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—We address the problem of simulating domestic activities related to electrical consumption. Continuously growing electrical energy requirements have become an issue as resources to produce it are limited. Human factors have to be taken into account in order to better predict electric consumption and optimize its production. We propose a framework based on a psychological scheme and on stochastic features. The decision process is based on the representation of habits and the use of heat maps. Inclusion of planning-related behaviour is performed by a non-parametric voting method using relational properties among domestic activities. The results show a good fitting between the predictions and ground truth.

While colleges and universities seek to utilize big, complex and aggregated data to generate insights to support students, big data is limited in its use to design interventions due to limits it inherently has. Small data, or onedimensional teaching and learning analytics, provide quality feedback to teachers and students. In this paper, we will discuss how Abilene Christian University (ACU), a private university in the western region of the United States, uses alert system to serve at-risk students, IDEA evaluations to gather feedback to improve teaching, and data from the use of a learning management system Canvas to identify ways to improve student learning by providing formative evaluation for faculty to improve their practices. Towards the end of the paper we will discuss what students can do to make informed choices about their learning.

What strategies can people use to control unwanted habits? Past work has focused on controlling other kinds of automatic impulses, especially temptations. The nature of habit cuing calls for certain self-control strategies. Because the slow-to-change memory trace of habits is not amenable to change or reinterpretation, successful habit control involves inhibiting the unwanted response when activated in memory. In support, two episode-sampling diary studies demonstrated that bad habits, unlike responses to temptations, were controlled most effectively through spontaneous use of vigilant monitoring (thinking “don’t do it,” watching carefully for slipups). No other strategy was useful in controlling strong habits, despite that stimulus control was effective at inhibiting responses to temptations. A subsequent experiment showed that vigilant monitoring aids habit control, not by changing the strength of the habit memory trace but by heightening inhibitory, cognitive control processes. The implications of these findings for behavior change interventions are discussed.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.1 Healthcare leaders,2 ,3 academics4–7 and regulators,8 ,9 continue to push healthcare organisations to emulate high-reliability organisations (HROs) like aircraft carrier flight decks and nuclear power control rooms10 to solve long-standing quality and safety problems in healthcare delivery. The nearly error-free performance of HROs in trying circumstances is a function of mindful organising—a set of behavioural and cognitive processes by which their members discern latent and manifest threats to reliability and act swiftly to resolve them.11 ,12 Emerging evidence suggests that processes of mindful organising are associated with lower error rates,13–15 more reliable service performance16 and even lower turnover.17 Yet despite persistent calls by influential leaders and promising empirical evidence, there is little indication of highly reliable performance in healthcare generally.8 ,9 ,18 In other words, the pursuit of highly reliable healthcare through mindful organising has become a problematic improvement to the problem of medical error.19 We ask, ‘why does high reliability remain so elusive?’ Fostering improvement often starts with looking at what successful people and organisations consistently do as evidenced by the continuing popularity of Steven Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People 20 or Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit .21 Similarly, we argue that the continued unreliability of healthcare delivery results from the failure to turn periodic mindful practice into consistent, enduring habit. In other words, we focus on healthcare organisations that either aspire to be highly reliable and/or have attempted to pursue it in some manner but have not achieved reliable performance. For example, hospital executives may consistently emphasise a zero harm goal and frequently talking with frontline care providers about safety (ie, WalkRounds), yet …

We address the problem of simulating domestic activities related to electrical consumption. Continuously growing electrical energy requirements have become an issue as resources to produce it are limited. Human factors have to be taken into account in order to better predict electric consumption and optimize its production. We propose a framework based on a psychological scheme and on stochastic features. The decision process is based on the representation of habits and the use of heat maps. Inclusion of planning-related behavior is performed by a non-parametric voting method using relational properties among domestic activities. The results show a good fitting between the predictions and ground truth.

