A new paper suggests the number of automatic behaviours we engage in daily may be higher than previously estimated.
06 November 2025
By Emma Young
Models of social cognition generally portray people as being rational decision-makers, who will often weigh up options before deciding how to act, note the authors of a recent paper in Psychology and Health. However, write Amanda Rebar at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and colleagues a lot of our everyday behaviours are repetitive. And this could leave them open to being governed by habits, rather than intention.
For their study, the team set out to explore just what proportion of our daily actions are the result of conscious choice, and which are habits — impulse-governed actions triggered by being in a particular setting, because we have learned to associate that setting with that action.
A total of 105 participants from the UK and Australia took part in the study. Every day for a week, the researchers sent six separate prompts to participants' phones. Each time, they were asked to describe what they were doing, how deliberate the decision to do it had been, and how automatic it felt to perform that action. The participants also indicated how much the action aligned with an existing plan or goal.
So, for example, if someone had reported being in the act of grabbing a bar of chocolate from a cupboard, they might have said that the decision to grab it had taken place without thinking, that the action itself felt automatic, and that it had been contrary to a plan or goal (assuming that cutting out snacks was one of their goals).
When the team analysed the responses, they first looked at the types of activities that the participants had been engaged in. They found that a fifth involved employment, education, or volunteering. A slightly smaller fraction were in the realm of domestic or childcare activities. About 10% of the time, the participants said they were eating or drinking, while 'relaxing' accounted for a similar percentage. Other activities included transportation (including commuting to or from work), exercise (5.9% of the responses), and hobbies and leisure (5.4%).
When the researchers then looked at the participants' replies to the follow-up questions, they found that two thirds of these behaviours had been initiated by habit, 88% were done in an automatic way, and three quarters had been aligned with the participant's intentions or goals. The team's analysis also revealed that one sixth of the behaviours ticked both the 'habit' boxes, being both initiated and executed out habit, but were not goal-aligned.
Overall, the finding that two-thirds of these everyday behaviours were initiated out of habit is perhaps the most notable, the team thinks, as it's significantly higher than the figure of 35–43% for this reported in some earlier work.
As for the observation that almost 9 out of 10 everyday behaviours happened on autopilot, on one hand, this might seem to be a dispiriting finding, especially as the team's analysis also showed that actions triggered by habit were roughly equally likely to feature in the participants' leisure time as during work.
However, the researchers see an upside to this. "Our results indicate that almost all behaviours can be supported by habit, which in turn suggests interventions can realistically seek to promote habit formation for any action, to maintain change over time," they write.
In other words, the fact that we do indeed seem to be creatures of habit should mean it's possible for us to form a suite of good ones, and, as a result, achieve our goals. "We recommend that techniques conducive to forming new habits and disrupting old habits be built into behaviour change interventions to maximise effectiveness," the team concludes.
Read the paper in full:
Rebar, A. L., Vincent, G., Cornu, L., & Gardner, B. (2025). How habitual is everyday life? An ecological momentary assessment study. Psychology and Health, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2025.2561149
SOURCE:
https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/how-much-our-life-lived-autopilot(accessed 12.11.25)
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