麻豆传媒

You wouldn鈥檛 stand facing the back of the lift or sit out front in the garden, would you? Well there you are. Proof positive that you鈥檙e not in control of your actions 鈥� the people around you are. And not just them. Your environment controls you, as do habits you don鈥檛 even know you have. But realise what鈥檚 really pulling your strings, and you can work out how to manipulate yourself for the better.

US social scientist Roger Barker . Back in the 1950s, he observed the population of a small US town, and realised that the best predictor of a person鈥檚 behaviour was not personality or individual preferences, but their surroundings. People in a shop behaved as people in shops do. Ditto for libraries, churches, bars, music classes, everything.

More recently, of the University of Southern California and her colleagues of the behaviours we adopt in any given situation are habitual 鈥� an automated action learned by repetition until we do it without thinking. 鈥淭hese were a wide range of behaviours,鈥� says Wood, 鈥渋ncluding eating, napping, watching TV, exercising and talking with others.鈥�

Social control bubbles up from beneath, too. 鈥淩eputations are so important in the social world,鈥� says , who studies behaviour change at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Society is founded on cooperation, and we can鈥檛 benefit from it unless we gain acceptance by adhering to the unwritten rules. So we face front in the lift.

We work this way because neurons are expensive to run. If we had to do everything consciously, we would have no energy for anything else 鈥� automation frees up processing power. We notice that when we lose the comfort blanket of subconscious control. 鈥淚f you have ever walked into a restaurant in a foreign country, you are almost paralysed until you work out what everyone else is doing and then copy them,鈥� says Curtis.

Identifying your unconscious workings provides you with ways to fine-tune your behaviour. For a start, if you want to change bad habits, , and then try to disrupt that pattern. If you want to stop smoking, avoid the places where you are likely to spark up, or move your cigarettes out of sight. If you want to start eating more healthily, stop meeting friends for lunch at a burger restaurant. 鈥淵es, you think now that you鈥檒l order the salad, but when you get there, the cues and smells will be hard to resist,鈥� says Wood.

Curtis has to develop ways to encourage handwashing with soap in India and to modify the tendency for mothers in Indonesia to . She suggests we can all prime ourselves in similar ways. If you think you ought to do some exercise but don鈥檛 really feel like it, just put your running gear on anyway, and wait and see what happens, she says. 鈥淭he kit takes you for a run. You let it control your behaviour.鈥�

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淵ou are鈥� a copycat鈥