Habits are learned stimulus-response associations that develop through repeated behaviors and eventually become automatic. Once established, habits are rigid and resistant to sudden environmental changes, such as the devaluation of reinforcers or the weakening of response-outcome contingencies. As a result, they often persist despite shifts in motivation or outcomes.
Habits are believed to play a crucial role in disorders characterized by inflexible behaviors—for example, the continued engagement in a specific behavior despite experiencing negative consequences, as observed in addictions and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Therefore, assessing habits is of great interest for understanding the core mechanisms of clinically relevant disorders. However, habit assessment remains challenging, as their development requires extensive repetition, and they are executed automatically, often without conscious awareness. Additionally, automaticity and goal-directedness exist on a continuum, making it difficult to determine when a behavior qualifies as a habit.
This presentation provides a comprehensive definition of habits, followed by an overview of experimental tasks and ambulatory assessment methods used to evaluate habits based on their degree of automaticity and goal-directedness. Special attention will be given to innovative methods, such as mobile phone applications and sensor technologies, which enable the assessment of habitual behaviors in natural environments, particularly in the context of addictions and OCD.
These methods will be critically discussed, highlighting their strengths and limitations, and future research directions will be proposed. Assessing habits in both laboratory settings and real-life contexts is crucial for understanding the core mechanisms underlying inflexible addictive and compulsive behaviors, as well as related disorders. Furthermore, these assessment approaches may help identify habitual behaviors in real time, offering valuable opportunities for timely interventions.