Naturally disengaging control to reveal habits.

Abstract

Habits are an essential part of everyday decision making, yet the mechanisms underlying human habit formation and expression are difficult to study in laboratory settings, where participants typically engage strong goal-directed (GD) control that can mask habitual tendencies. Recent approaches have successfully elicited habits in long experiments by limiting the amount of GD control participants can exert (e.g., through forced response times). We extend this approach by designing a short behavioral paradigm that aims to induce and reveal habits without extrinsically limiting GD control, instead incorporating task features that we hypothesized would encourage participants to spontaneously relax GD control: a hierarchical multistep trial structure, opportunities for self-correction, and frequent switches between extensively and minimally practiced behaviors. Across seven experiments, we demonstrate that this approach induces habitual control in a relatively brief paradigm. Specifically, overtraining increases slips of action toward the extensively practiced context and reduces slips toward the minimally practiced one, indicating behavioral inflexibility at early response times, while slower responses remain dominated by GD control. Systematic manipulation of task features across experiments revealed that allowing multiple response attempts was particularly important for reliably observing this overtraining effect; a hierarchical trial structure may further facilitate habit expression, though this remains inconclusive. More broadly, our paradigm provides a practical tool for investigating how habits form and interact with goal-directed control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).