Are you in control? Pascal Lafay/Picturetank
You wouldn’t stand facing the back of the lift or sit out front in the garden, would you? Well there you are. Proof positive that you’re not in control of your actions – the people around you are. And not just them. Your environment controls you, as do habits you don’t even know you have. But realise what’s 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’s 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.
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More recently, of the University of Southern California and her colleagues of the behaviours we adopt in any given situation are habitual – an automated action learned by repetition until we do it without thinking. “These were a wide range of behaviours,” says Wood, “including eating, napping, watching TV, exercising and talking with others.”
Social control bubbles up from beneath, too. “Reputations are so important in the social world,” says , who studies behaviour change at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Society is founded on cooperation, and we…
