Trial reportJournal of experimental psychology. General2018
Shifting the balance between goals and habits: Five failures in experimental habit induction.
Trial report in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 103 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
103 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 231 citations in OpenAlex.
- Bad habits-good goals? Meta-analysis and translation of the habit construct to alcoholism.Translational psychiatry · 2024Pooled it
- Cognitive Inflexibility in OCD and Related Disorders.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2021Pooled it
- Effects of sleep deprivation on food-related Pavlovian-instrumental transfer: a randomized crossover experiment.Scientific reports · 2024Trial
- Addiction history moderates the effect of prefrontal 10-Hz transcranial alternating current stimulation on habitual action selection.Journal of neurophysiology · 2021Trial
- Appetitive Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer in Participants with Normal-Weight and Obesity.Nutrients · 2019Trial
- Does time pressure reveal habits? Divergent results from outcome devaluation and response remapping paradigms.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Naturally disengaging control to reveal habits.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026Article
- The evaluation of devaluation: Deficient outcome devaluation leads to wrongly considering goal-directed actions as habits.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Reference-point dependent reinforcement learning in humans and rats.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Revealing abrupt transitions from goal-directed to habitual behavior.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Habit degradation strategies promote faster early reductions in unhealthy snacking habit strength in intensive longitudinal randomised controlled trial.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Article
- Human goal-directed behavior is resistant to interventions on the action-outcome contingency.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Devaluation of response-produced safety signals reveals circuits for goal-directed versus habitual avoidance in dorsal striatum.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Avoidance habit learning in adolescents and young women with anorexia nervosa: an fMRI study.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Mapping affective pathways to compulsion: Insights from an aversive devaluation approach.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2025Article
- Assessing the validity evidence for habit measures based on time pressure.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- The reward positivity is insensitive to reinforcer devaluation.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Dissociable habits of response preparation versus response initiation.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Studying human habit formation through motor sequence learning.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
43 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Habits are repetitive behaviors that become ingrained with practice, routine, and repetition. The more we repeat an action, the stronger our habits become. Behavioral and clinical neuroscientists have become increasingly interested in this topic because habits may contribute to aspects of maladaptive human behavior, such as compulsive behavior in psychiatry. Numerous studies have demonstrated that habits can be induced in otherwise healthy rats by simply overtraining stimulus-response behaviors. However, despite growing interest in this topic and its application to psychiatry, a similar body of work in humans is absent. Only a single study has been published in humans that shows the effect of extensive training on habit expression. Here, we report five failed attempts to demonstrate that overtraining instrumental behavior leads to the development of inflexible habits in humans, using variants of four previously published outcome devaluation paradigms. Extensive training did not lead to greater habits in two versions of an avoidance learning task, in an appetitive slips-of-action task, or in two independent attempts to replicate the original demonstration. The finding that these outcome devaluation procedures may be insensitive to duration of stimulus-response training in humans has implications for prior work in psychiatric populations. Specifically, it converges with the suggestion that the failures in outcome devaluation in compulsive individuals reflect dysfunction in goal-directed control, rather than overactive habit learning. We discuss why habits are difficult to experimentally induce in healthy humans, and the implications of this for future research in healthy and disordered populations. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.