Making and Breaking Habits

Ray Briggs
Are habits a prison we build for ourselves?

Josh Landy
Or do they free our minds for more important business?

Ray Briggs
Could you live your life without any habits at all?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy.

Josh Landy
And at the University of Chicago, where Ray teaches philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about making and breaking habits,

Josh Landy
Habits—who ho needs them, Ray? I think Proust was right about this: habit weakens everything.

Ray Briggs
Ah, here we go with the Proust again.

Josh Landy
What can I do, he’s always right. And what I think he’s saying about habit is that it makes us put things in boxes, like, Oh, there’s another sunset instead of seeing this sunset on this day with this wonderful person, habit anesthetizes us.

Ray Briggs
Hey, don’t knock anesthesia. Have you been following the news? I sure could use some anesthesia right now. And a lot of habits are cheaper than drinking, unless that is your habit, I guess.

Josh Landy
Okay, but say your habit is playing video games or like Doom scrolling on social media. I mean, those are things you can do for relatively cheap. But is that really how you want to go through life, you’re wasting time. You could be spending out in nature or with your friends, and you’re locking yourself into a repetitive behavior, you end up no better than a machine.

Ray Briggs
Come on, Josh, don’t you think there are any good habits? Maybe I coped by lifting weights every day or cleaning my house. That doesn’t imprison me. It frees me. It’s like William James says, the more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work, proper work, like what? Well, like making art. Okay, suppose you want to write a concerto. Once you’ve learned to play the piano, you don’t have to spend mental energy on finding the keys. You just let your fingers fly while your imagination takes care of the brilliance.

Josh Landy
But are you saying that all habits are good habits? I mean, Take me, for example, I’ve been trying for quite a long time to stop biting my nails. There is nothing glorious or creative about that habit. I’m not writing some kind of fingernail symphony. I mean, the problem is, it’s not just I have the ability to bite my nails. I also have an urge to bite my nails, and that is not good,

Ray Briggs
Alright, so maybe there’s two kinds of habits. There’s the good ones and there’s the bad ones. You control the good ones. The bad ones control you.

Josh Landy
In Russia, habit control you.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, exactly. Aristotle even says there’s no virtue without habit. As long as you develop the right habits of mind, you’ll reliably do the right thing.

Josh Landy
Well, Aristotle says that, but Immanuel Kant disagrees. Kant says all habits are objectionable, which is super interesting, right, right? I mean, his thought is, even if you’re doing the right thing, if you’re doing it habitually, you’re doing it for the wrong reason.

Ray Briggs
Really, all habits are objectionable, but your habits are a big part of what makes you who you are. A rock star is someone who knows how to shred a guitar and does it day in and day out. A surgeon is someone who makes a habit of fixing people. And a philosopher, that’s somebody who knows how to think a certain way and who just loves to do it. Where would you be without your good habits?

Josh Landy
I still think there’s a danger even to good habits. Suppose you take a walk every single morning.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah, that sounds great. It’s healthy. It gets you out into the world.

Josh Landy
If it’s just habitual, it doesn’t get you fully out into the world because you’re not engaging with your surroundings anymore. I mean, after a few weeks of the same route, you end up on autopilot. You’re not even listening to the birds or looking at the trees.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but what’s the alternative? We have to do a lot of repetitive things every day. If we were truly paying attention at every single moment, we’d lose our minds.

Josh Landy
Well, there is one interesting compromise out there. It’s what Friedrich Nietzsche called brief habits. His thought is, yeah, do that same walk every day for, I don’t know, six months, but then switch to basketball or ballroom dancing or skydiving. The habit is a kind of a good thing, because it allows you to know something fully and deeply. But once you know it, move on. You’re done.

Ray Briggs
Ah, I hope that isn’t your relationship advice. I’m going to seek a second opinion from our guest. It’s Shaun Gallagher from the University of Memphis, author of “Action and Interaction.”

Josh Landy
In the meantime, maybe we can get some third and fourth opinions. We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to find out how to put our phones away and break our bad social media habits. She files this report.

Holly McDede
When Maddie Freeman was in middle school, she saw social media as a cool way to connect with friends and get new ideas.

Maddie Freeman
I also really liked Pinterest at the time in middle school, I liked to look at, you know, fun hairstyles, to do, fun things, to bake and cook and stuff like that.

Holly McDede
But over time, her relationship with social media became pretty unhealthy because she spent so much time glued to her phone, she didn’t actually have time to do any of those fun things or see those friends in person.

