The habitual consumer

Abstract Consumers sometimes act like creatures of habit, automatically repeating past behavior with little regard to current goals and valued outcomes. To explain this phenomenon, we show that habits are a specific form of automaticity in which responses are directly cued by the contexts (e.g., locations, preceding actions) that consistently covaried with past performance. Habits are prepotent responses that are quick to activate in memory over alternatives and that have a slow‐to‐modify memory trace. In daily life, the tendency to act on habits is compounded by everyday demands, including time pressures, distraction, and self‐control depletion. However, habits are not immune to deliberative processes. Habits are learned largely as people pursue goals in daily life, and habits are broken through the strategic deployment of effortful self‐control. Also, habits influence the post hoc inferences that people make about their behavior.