People automatically repeat behaviors that were frequently rewarded in the past in a given context. Such repetition is commonly attributed to habit, or associations in memory between a context and a response. Once habits form, contexts directly activate the response in mind. An opposing view is that habitual behaviors depend on goals. However, we show that this view is challenged by the goal independence of habits across the fields of social and health psychology, behavioral neuroscience, animal learning, and computational modeling. It also is challenged by direct tests revealing that habits do not depend on implicit goals. Furthermore, we show that two features of habit memory—rapid activation of specific responses and resistance to change—explain the different conditions under which people act on habit versus persuing goals. Finally, we tested these features with a novel secondary analysis of action-slip data. We found that habitual responses are activated regardless of goals, but they can be performed in concert with goal pursuit.

人们会自动重复过去在特定环境下经常得到奖励的行为。这种重复通常归因于习惯，或者记忆中上下文和反应之间的关联。一旦习惯形成，情境就会直接激活大脑的反应。一种相反的观点是，习惯行为取决于目标。然而，我们表明，这种观点受到社会和健康心理学、行为神经科学、动物学习和计算建模领域习惯的目标独立性的挑战。它也受到直接测试的挑战，直接测试表明习惯并不依赖于隐含的目标。此外，我们还发现习惯记忆的两个特征——特定反应的快速激活和对改变的抵制——解释了人们根据习惯行事与追求目标的不同条件。最后，我们通过对动作滑动数据进行新颖的二次分析来测试这些功能。我们发现，无论目标如何，习惯性反应都会被激活，但它们可以与目标追求一起执行。