Maddie Freeman
I was spending upwards some days of 10 hours a day on my phone, with at least 90% of that time being spent on social media, and it became really obsessive and harmful for me, because I was being exposed to definitely harmful content.

Holly McDede
Then she saw a documentary called “The Social Dilemma.”

The Social Dilemma
We get rewarded by parts, likes, thumbs up, and we conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth. A whole generation is more anxious, more depressed.

Holly McDede
The film shows how social media companies use psychology to make people dependent.

The Social Dilemma
I always felt like fundamentally,it was the force for good. I don’t know if I feel that way anymore.

Holly McDede
So Maddie and about 30 other students decided to take control and go on a social media detox together. They wouldn’t use any social media platforms for a month. Ordinarily, Maddie could click on something and it would be an instant escape, like disappearing on another planet, but rewiring her brain to turn towards something else was really hard. Others who participated said the same thing.

Maddie Freeman
They were like, Oh my gosh, my finger keeps clicking where Instagram used to be, and it’s so weird. It’s like a memorized habit. And I felt very seen and heard that they were experiencing that as well, and it made me feel not as alone. So yeah, it’s definitely there’s power in numbers, in the in the movement for sure.

Wendy Wood
We all know how difficult it is to control our social media and access to the internet, but few of us have taken the steps we need to actually gain that control.

Holly McDede
That’s Wendy Wood, Provost Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California. She’s been studying habits and why they’re difficult to change for 30 years.

Wendy Wood
We know how strong our emotions are because we feel them and we have strong beliefs and strong convictions, but habits are in there. We just don’t have access to how strong they are, so it makes it very hard for us to control them and change them.

Holly McDede
Wood says it’s not a matter of motivation. Once habits form, they stick, but we can change our environments or put away our phones. Her son actually tried this.

Wendy Wood
And he said to me, one day, mom, oh my gosh, I did leave my phone outside my bedroom, and now I’m sleeping an hour more a night, and that was a big deal. First for him to admit that to his mother, that I said something that actually worked, but also that it really does have an impact.

Holly McDede
When Maddie Freeman went on her social media detox, she and one of her best friends did yoga. They meditated. She made a long list of everything she had been meaning to do.

Maddie Freeman
Like clean that one drawer, or, you know, learn about how to plant basil plants or something. And just kind of, I wanted to have a list so that every time I was bored or feeling anxious, I could just, like, turn to it immediately.

Holly McDede
And her mental health improved significantly. Now she runs a nonprofit called no social media November, dedicated to the cause. She says it’s an ongoing work in progress. The algorithms can easily pull her back in, but social media detoxes are a dependable option she can turn to just as easy to tap into as these apps. Maddie now owns a dumb phone with no social media or internet access, and now and again, she’ll put away her phone for a day or two and see what happens.

Maddie Freeman
It just feels so refreshing to just not have to feel reachable and to just really invest all my time and energy into things I want to.

Holly McDede
For anyone looking to spend less time on their phone, here’s a fun fact, studies have shown that those of us who don’t charge our phones in our bedrooms are happier than those who do.

The Social Dilemma
Put the damn phone down and listen up.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk. I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Holly. Man, that made me feel a little guilty and makes me think maybe I need a digital detox. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher, Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about making and breaking habits.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Shaun Gallagher. He’s professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis, and the author of many books, including “Action and Interaction.” Shaun, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Shaun Gallagher
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me

Josh Landy
So Shaun, you’ve written a lot about habits, but like the rest of us, I’m sure you have habits of your own. So, so what’s one habit you’re particularly happy to have?

Shaun Gallagher
Yes, thank you. Well, I have many bad habits, but I won’t talk about them. One, one good habit I have is I play the guitar. That’s almost required if you’re living in Memphis. And playing the guitar involves a lot of different habitual movements training, you know, a lot of practice getting your fingers on the fret in the right way. And then, you know, you practice, practice, practice and forget about it. And then the habit, in a sense, takes over. It becomes almost automatic. As you guys were talking about this before, I thought that both of those kinds of ideas that a habit is, in the first place, automatic, and in the second, it’s something that allows you to do something, and sometimes very creative things.

Ray Briggs
So Shaun, it sounds like habits are a mix of stuff you do automatically and stuff that you can control. So would you say that that means they make us more rigid overall, or more flexible?

Shaun Gallagher
Yeah, I think it’s the combination, and that’s the way I think of it. It’s the idea that With practice, you can make some things automatic. And a lot of philosophers simply say, oh, habits just are That? That they’re just automatic. But then there are others who argue, no, actually, habits are flexible and intelligent. Dewey, for example, says, you know, there are some kinds that are simply automatic and some kinds that are intelligent. I think my own view is that it’s a combination every habit involves both automaticity and something like intelligence.

