initial response to hearing a customer say, “I don’t really know why I bought that,” was to torture the data, interrogate subjects like suspects in a major crime, or psychoanalyze them. Eventually, it began to dawn on him that maybe consumers didn’t know why they bought a lot of what they bought. Worse, maybe they didn’t even care.
“Customers do not waste huge amounts of brainpower to make most everyday decisions,” Gordon contends. Customers are familiar with thousands of brands, and it occurred to him that instead of looking at what they bought, maybe he should look at the process of buying. He turned to heuristic theory to see if maybe customers were employing simple rules when they shopped instead of using a brand-centric approach. A heuristic can be thought of as a rule of thumb, a simple and versatile tool used to solve a problem—such as buying well-known brands when on sale.
Out of these insights, Gordon and fellow Nielsen consultant Duncan Stuart developed DeltaQual, a research methodology designed to reveal how consumers make decisions based on rules, with brands serving as just one component of a mental formula. The foundations of DeltaQual analysis are Omega rules and Delta moments.
Omega rules are the heuristics that customers learn over time but often forget, the foundations of their habits. When shoppers are using Omega rules, they are effectively on “autopilot.” Occasionally, events in the marketplace challenge Omega rules, a process Nielsen calls Delta moments.
A Delta moment occurs when a habitual pathway is disrupted and conscious evaluation replaces automatic response. During a Delta moment, a customer is open to new choices.
“We start with behavior,” Nielsen’s Achala Srivatsa explained to me while sitting in her Manhattan office. “We try not to ask, ‘Why?’” Asking a customer why they bought something automatically engages their executive mind. As discussed in Chapter 1, customers are generally unaware of the habits that guide them. If given a nudge in the direction of conscious guesswork, customers will be unable to recall the information necessary for Nielsen researchers to understand their Omega rules. “Similarly, respondents in focus groups are going to rationalize their decisions, so we avoid them in the early stages of our analysis,” Srivatsa noted.
Accordingly, the DeltaQual process begins by finding out how the behavior fell into place. “We use situation reconstruction, the same technique the police use to interview witnesses,” Srivatsa explained to me. Using one-to-one interview techniques, the researcher attempts to get the subject to recall the first use of the product. Emphasis is given to remembering sensory information associated with initial experiences. This information is then used in the next step of the process, in which dual interviewers conduct mini focus groups.
Srivatsa explained that, most of the time, customers are on autopilot as they navigate through a store. But interestingly, she noted that people might have very different rules working to explain the same behavior. “A shopper on autopilot may have a very strong brand preference, what we call brand bonding. Or that same behavior might reflect a consumer who has automated that choice out of sheer indifference, what we call inertia driven.”
Similarly, Nielsen identifies segments of customers who are in “experimental mode during shopping.” Srivatsa listed motivational segments for Delta moments—bargain, buzz, and variety seeking.
In bargain mode, customers are looking for the best deal. If you have ever gone to the store excited to try out a product you’ve seen or heard about, you are in buzz mode. The third form of experimental shopping is variety seeking. If you like to try out microbrewed beer or new flavors of ice cream, you are engaging the shopping experience with your executive mind tuned to new sensations. This differs from buzz, which is narrowly focused around the goal of trying a specific product that you’ve heard about.
These segments are not groups of people, but groups of behavior. A customer might be brand-bonded to her toothpaste, inertia driven for cereal purchases, and a bargain shopper for toiletries, yet be looking forward to trying a new flavor of ice tea.
“By understanding the rules, you understand how to strengthen them or how to break them,” Srivatsa said. The rules may be trivial yet deterministic. “We found in one market, the size of the coffee granules was a critical heuristic.” Conversely, the heuristic may be quite important. “If a baby product ever causes a rash, a mother will never purchase that brand again.”
In my dissertation research, six months spent interviewing customers in two consumer electronics chains, this phenomenon was encountered repeatedly. In returning a car stereo from a well-known manufacturer, one customer explained that when he had taken the unit out of the box, “the buttons felt cheap.” The feel of the buttons communicated more powerfully than the well-known brand or premium price.
For market leaders, the goal is to prevent Delta moments. New brands or companies attempting new market entry must create Delta moments if they are to break the habits that guide existing consumer behavior.
Whereas DeltaQual focuses on purchase behavior in all of its variety, a couple social psychologists at Duke have set out to discover just how much of behavior is habitual.
Habits and Goals: Wendy Wood
Wendy Wood, Ph.D., began her academic career studying attitudes, a traditional and well-trodden path for a social psychologist. Her habit epiphany came when a graduate student colleague at a conference she was attending pointed out an obvious flaw in the study of attitudes. People have strong attitudes about working out and getting healthy, but these attitudes are poor predictors of actual behavior. In talking with Wood, I was struck by how similar her journey to habits was to my own upon discovering that customer satisfaction did a poor job of predicting repurchase.
Sitting in her office in the historic Erwin Square Mill Building, Wood walked me though her path to understanding the centrality of habits to human behavior. “Originally, I looked at habits in their pernicious form: Why is it so difficult to stop doing things that are bad for you? But the more I studied them, the more I realized that habits are not only useful, but essential.” In addition, her study of habits helped her understand why attitudes and intentions do such a bad job of predicting actual behavior.
“Habits emerge from the gradual learning of associations between an action and outcome, and the contexts that have been associated with them. Once the habit is formed, various elements from the context can serve as a cue to activate the behavior, independent of intention and absent of a particular goal,” she explained. “Very often, the conscious mind never gets engaged.”
