The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (34 page)

Whether selling a new song, a new food, or a new crib, the lesson is the same: If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.

The usefulness of this lesson isn’t limited to large corporations, government agencies, or radio companies hoping to manipulate our tastes. These same insights can be used to change how we live.

In 2000, for instance, two statisticians were hired by the YMCA—one of the nation’s largest nonprofit organizations—to use the powers of data-driven fortune-telling to make the world a healthier place. The YMCA has more than 2,600 branches in the United States, most of them gyms and community centers. About a decade ago, the organization’s leaders began worrying about how to stay competitive. They asked a social scientist and a mathematician—Bill Lazarus and Dean Abbott—for help.

The two men gathered data from more than 150,000 YMCA member satisfaction surveys that had been collected over the years and started looking for patterns. At that point, the accepted wisdom among YMCA executives was that people wanted fancy exercise equipment and sparkling, modern facilities. The YMCA had spent millions of dollars building weight rooms and yoga studios. When the surveys were analyzed, however, it turned out that while a facility’s attractiveness and the availability of workout machines might have caused people to join in the first place, what got them to stay was something else.

Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names. It’s a variation of the lesson learned by Target and radio DJs: to sell a new habit—in this case exercise—wrap it in something that people already know and like, such as the instinct to go places where it’s easy to make friends.

“We’re cracking the code on how to keep people at the gym,” Lazarus told me. “People want to visit places that satisfy their social
needs. Getting people to exercise in groups makes it more likely they’ll stick with a workout. You can change the health of the nation this way.”

Someday soon, say predictive analytics experts, it will be possible for companies to know our tastes and predict our habits better than we know ourselves. However, knowing that someone might prefer a certain brand of peanut butter isn’t enough to get them to act on that preference. To market a new habit—be it groceries or aerobics—you must understand how to make the novel seem familiar.

The last time I spoke to Andrew Pole, I mentioned that my wife was seven months pregnant with our second child. Pole himself has children, and so we talked a bit about kids. My wife and I shop at Target on occasion, I said, and about a year earlier we had given the company our address, so we could start getting coupons in the mail. Recently, as my wife’s pregnancy had progressed, I’d been noticing a subtle upswing in the number of advertisements for diapers, lotions, and baby clothes arriving at our house.

I was planning on using some of those coupons that very weekend, I told him. I was also thinking of buying a crib, and some drapes for the nursery, and maybe some Bob the Builder toys for my toddler. It was really helpful that Target was sending me exactly the right coupons for what I needed to buy.

“Just wait till the baby comes,” Pole said. “We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.”

SADDLEBACK CHURCH AND THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT
How Movements Happen

The 6
P.M
. Cleveland Avenue bus pulled to the curb and the petite forty-two-year-old African American woman in rimless glasses and a conservative brown jacket climbed on board, reached into her purse, and dropped
a ten-cent fare into the till.
^8.1

It was Thursday, December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, and she had just finished a long day at Montgomery Fair, the department store where she worked as a seamstress. The bus was crowded and, by law, the first four rows were reserved for white passengers. The area where blacks were allowed to sit, in the back, was already full and so the woman—Rosa Parks—sat in a center row, right behind the white section, where either race could claim a seat.

As the bus continued on its route, more people boarded. Soon, all the rows were filled and some—including a white passenger—were standing in the aisle, holding on to an overhead bar. The bus driver, James F. Blake, seeing the white man on his feet, shouted at the black passengers in Parks’s area to give up their seats, but no
one moved. It was noisy. They might not have heard. Blake pulled over to a bus stop in front of the Empire Theater on Montgomery Street and walked back.

“Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” he said. Three of the black passengers got up and moved to the rear, but Parks stayed put. She wasn’t
in
the white section, she told the driver, and besides, there was only one white rider standing.

“If you don’t stand up,” Blake said, “I’m going to call the police and have you arrested.”

“You may do that,” Parks said.
^8.2

The driver left and found two policemen.

“Why don’t you stand up?” one of them asked Parks after they boarded.

“Why do you push us around?” she said.

“I don’t know,” the officer answered. “But
the law is the law and you’re under arrest.”
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At that moment, though no one on that bus knew it, the civil rights movement pivoted. That small refusal was the first in a series of actions that shifted the battle over race relations from a struggle fought by activists in courts and legislatures into a contest that would draw its strength from entire communities and mass protests. Over the next year, Montgomery’s black population would rise up and boycott the city’s buses, ending their strike only once the law segregating races on public transportation was stricken from the books. The boycott would financially cripple the bus line, draw tens of thousands of protesters to rallies, introduce the country to a charismatic young leader named Martin Luther King, Jr., and spark a movement that would spread to Little Rock, Greensboro, Raleigh, Birmingham, and, eventually, to Congress. Parks would become a hero, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a shining example of how a single act of defiance can change the world.

But that isn’t the whole story. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus
boycott became the epicenter of the civil rights campaign not only because of an individual act of defiance, but also because of social patterns. Parks’s experiences offer a lesson in the power of social habits—the behaviors that occur, unthinkingly, across dozens or hundreds or thousands of people which are often hard to see as they emerge, but which contain a power that can change the world. Social habits are what fill streets with protesters who may not know one another, who might be marching for different reasons, but who are all moving in the same direction. Social habits are why some initiatives become world-changing movements, while others fail to ignite. And the reason why social habits have such influence is because at the root of many movements—be they large-scale revolutions or simple fluctuations in the churches people attend—is
a three-part process that historians and sociologists say shows up again and again:
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A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances.

It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together.

And it endures because a movement’s leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.

Usually, only when all three parts of this process are fulfilled can a movement become self-propelling and reach a critical mass. There are other recipes for successful social change and hundreds of details that differ between eras and struggles. But understanding how social habits work helps explain why Montgomery and Rosa Parks became the catalyst for a civil rights crusade.

It wasn’t inevitable that Parks’s act of rebellion that winter day would result in anything other than her arrest. Then habits intervened, and something amazing occurred.

Rosa Parks wasn’t the first black passenger jailed for breaking Montgomery’s bus segregation laws. She wasn’t even the first that year. In 1946, Geneva Johnson had been arrested for
talking back to a Montgomery bus driver over seating.
^8.5
In 1949, Viola White, Katie Wingfield, and two black children were arrested for sitting in the white section
and refusing to move.
^8.6
That same year, two black teenagers visiting from New Jersey—where buses were integrated—were arrested and jailed after breaking the law by
sitting next to a white man and a boy.
^8.7
In 1952, a Montgomery policeman shot and killed a black man when he argued with a bus driver. In 1955, just months before Parks was taken to jail, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith were arrested in separate incidents for refusing to give their seats to white passengers.