Ray Briggs
So I can imagine somebody disagreeing and saying, well, some, not every habit. Maybe some habits are flexible, but some you don’t think about at all, like there are a lot of habits where I don’t even know that I’m doing them. Maybe sort of, if I’ve got a habit of, like, scratching my face in a particular way when I’m concentrating, like that doesn’t seem like it enables me to do anything creative. Does that not count as a habit?

Shaun Gallagher
Yeah, I think that is something like an automaticity, but I wouldn’t necessarily. I mean, a lot of people would call them habits, but I you know, if you’re talking about the kind of technical understanding of habit, I would say that’s not really a habit. A habit does have these two sides to it.

Josh Landy
So it seems like okay to call something a habit. It needs to be something where there’s some degree of awareness and control, right? So I think about driving it as an example. First of all, I chose to learn to drive at some point. Secondly, if I’m getting in my car to go somewhere, I chose to go to that place. And thirdly, even while I’m driving, even though most of what I’m doing, I’ve delegated to kind of condition reflexes, I’m still able to respond to situations that crop up. Is that a is that a reasonable characterization of the way in which things that you call full blown habits operate, that you know they’re most of the time, we’re not fully aware of them, but we can, kind of our our conscious mind can intervene.

Shaun Gallagher
I think that’s right. And you can think of a lot of different examples of playing baseball. If you’re up to bat right, you might have practiced a lot, and there’s a lot of certain automatic aspects to your your swing. But of course, you don’t do the same thing every time you get up to bat. You have to look at the field, you have to have a strategy of where you’re going to try to place the ball, and that means you have to use and exercise your habit in an intelligent manner. And those two sides, one is sort of saying that habits have a certain unchangeable structure. That’s why they’re hard to break. But on the other side, habits are something we can use and to exercise and to perform. A habit is where the creativity comes in and where you can use a habit to do lots of different innovative things.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today, we’re making and breaking habits with Sean Gallagher from the University of Memphis.

Ray Briggs
Do you have a habit that you wish you could change? Why is it so hard to do things differently? Would it help to seek out a new environment?

Josh Landy
Habits: the good, the bad, and the ugly—along with your beautiful comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues,

Ed Sheeren
My bad habits lead to you

Josh Landy
Could a bad habit lead you somewhere good? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about making and breaking habits with Shaun Gallagher from the University of Memphis.

Josh Landy
Got a non-habit forming question on the topic? Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or you can comment on our completely revamped website. And while you’re there, you can become a subscriber and get in the habit of listening to our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Shaun, we’ve been talking about how habits straddle the line between things we think about and control and things we don’t, and that tells us that habits can help us control our environment. But does it tell us anything about whether we can control our habits?

Shaun Gallagher
Yes, I think that we have some control over our habits. Of course, if we turn our attention to them and try to modify them, sometimes they are very structured and persistent, right? But you have to try and change some things. For example, you can try by changing the environment or changing the people you hang around with.

Josh Landy
Wait, so my mother was right about all those kids who are a bad influence?

Shaun Gallagher
Yeah, your mother read Aristotle. That’s exactly what Aristotle says. Hang around with the right people and you’ll start to do the right thing, forming the right habits, right as Ray you were saying, Aristotle says this is part of virtue.

Ray Briggs
So we’ve got a question from Deborah on Facebook that I think connects to this point. Debra writes, If I change locale, I have a tough time bringing my newish habit with me. I’m fascinated by how strongly habits seem to be supported and reinforced by locale. So is there something that you can do to carry habits with you if you want to keep them sort of into new environments and into new company?

Shaun Gallagher
Yeah, I was thinking going the other way, that the idea that when you change environments, you really change your habit, which tells us something about the nature of habit. I think it tells us that habit doesn’t simply mean something that’s inside me that I carry around with me, but rather it tells us that the environment itself that you’re in plays a role in what constitutes a habit. So I think of making coffee in the morning, you know, I get up, I do kind of routine of, you know, reaching for a cup and getting the coffee out and so forth. But that all depends upon a stable environment. If my kitchen cabinets had their own habits of moving around or something like that, you know, that would really throw off my habits and my habitual behavior. The environment has to be stable. So changing the environment traveling as as the example goes, that that does challenge, in a certain sense, your ability to to maintain some some types of habits.

