Getting into your workout clothes and heading to the gym can be a task at first. You can eventually develop a habit of going to the gym and quickly getting to your Zumba class or treadmill run. A new study by social scientists at Caltech suggests that it takes an average of six months to form a gym habit. The same study also looked at how long it took healthcare workers to get into the habit of washing their hands: a few weeks on average. “There is no magic number for habit formation,” says Anastasia Byalskaya, assistant professor of marketing at HEC Paris.
Other authors of the study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, include Caltech’s Colin Kammerer, Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics and Director and Leadership Chair and Researcher at the T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience Are. from the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. Xiaomin Li, formerly a graduate student and postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, is also an author. “You may have heard that it takes about 21 days to form a habit, but that estimate wasn’t based on any science,” says Kammerer. “Our work supports the idea that the speed of habit formation varies according to the behavior in question and many other factors.”
This is the first study to use machine learning tools to study habit formation. The researchers used machine learning to analyze a large data set of thousands of people who were either swiping their badges to enter their gyms or washing their hands during a hospital shift. For the gym research, the researchers partnered with 24-Hour Fitness, and for the hand-washing research, they partnered with a company that uses radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to monitor hand washing in hospitals. Used to use The data set tracked more than 30,000 gym goers over four years and more than 3,000 hospital workers over nearly 100 shifts. “With machine learning, we can look at hundreds of contextual variables that can predict behavioral performance,” explains Bielskaya. “You don’t need to start with a hypothesis about a specific variable, because machine learning does the work for us to find the relevant ones.”
Machine learning let researchers study people over time in their natural environment; Most previous studies were limited to participants filling out surveys. The study found that some variables had no effect on gym habit formation, such as time of day. Other factors, such as one’s past behavior, come into play. For example, for 76 percent of gym goers, the amount of time that had elapsed since the last gym visit was a significant predictor of whether the person would go again. In other words, the longer it takes a gym-goer to hit the gym, the less likely they are to make it a habit. Sixty-nine percent of gym goers were more likely to go to the gym on the same days of the week, with Mondays and Tuesdays having the best attendance.
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For the hand-washing portion of the study, the researchers looked at data from healthcare workers who were given new requirements to wear RFID badges that recorded their hand-washing activity. “It is possible that some healthcare workers already had the habit prior to our inspection, however, we regard the introduction of RFID technology as a ‘shock’ and believe that they will have to develop their habit from the moment the technology is used. may need to be redone. ,” says Byalskaya. “Overall, we are seeing that machine learning is a powerful tool for studying human habits outside the laboratory,” says Bielskaya.