One school of thought even contends that much of our conscious interpretation of our behavior occurs after it happens, Harvard’s Daniel Wegner refers to this as “the illusion of conscious will.” Although it’s counterintuitive, this explains many of the gaps in market research. Let’s look at a hypothetical business challenge to see how habitual behavior can sabotage marketing’s best efforts.
Imagine that a fast food restaurant notices that in-store sales are flat or declining. Looking at trends in the marketplace, it is suggested that the aging baby boom population is becoming more health conscious. The company decides to evaluate a new, healthy menu item. First, attitudinal research is done to gauge customer interest. Participants in the study are asked if they would be interested in a low-fat and/or low-carbohydrate alternative on the restaurant’s menu. They respond favorably to the idea. A low-fat/low-carb sandwich is developed and tests well with focus groups. The project is green-lighted.
After a multimillion-dollar launch that includes heavy advertising and promotion, the sales of the healthy sandwich are dismal. A postmortem is held to evaluate customer feedback and determine what went wrong, but little is gleaned from the data. Eventually, everyone shrugs and wonders how such a slam-dunk idea ended up wasting millions of dollars.
What happened? When answering the interviewer’s question, the respondent answered truthfully from the executive mind’s perspective, which knows healthy food is better for her and that her favorite jeans don’t fit anymore. “Yes, I would definitely eat the healthy sandwich, if it were available.” But here we can see why intentions are not highly correlated to actual behavior.
Fast food restaurants contain hundreds of cues tapping into habitual behavior, like the smell of French fries and high-fat burgers. Before the conscious mind becomes engaged, the customer orders her usual combo meal and, because of another external cue, unthinkingly says, “Yes” when asked if she would like it supersized. If this customer had planned on eating “healthy” today, she may even feel guilt and shame over her behavior and chastise herself for being weak. This is the executive mind assuming that it is in control and taking the blame for the habitual mind’s actions.
“Habits become associated with cues in the environment, and so, to some extent, they become separated from goals,” Wood explained to me. Although in this example habits seem to be compelling us negatively, we can think through the benefits of this system.
Imagine that a dad takes his three kids to a fast food restaurant for lunch on a Saturday. The place is jammed with kids; the background noise is deafening, and each of his children is talking at the same time. Upon reaching the counter with a mass of humanity at his back hoping he won’t have any special orders, he looks at the billboard-sized menu that spans the entire wall. Instead of the executive mind being overwhelmed by the surrounding chaos and the number of choices, the habitual mind takes charge and orders three kid’s meals and one adult combo meal. Any attempt to engage his executive mind would hold up the system and prolong the chaos.
Wood has conducted numerous studies with a wide variety of subjects to find out just how much of our daily behavior is under the influence of habits. Participants are provided with pagers and a notebook. Once an hour throughout the day for a week or more, participants are paged. Their assignment is to write down where they are, what they are doing, and what they are thinking. The results are illuminating.
“Whether we’re talking about college students or people in the community, 45% of the behaviors participants listed in their diaries tended to be repeated in the same location almost every day,” Wood told me. “We can see this is habitual behavior, as participants report thinking about something other than what they are doing.” She finds that a quote from D. J. Townsend and T. G. Bever nicely sums up this line of research: “Most of the time what we do is what we do most of the time.”[6]
[6] D. J. Townsend and T. G. Bever, Sentence Comprehension: The Integration of Habits and Rules (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
David Neal, Wood’s colleague and frequent co-author on habits, joined us for lunch. Neal is a young Australian post-doctorate who met Wood at a conference in Sydney in 2003. She persuaded him to study habits and lured him to Duke, where he now runs the Social Science Research lab. He and Wood are looking into how the brain resolves conflicts between habits and goals.
“We think that people have two behavioral control systems—a habit system and a goal system—that compete for control of behavior,” Neal explained. “If you raise motivations, you can interfere with highly routinized behavior. The classic example comes in sports, where an athlete chokes, as when a golfer misses an easy 3-foot put to lose a championship.”
The relationship between habits and goals occupies much of Wood’s thinking. “Habits and goals often work together, as you would expect. But they also work in opposition. When they do, it is typically the strength of the habit that determines which wins.” If habits are weak, a person’s goals will have a good chance of driving behavior. But if habits are moderate to strong, they typically express themselves even if the behavior is in opposition to a person’s morals and beliefs.
Wood is also working with Mindy Ji at Iowa State on understanding how the competing systems vie for behavioral control in consumer purchasing situations. They have found that when a strong habit becomes established, such as when a customer has repeatedly purchased a product in the same context, intentions no longer predict purchase. “A consumer’s favorable or unfavorable intention with respect to the product purchase exerted no influence on the consumer’s behavior. Of course, people will still express a clear intention, if asked.” This is similar to Nielsen’s findings that show that the probability of purchasing a product in the future goes up significantly based on the number of times that purchase has been made previously. This repurchase behavior does not correlate strongly to customer satisfaction or intention.
Wood and Ji’s results explain why market research has not done a good job of predicting actual consumer behavior. When we ask questions of our customers, we access only one of the two systems vying for control of purchase behavior, and it is often the weaker of the two. Intentions and preferences are not unimportant, but when a strong habit has been established, a cue activates the behavior before the executive mind can exert control.
To better understand how such systems compete within the brain, we next look at our different memory systems and how we learn.