Ray Briggs
So I’m reminded a little bit of sort of teaching my dog how to do things in different environments, where dogs are really bad at generalizing. So if you teach your dog to sit in living room every day and then you go to a different room, the dog may not remember how to sit. And I’m kind of wondering if there are kind of generalizable lessons for humans here. So my own observation of the dog is that she got better at generalizing if I made her generalize a little bit. And I’m thinking about like habits of making coffee. So maybe, maybe I go to a new location and I don’t have exactly the same kind of coffee machine. Is there? Is there something like a generalized, flexible habit?

Shaun Gallagher
Sure, because there might be certain steps that you you need to go through, you know, 123, but then you find a new coffee machine. Now you have to start thinking. And then that can’t be purely automatic. So part of action, I think, involves habit. Part of action also involves conscious processing of differences in the environment. And these things have to mesh together in a certain sense. So habits are always, I think, contextualized in that way. And to talk about habit in the abstract is if there is just, you know, the 123, bits of habit, without taking into consideration how they relate to your environment, for example, that I think is a kind of abstraction.

Josh Landy
Yeah. And that goes for other people too. So I mean, you know, if you have a habit of playing soccer once a week, as I may do, where, by the way, those same habits that you were talking about in relation to baseball come into play, right? They’re things you have to do in a fraction of a second. So you can’t possibly be thinking consciously through every move, but nonetheless, you’re kind of deliberately doing them. But if you have that habit, it depends. On. You know, 20 other people showing up, or however many it is, we also have a question from Maureen on our website that’s very much in the same ballpark of of how to adopt different habits. So here’s Maureen. Two years ago, I decided to change my habits to improve my health and lose a lot of weight. I went to balance it by first adding before subtracting. I added more plant based foods for two months after I was comfortable with this new habit of adding healthier foods, I began a calorie restriction in the third month, I’ve lost a great deal of weight, and my blood work shows I’m healthy. I’m also more creative, because I have a lot more energy, less brain fog, and a renewed appreciation of my life and health. So Sean, what do you think of Maureen’s strategy for changing habits, subtracting by adding?

Shaun Gallagher
I think that’s that can be a good strategy. I think the same thing can apply for a lot of different kinds of activities that we do. For example, cooking. It relates to diet, of course, and if we’re cooking something, we might have a routine, kind of the habitual way of going about cooking a particular dish, but if it turns out that we are out of this particular ingredient, then we have to improvise. So habits will take us to a certain point, and then beyond that, we have to improvise a bit, perhaps and and do something different. And sometimes that’s a challenge, and other times, other habits will come to the rescue and kind of kick in and allow us to do what we need to do in order to get the job done.

Josh Landy
This is a kind of set a thief to catch a thief thing, right? Kick out a bad habit by means of a new habit, of a better habit.

Shaun Gallagher
Yeah, I think so. And that that’s like maddie’s, you know, example of the iPhone addiction, and her attempt to to change that. What did she do? She she started to, you know, put her iPhone someplace where she couldn’t get it so easily. And also she formed a kind of group, a support group. So again, changing your environment, hanging around with other people that can help, changing what you do, forming new habits. That’s always possible, I think.

Ray Briggs
Shaun, we’ve been talking a lot about how the environment is part of our habits. I’m wondering if there’s any such thing as a kind of purely inner habit, like a habit of mind. So if I if I say, when I see a person, always try to think a generous thought about them in a way that’s not really dependent on them. Is that me not relying on my environment or just relying on my environment in a different way?

Shaun Gallagher
Yeah, so that’s a nice question. What would count as something purely inner or internal? We might be doing a math problem, and we might have a certain type of habit, habitual way of going about doing it, moving from one side of the equation to another, or something like that, trying out those types of things. So we could maybe do that in our head, or we could do it on paper. Well, that brings the environment back in. But I suppose it’s possible to to think of habits, and this is something pragmatists. American pragmatists do that thinking itself is a kind of habit, and if you regard thinking as, at least in some cases, an internal process, then I suppose there are some internal habits.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about making and breaking habits with Shaun Gallagher from the University of Memphis. I really love this topic of of mental habits. I mean, you know, it’s part of the way I think about the value of philosophy, right? Obviously, philosophy is great for giving us new questions and sometimes, believe it or not, even answers, but I think a lot of what it’s doing is equipping us just with, straightforwardly, with better mental habits. The example that Ray gave of, you know, thinking charitably in the first instance of what somebody else is saying. You know, Brecht’s idea about looking at the world around you as something changeable, right? Things don’t necessarily always have to be the way they currently are. Epistemic modesty, right? Being aware that you might be wrong, being aware that you might be biased. These are all, I think, very, very healthy habits, and maybe even conducive to good interpersonal relations, perhaps even to, you know, solidifying democratic institutions. What do you think about the value of these habits, whether we call them purely internal or not? These, these specifically mental habits,

Shaun Gallagher
I think they’re, they’re excellent and and in in some sense, doing philosophical thinking is like playing a guitar. You know you you have these habits that you can hang on to and at the same time that allows you to improvise. Improvisation really, in a certain way really depends on the the habits that structure your performance. So your ability to think, in the case of philosophy, and they allow you to do all kinds of creative things.

