Theory-based habit modeling for enhancing behavior prediction in behavior change support systems

Psychological theories of habit posit that when a strong habit is formed through behavioral repetition, it can trigger behavior automatically in the same environment. Given the reciprocal relationship between habit and behavior, changing lifestyle behaviors is largely a task of breaking old habits and creating new and healthy ones. Thus, representing users’ habit strengths can be very useful for behavior change support systems, for example, to predict behavior or to decide when an intervention reaches its intended effect. However, habit strength is not directly observable and existing self-report measures are taxing for users. In this paper, building on recent computational models of habit formation, we propose a method to enable intelligent systems to compute habit strength based on observable behavior. The hypothesized advantage of using computed habit strength for behavior prediction was tested using data from two intervention studies on dental behavior change (N= 36 and N= 75), where we instructed participants to brush their teeth twice a day for three weeks and monitored their behaviors using accelerometers. The results showed that for the task of predicting future brushing behavior, the theory-based model that computed habit strength achieved an accuracy of 68.6% (Study 1) and 76.1% (Study 2), which outperformed the model that relied on self-reported behavioral determinants but showed no advantage over models that relied on past behavior. We discuss the implications of our results for research on behavior change support systems and habit formation.