The history of 'habit'

The new Google N-grams facility allows searching their huge digitized text collection for relative frequencies of terms.  Below is a plot for three concepts that come up often in this blog: 'habit' (blue), 'choice' (red) and 'decision' (green), shown from 1840-2000.  (A pretty amazing resource !)

Data from all English books, 1840-2000, computed 2010.12.17.

For many decades the three terms track each other at around .0035 percent of all items. They begin diverging sharply in the late 1920s, with 'habit' declining steadily from its peak in 1929. 'Decision' rises gently, and then quite sharply beginning in World War II. By 1980 it is at nearly ten times the level of 'habit'. 1929 is also the year in which 'choice' first becomes more frequent than 'habit', and it rises steadily from that point onward.

The data match up quite well with the claim that ideas of habit have been disappearing from our ways of thinking about the sources of action. (As in the Camic 1986 article, "The Matter of Habit".) In the 1920s Dewey could write that "habit is the mainspring of action" without seeming a little odd (in The Public and its Problems). Although our current era has many similarities to the "confused publics" he analyzed, we don't seem to have available for our reflections the  notion of habit as a fundamental human faculty that was an established resource in his time. 

The public and its problems

In 1927 John Dewey laid out a remarkable analysis of why it is so hard to move our society in humane and democratic directions that seem to us so obvious. Despairing again today of our inability to have useful public discussion of our situation, I went back to The public and its problems (1927) and reread his Chapter 5, "Search for the great community".  It's stunning how superficial the changes of the last 85 years seem and how stable are the sources of our troubles.

I may end up writing several posts about this, but here is a first thought. Dewey argues that a deep part of our problem connects to the running theme of this blog: our failure to appreciate the crucial role of habit.

The Public, Dewey says, is "eclipsed": confused, unable to identify its own interests or find its voice. (If you are wondering, here is Dewey's definition: "The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for."[p15-16])  He feels our nominally democratic political institutions are not delivering anything resembling progress toward a life that corresponds to democratic ideals. He asks how we should diagnose our situation and what might help us find our way out of it?

Why hasn't the promise of democratic ideals been realized within our institutions? Dewey's view is that we depended on the assumption that each individual had "the intelligence needed, under the operation of self-interest, to engage in political affairs; and that general suffrage, frequent elections of officials, and majority rule are sufficient to ensure the responsibility of elected rulers to the desires and and interests of the public." [157]  The "omnicompetent individual" assumed in this approach has proved illusory. We haven't appreciated that because the psychology we assumed 

"held that ideas and knowledge were functions of a mind or consciousness which originated in individuals by means of isolated contact with objects. But in fact, knowledge is a function of association and communication; it depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed and sanctioned. Faculties of effectual observation, reflection and desire are habits acquired under the influence of the culture and institutions of society, not ready-made inherent powers. The fact that man acts from crudely intelligized emotions and from habit rather than from rational consideration, is now so familiar that it is not easy to appreciate that the other idea was taken seriously as the basis of economic and political philosophy. [158]"

Only the last sentence seems misaligned with our moment. It isn't true in our time that the crucial roles of habit and emotion in generating action are so clearly appreciated.  In retrospect, Dewey may also have overestimated his own era.

He goes on to account for how the omnicompetent view could have prevailed:

The measure of truth it contains was derived from the observation of a relatively small group of shrewd business men who regulated their enterprises by calculation and accounting, and of citizens of small and stable local communities who were so intimately acquainted with the persons and affairs of their locality that they could pass competent judgment upon the bearing of proposed measures upon their own concerns.

He goes on to contrast the omnicompetent view with one that acknowledges the character and primacy of habit, saying "Habit is the mainspring of human action, and habits are formed for the most part under the influence of the customs of a group."

Dewey links the question of public helplessness directly to the inadequacies of our received understanding of how human action is generated. Working our way out of our vexing situation will evidently require us to bring habit (and emotion) properly into consideration in the way we think about public discourse, policy design, and education.

"Routine Matters": a talk I gave

On Nov 5 (2010) I gave this talk at the ICOS Seminar at the University of Michigan. Clicking the link will retrieve a flash recording of the slides and audio. 
I also provided a couple of related background papers.  Those are available from this page on the lecture, as is a podcast version of the talk.  To get the papers you have to be registered at ICOS, but that is pretty quick to do, and they have quite a few other interesting lecture recordings, which are listed at http://icos.umich.edu/lectures.

The root meanings of 'patient' and 'agent'

Following my penchant for tracing the history of our key terms, I’ve gone back to examine the pair ‘active’ - ‘passive’ and some other pairs of related terms.  Their Latin roots mean (with a little help from http://wordinfo.info), respectively:

• ag- agen- act- agi- agit- :   to set in motion, to shake; to drive; to do, to act, to lead, to conduct, to guide
• pass- pati-  suffering, feeling; enduring

The one who is active is an ‘agent’ , while the one who is acted upon is a ‘patient’.  This is a quite useful distinction in grammar. At the syntactic level the subject of a verb might not be the one who is actually (semantically) doing something,  as in “The man’s left hand was licked by the dog.”  But at the semantic level the agent in the sentence is the dog and the man's hand is the patient.

We sometimes lose sight of this root sense of patient as the opposite of agent if we are thinking of the related meaning of waiting calmly.  But if we think of the medical use of the term, it aligns pretty well with the dictionary sense as “one who suffers or undergoes”, especially if we remember at the same time the broader historical sense of ‘suffer’ that we still can see in “She does not suffer fools gladly.”  