Ray Briggs
I am seeing sort of the value of good mental habits and the disvalue of bad mental habits. To what extent do you think that we’re responsible for our habits? So if I listen charitably to the people around me, because I’m used to doing it, like, is that actually a credit to me, or is it just a credit to my prior environment and upbringing? Like, does it matter how hard I work to build the habit, or just that it happens to be good or bad?

Shaun Gallagher
I think responsibility is there. It might be a shared responsibility. I mean, as you say, your upbringing can lead you into a nice set of habits, hopefully. And that is not totally on you, but it’s maybe your parents, your teachers, can sort of give you those good habits. And then if we ask, who’s responsible, then I would, I would want to share that responsibility in some way.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s nice. And it brings me to a question about habits that might be sort of foisted on us by our culture. So William James, who we quoted earlier, has a nice, although rather dispiriting line about this. He says, habit holds the miner in his darkness and nails the Countryman to his log cabin. It dooms us all to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees with us. And you know, there isn’t there something to that? In other words, Aren’t there some habits that many of us pick up just from, you know, breathing the air of our culture, so to speak, and we just think, well, you know, I’m from a miner’s family, and so I guess I go down the mines, and these are, I mean, make, I don’t know if habits the right word. That’s certainly what the word that William James is using. What about these habits that, you know, it’s not like me biting my nails. I didn’t get that from my culture. And it’s not like you playing your guitar. You decided that for yourself. But what about these habits that seem to be foisted on us by our surrounding environment?

Shaun Gallagher
I think this is where study of habits gets very interesting. And one thing I’m interested in is the relationship between habits and institutions. In some sense, you can think about personal habits or individual habits, but when you then encounter others and you have to work with them, and you enter into something like routines or social practices or joint actions, their habits and your habits maybe come together and something perhaps like a different habitual way of doing things with another person starts to emerge. And if this is something that works well, and other people get involved, then they can turn into something like an institution. It can get instituted as a social practice. Then the question is, can those kinds of habits exist just on their own, or do they need something like institutional support? And if you start changing the institutional part of it does that then modulate the various habits that have been part of the practices that you’ve been engaged in. So I think very interesting to think about habits, and the relation of habits to those social practices, being with others, and especially being with others in frameworks that are institutional in some fashion.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I have, I have a couple of of, like, specific examples. So maybe I’ll start with social media habits which seem extremely mediated by institutions like corporations that kind of almost hijack our brains and attention to get us to do things like engage, like, and subscribe and scroll.

Josh Landy
Get angry.

Ray Briggs
Right. This seems like a kind of environmental problem, like, you know, what do we do about it?

Shaun Gallagher
Absolutely. So some institutions are good, but other institutions really are doing some damage to us, and we have to try to discern what would which are the good ones, which are the bad ones, and take a critical perspective precisely on how this all works out, how habits can become institutions, how institutions can recursively loop back and start to shape the way we behave, and whether we want that type of shaping or not. So, yeah, I mean, in today’s world with social media, especially, there is a lot of things that we may not agree with, and then we try, we have to try to fix that. But it very much like the the example of. The iPhone addiction, and what can we do about that?

Josh Landy
And part of what’s scary about that is our is the degree to which these habits that we have, in part constitute who we are. Right? I mean, Nietzsche has this nice line, every victorious second nature will become a first. So you start out with something that you’re, you’re, you know, like your guitar playing, when you start out, it’s, it’s very time consuming and laborious, but eventually it becomes a second nature, becomes a conditional reflex. You can do it without thinking about it. In some cases, it’s unfortunate if you know, if you get addicted to social media or something like that. In other cases, this is wonderful, as in the case of your guitar. So to what extent is it true that our habits contribute to making us who we are as people?

Shaun Gallagher
Yeah, definitely that that is the case. I think studying habits or thinking about habits, is very important for two reasons. One, because they shape our actions. They shape the way we respond to the world, right? But at the same time, they kind of loop back and shape us. They make us who we are. So that forming good habits means you build good character. We’re going back to Aristotle here again. He always comes into play. William James and Aristotle seem to be the people, big players, most here, yeah. And so that that kind of two way aspect of habits, that it shapes our response to the world, but it also shapes us and makes us who we are. I think that’s really important, yeah.

Josh Landy
Because one way I think about the question is, okay, what is it that really makes me who I am? Is it the special things that I’ve done at intervals, or is it the things I do all the time? What is it that makes us more? Yeah, people have, someone’s done a really great thing, a really terrible thing, is that what makes that person who they are, or is it more the things you can rely on that person to do every minute of every day? They’re reliably good. They’re reliably mean, cranky, wonderful. How much is habit contributing?

Shaun Gallagher
Yeah, I think that’s great. Reliability and trust, the idea that others can trust you to to be the kind of person you are and to do what you do, that that really does come from habits that are ongoing and that you try to develop, and not just one event now and then.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today, we’re thinking about making and breaking habits with Shaun Gallagher from the University of Memphis.

Ray Briggs
Do your habits stifle your creativity, or do they make it easier to think of an original response when the moment calls for it? Are there habits you cultivate to become a better citizen?

Josh Landy
Art, activism and automatic action—plus a conundrum from one of our listeners, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Oingo Boingo
Tell your secrets, tell me your name

Ray Briggs
Where would we be without our habits, nasty or otherwise? I’m Ray Briggs, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy. Our guest is Sean Gallagher from the University of Memphis, and we’re thinking about making and breaking habits.

Ray Briggs
So Shaun, we were just talking about the relationship between habits and institutions, and how institutions form our habits, and I had a kind of nice example of things going the other way, of habits turning into institutions that make good habits, which is that I got recently, not that recently, but I got vaccinated for mpox in Chicago, and it was really smooth, like the community just mobilized so quickly that there was no mpox outbreak because they vaccinated people efficiently. And I think this comes from habits formed during the AIDS crisis, when people got really attentive to public health. So you know, how do we get more of that? People turning good habits into good institutions that turn into good habits?

Shaun Gallagher
Yes, I think that the relationship between habits and institutions can be good or bad. So if you if they turn out to be bad, of course you have to try to offer a critique of that and try to fix it. But of course, the reason we have institutions is because a lot of times they work so well and they reinforce our habits. They grow out of our habits and sort of allow us to continue along the same line of, you know, performing, and of I’m thinking here about institutions that might pertain to artistic performance and things like that, that that’s something good, that’s something we want. So I think. Think it goes one way or the other, and we just have to always look and ask, you know, which way is it going, and is that the right way that we want it to go?

Josh Landy
Is it always easy to tell? I mean, in some cases it seems like it’s pretty clear, but are there any cases where you know you might think such and such is a good habit, or such and such as a good institutional habit. But then you realize 10 years later, wait a minute, I was barking up the wrong tree. There was I was getting into some habits I really shouldn’t have acquired.

Shaun Gallagher
Yeah, maybe that happens in philosophy quite a bit, where we decide to go on one, one particular thoughtful route, and then find that we have been going down, you know, a blind alley or something so that, yeah, I think that can happen.

Josh Landy
Could it be, for example, okay, so let’s say you have this habit of charitable interpretation. You give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I mean, could there be cases where maybe you shouldn’t do that. You know, the person walking behind you very close behind you, late at night, you think, well, let’s just give this person the benefit of the doubt rather than changing course. You know, are there? Are there cases where habits can get us into even good habits, or habits we might generally think of as good could get us into trouble.

Shaun Gallagher
Yeah, and I think that’s that’s why we said before that habits are often relative to the environment, depending upon what the environment is, what the situation is, whether that habit is appropriate or not. And one has to have another kind of habit of being able to judge when a habit is appropriate and when it’s not, and that’s an important fact factor as well.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. I mean, I think this is a real risk of social institutions, is that the environment around them can change so that something that everybody did that made sense for a while doesn’t make sense anymore. Like, I think this is why guilds died when you had mass production, because, like, the collective habit of sort of controlling the quality of your product by having, like, skilled artisans, just doesn’t work when there’s a way to create the product really cheaply.

Shaun Gallagher
Also, new technologies always are challenging. New technologies come along, and then we have to change our habits to be able to use them properly, or to be able to invent even newer technologies.