And once we recover the sense of ‘patient’ it becomes easier to see the traditional opposition of  ‘action’ to ‘passion’ .  For many modern readers it can seem odd to say that to be passionate is not active. But over the long history of language, going back to Greek and Latin, the idea has been that a passionate individual was being subjected to emotional or other compelling forces.  Indeed, when we feel emotions we say we "are moved", an idea contained in the very word 'emotion'.  We still retain this sense of being acted upon in the Christian phrase “the passion of Christ”.  The reference is not to Christ’s strong motivation, but rather to what he suffered, or underwent as the patient in the story.

What 'organization' used to mean

In mid-June I spoke at a meeting in Helsinki on “Micro-origins (or, in some titles,  'Micro-foundations') of Routines and Capabilities".  There is a substantial literature – and community – around the topic of organizational capabilities, with the idea that routines are a large component of what organizations are able to do, and therefore we might not expect firms to behave like rational individuals.  This is a congenial perspective for economists who are dissatisfied the conventional theory of the firm.

Nearly every participant hoped to be illuminating some aspect of organizational capabilities.  I thought a while about this phrase and found myself noticing that it is actually somewhat redundant.  ‘To organize’, after all, means to create capabilities (organs, which are instruments, tools, or capabilities to perform functions).  So an organization already is a set of capabilities, and the language we use – without attending to that root sense – actually means something like “the capabilities of a system of capabilities”.  There’s nothing wrong, of course with saying “organizational capabilities” to draw attention to the capabilities themselves and away from the system they constitute.  Still, the invisibility of the redundancy did provide a clear reminder of how far into our mental background the root meaning of ‘organization’ has receded.  

James Gibson and Heraclitus

I've been reading Reasons for Realism, a collection of essays and unpublished memos by James J. Gibson, the psychologist who ideas about affordances have been so influential in the design world (partly as rendered, somewhat controversially, by his former student, Don Norman). There are many striking ideas.

One theme of Gibson's is that we should look at the variability of the world as an advantage rather than as a problem.  "Invariants", as Gibson calls them, are components of affordances and essential guides to action. Mostly, the perceptual invariants he discusses are textures, edges and surfaces. He does allow, especially in the later papers, that other invariants might be persons or events. This is where he gets closest to the foundational issues for organizational action patterns.

A distinctive wrinkle in his argument is that change supports the identification of invariants, rather than being the problem to be overcome.  Instead of wondering how we ever make sense of all that "blooming buzzing confusion", he argues that it helps us sort invariant wheat from chaff – especially since  we can reliably produce some of the change by our own actions.

In some sense every action is an experiment in this view, in which the crucial invariant features of an action or event are sifted from the accidental ones.  “The normal activity of perception is to explore the world. What exploration does is isolate the invariants. The sensory system can separate the permanence from the change only if there is change. “ (p369)

This view gives Gibson a different take on the problem that Jeremy Birnholtz and I called the paradox of the (n)ever-changing world.  We pointed to the tension between Heraclitus (You never step twice in the same river.) and Ecclesiastes (There is no new thing under the sun.).

We took the view that flux was a deeply puzzling problem.  How do (routine) actions come to be seen as "the same" when there is so much variation in their context and in the details of carrying them out?

But Gibson's view suggests that we are designed for the isolating of constancy within flux. We have the same problem just for the perception of an object as the sun comes and goes behind clouds. We somehow use the flux – and even produce it by our own actions – as a key ingredient of perception. 

So Gibson says – thinking of Heraclitus, I'm inclined to suppose – "We perceive the water that flows over the rocks, but [also] that it is the same stream." (p 395). The implications of his ideas on active perception and change go further still, I think. I get to something like: "If two steps in it are in the same water, it isn't a river."

seeing things as a group

My colleague Paul Resnick was discussing some research by Janet Vertesi of UC Irvine. She has been observing teams of scientists who "drive" the Mars Rovers. She sees lots of interesting embodiment as they physically mimic the motions made by a Rover's wheels or mechanical arm. Paul was taken by her observation that identifying their bodies with the Rover played a role in their identification with each other as members of their team. He finished by remarking that seeing the Rover was much more than "just seeing a cup".

I've been thinking about this. I share his view that she's noticed something important about their relations to the Rover and each other, but I'm not sure he's right about the cup.

I think that just seeing the cup has something in common with the Rover story.

Vertesi's conjecture was that identifying with the Rover solidified the group identity of the team of scientists.  Physically projecting themselves into a shared object brought them closer to each other. This reminds me a bit of a lab result that Chip Heath got recently, that experiencing synchrony of movement increased the likelihood that experimental participants would cooperate in mixed motive games. (Wiltermuth and Heath  Psychological Science, 2009.) There is a related finding in JoAnn Brooks' Michigan doctoral dissertation on Presentations as Rites (2004), which looked at the group identification effects of participating (taking part) in powerpoint presentations. And Natalie Sebanz has nice work on seeing "through the eyes of a group".

All this work leads me to think that the objectivity of a perception disposes us to feel linked to – and perhaps more able to cooperate with – the others who share the perception, which its objectivity implies they do.

If there is anything to this, it might suggest some an underexplored reason why even high quality video-conferencing can feel a little unsatisfying.  Even if you see the other person very clearly, and even if expensive equipment lines up your gazes, you are still in a situation where you know that they don't see in their room a lot that you do see in yours.