Josh Landy
Does that take us back to Nietzsche’s brief habits? Is there some value to this idea that we should be just a little bit agile in our habit formation, develop habits because, you know, as you were saying, habits are good, habits are liberating. They’re not entrapping. But on the other hand, we should be ready if necessary, as the environment around this changes to ditch them and embrace new ones if necessary.

Shaun Gallagher
That’s right, yeah. And forming good habits means forming habits that are flexible and that can adjust to changing environments, I think.

Josh Landy
So let’s get back to this question, how we form these good habits, right? So we talked about making better friends, noticing our bad habits, we could change them, changing our environment. What about Aristotle’s idea that it’s really about repetition, it’s really almost fake it till you make it. Is the way to form a new habit? Do you think that’s the right way of thinking about acquiring new habits, or do we need to be I don’t know, a little bit more. Does there need to be a little bit more thinking involved? Is it more about mechanical repetition, or is it also, in part about thinking?

Shaun Gallagher
I guess I’ll go back to what I said originally. I think it’s both. It involves both the kind of practice of repetition and getting movements right and getting our practices right, but at the same time, it requires some thinking in order to keep the flexibility alive. Aristotle talks a lot about imitation, right, learning by example, again, hanging around with the right kind of people. That’s how we build the right kind of habits according to him, and that means ultimately learning by a kind of imitation, which is a kind of repeating what the other person does, until it becomes your own, until it in a certain way changes you to to the person that you want to become.

Ray Briggs
So I have a question about how to pick up the right habits when I change my environment. So I’m thinking about sort of traveling, and trying to figure out what is the normal thing to do in the place where I’m traveling to. And that often being really tricky is there, is there a habit of, like, making good habits? Or making fitting habits. How do I do that?

Shaun Gallagher
Yeah, I’ve learned over the course of my travels that I have to ask people what the appropriate thing is, right? A good example is like tipping. But another example is I’ve learned from and it took me quite a while to learn this, traveling quite frequently to Denmark. I would be sitting in a in a pub with someone, and we’d have a toast, and I would clink my glass. And it turns out, in Denmark, you don’t really Clink. You can toast, but not Clink. It took me several years to learn this because I never asked. Of course, I didn’t know to ask, but at some point, somebody mentioned to me that actually we don’t clink like that. So I think asking is a good, good policy.

Josh Landy
That makes perfect sense. I have a different kind of question Sean, which is about the role of the body in habit, right? So some people like to say that you know your guitar playing ability is in your fingers. That always confuse me. I like it as a metaphor, but you always thought, well, you know, if somebody gave you some transcranial magnetic stimulation in your motor cortex, you probably your fingers, probably wouldn’t be able to do the thing. So to what extent is this just a metaphor, and to what extent is there something really corporeal, really physical about our habits?

Shaun Gallagher
Yeah, I think it’s there’s a something really literal about changes in your body that come along with habits, physiological changes, neurophysiological changes. The plasticity of the brain is really important, I think, here, and the fact that it’s a change that can go one way or the other, that it became, it can be forming a habit, and you the plasticity of the brain is important. But also breaking a habit means you also need that plasticity there. But for example, in the story about the iPhone addiction earlier on, I think one of the people said something about that. You know, even after they were not using their iPhone for a while, their fingers still kind of moved in the same kind of or their thumbs texting moves, or whatever. There’s something like physiological changes that may, in fact, be the result of overuse and the creation of that kind of habit. And I think that that pertains to just about everything, sports practice, you know, up to bat again, you know, you’ve, you’ve trained your muscles. That’s that’s a bodily kind of thing. The habits that you are engaged in are, in fact, deeply embodied in that sense. I think so.

Ray Briggs
Shaun, we’re almost out of time. Do you have one final piece of advice for listeners who will be aiming to create better habits?

Shaun Gallagher
Yes, I, I guess I hate to keep habitually repeating this, but I think Aristotle’s advice on on that is good, hang around with the right people learn by what they do and, and, yeah, I think that type of thing is important. And it’s a it’s something also that leads to the same in the kind of formations of good social practices, good types of performance that might be supported by institutions or not. But, you know, it starts with social interactions with others. I think that’s the important thing.

Josh Landy
Well Shaun, I definitely feel like we’ve been hanging around the right kind of people today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Shaun Gallagher
Okay, thank you guys.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Shaun Gallagher, professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis, and author of “Action and Interaction. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I’m thinking as soon as I leave, I’m gonna have to clean my room and practice my Spanish.

Josh Landy
Yeah, good habits, right? And maybe I can do less on my iPhone. We’re gonna put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our completely revamped website, Philosophytalk.org and while you’re there, you can subscribe to our feed for free.

Ray Briggs
Or you can support us with a premium subscription and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Josh Landy
Now, could a little philosophy help with a listener’s everyday dilemma? It’s time for a conundrum.

Ray Briggs
Neil from Tallahassee, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Neil
Thanks for having me.

Josh Landy
Neil, what’s your conundrum?

Neil
All right, I was late to a chiropractor appointment. I’m driving trying to get there, and I pull up to an intersection that has a short, dedicated right turn lane, and it’s a long red and the car in front of me. Has about seven feet of room till the next car, and they could easily pull forward to let me get to the right lane, and would save me, you know, another minute and a half, or something like that. And so my my dilemma that I faced was, Do I honk at them or not? And on the one hand, I thought, well, it would be rude, and, you know, they’re not causing any accident or anything like that. And on you know, the other hand, I was late, and it didn’t seem like it would hurt them to move forward. So my question is, is it kind of in some sense unethical to just honk at people because you want to get somewhere quicker, and they have a little extra space.

Josh Landy
This gets me to a kind of pet peeve of mine. I feel like our cause is just badly designed. Why do we just have one thing that makes a sound and it’s like, ah, yeah, maybe you know because you sometimes you’re warning people there’s a danger. Sometimes you’re alerting folks around a corner to your presence. Sometimes you’re just saying hi to a friend. You haven’t seen it. There should be like a clown horn option, little bicycle bell option, but all we’ve got is the blah. So Ray, do you think under those given the technology that we currently have, it’s ethical for Neil to disturb someone’s slumbers at the at the light.

Ray Briggs
So I actually think that there are a little bit more options than you’re saying, Josh, it’s not it’s not just one signal. I think that you can do a short honk or a long honk, and that they are, in fact, different. A long honk is like, it’s an emergency or I’m really mad, and a short honk is sort of hey, hey, because saying hey is basically making a request. And I think it’s okay to make a request of somebody without worrying forever whether you’re inconveniencing them.

Josh Landy
Yeah, because I can see, you know, from a philosophical standpoint, I can imagine a version of libertarianism, which would say, just let that other person do their thing, that other person in front of you. They’re not harming anybody. They’re just chilling out at the light and keeping a good distance and don’t, don’t honk at them, don’t try to coerce them into doing something.

Neil
They’re harming me.

Josh Landy
I guess they’re harming you. That’s true, but only minimally. I don’t know. But I, you know, I feel like a Kantian might say, okay, you know, could you universalize this? How would you feel if everyone was honking at you and I’d be like, yeah, actually feel fine if I right, if I were the person in the car in front, I wouldn’t have any problem with you, Neil, you know, tapping lightly as Ray suggests on your horn to alert me to your presence and and to invite me to help you out, I’d be totally okay living in a world where that was a kind of general norm of behavior. So I feel like, for me, at least, I can imagine accounting an argument on your side, Neil.

Speaker 1
So it’s kind of like the golden rule, like, if I’m cool with people honking at me that way, I can honk at them that way.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I don’t know about this style of a priori Kantian. Arguments for traffic norms like these are highly contingent. I think the rules depend on where you are. Like, which which which side of the road Do you drive on? You don’t answer that by thinking, well, which rule could I universalize you look at which side of the road people are actually driving on.

Speaker 1
So is it like language? Like, what the meaning of the honk is, is going to vary place to place? It’s like a middle finger some places and a question other places.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I think that’s right.

Josh Landy
I still think you should fit a clown horn to your car and a bicycle bell and maybe, maybe an ice cream truck noise maker.

Ray Briggs
That is unethical. No, no, that’s so annoying.

Josh Landy
So did we solve your conundrum?

Speaker 1
Well, I think you did in the sense that, you know, sometimes ethical questions do need to be answered by learning more about the place that you’re in, right? And that’s, you know, maybe some somewhat satisfactory like I’m not going to know just by thinking about it, or by calling some philosophers wherever you two are. But you helped me figure out that what it is I need to talk to your neighbors. Yeah, talk to your neighbors. That’s a good answer.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much for joining us, Neil.

Neil
Alright, good to talk.

Josh Landy
Don’t drive like my fellow philosopher.

Ray Briggs
Don’t drive like my fellow philosopher.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2025.

Ray Briggs
Our Executive Producer is James Kass. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is the Director of Research and advancement.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston. Karen Adjluni, Steve Choi, and Linda Fagan.

Ray Briggs
Special thanks to Emma Lozeman-Plumb, Michael Aparicio, Tom Lockard, Matt Porta, and John Lehman.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.