Virtues, broadly understood as stable and robust dispositions for certain responses across morally relevant situations, have been a growing topic of interest in psychology. A central topic of discussion has been whether studies showing that situations can strongly influence our responses provide evidence against the existence of virtues (as a kind of stable and robust disposition). In this review, we examine reasons for thinking that the prevailing methods for examining situational influences are limited in their ability to test dispositional stability and robustness; or, then, whether virtues exist. We make the case that these limitations can be addressed by aggregating repeated, cross-situational assessments of environmental, psychological and physiological variables within everyday life—a form of assessment often called ecological momentary assessment (EMA, or experience sampling). We, then, examine how advances in smartphone application (app) technology, and their mass adoption, make these mobile devices an unprecedented vehicle for EMA and, thus, the psychological study of virtue. We, additionally, examine how smartphones might be used for virtue development by promoting changes in thought and behavior within daily life; a technique often called ecological momentary intervention (EMI). While EMA/I have become widely employed since the 1980s for the purposes of understanding and promoting change amongst clinical populations, few EMA/I studies have been devoted to understanding or promoting virtues within non-clinical populations. Further, most EMA/I studies have relied on journaling, PDAs, phone calls and/or text messaging systems. We explore how smartphone app technology provides a means of making EMA a more robust psychological method, EMI a more robust way of promoting positive change, and, as a result, opens up new possibilities for studying and promoting virtues.

Various security measures are ineffective having been designed without adequate usability and economic considerations. The primary objective of this thesis is to add an economic and socio-behavioral perspective to the traditional computer science research in information security. The resulting research is interdisciplinary, and the papers combine different approaches, ranging from analytic modeling to empirical measurements and user studies. Contributing to the fields of usable security and security economics, this thesis fulfills three motivations. First, it provides a realistic game theoretical model for analyzing the dynamics of attack and defense on the Web. Adapted from the classical Colonel Blotto games, our Colonel Blotto Phishing model captures the asymmetric conflict (resource, information, action) between a resource-constrained attacker and a defender. It also factors in the practical scenario where the attacker creates large numbers of phishing websites (endogenous dimensionality), while the defender reactively detects and strives to take them down promptly. Second, the thesis challenges the conventional view that users are always the weakest link or liability in security. It explores the feasibility of leveraging inputs from expert and ordinary users for improving information security. While several potential challenges are identified, we find that community inputs are more comprehensive and relevant than automated assessments. This does not imply that users should be made liable to protect themselves; it demonstrates the potentials of community efforts in complementing conventional security measures. We further analyze the contribution characteristics of serious and casual security volunteers, and suggest ways for improvement. Third, following the rise of third party applications (apps), the thesis explores the security and privacy risks and challenges with both centralized and decentralized app control models. Centralized app control can lead to the risk of central judgment and the risk of habituation, while the increasingly widespread decentralized user-consent permission model also suffers from the lack of effective risk signaling. We find the tendency of popular apps requesting more permissions than average. Compound with the absence of alternative risk signals, users will habitually click through the permission request dialogs. In addition, we find the free apps, apps with mature content, and apps with names mimicking the popular ones, request more permissions than typical. These indicate possible attempts to trick the users into compromising their privacy.

To what extent is repeated media consumption behavior a matter of habit rather than continuing and active self-instruction? The physiological and cognitive origins of habits are examined in the context of current research in neurology and social psychology. The result is a reconceptualization of media habits along a continuum from consciously enacted behaviors to those that are activated automatically by external stimuli. Communication research perspectives of the role of habits in media consumption are critically reviewed. From this analysis, habits emerge as automatic thought processes that are powerful predictors of media behavior and a model of habitual media consumption is proposed.

Title: Mining Location and User Information from Users’ Trajectories Author: Marcello Tomasini Major Advisor: Ronaldo Menezes, Ph.D. The understanding of human mobility is integral to the advancement of many fields including public health, city planning, economic forecasting, and it attracts the interest of researchers from a broad number of fields. The work of such researchers would not have been possible without the availability of large localized datasets such as mobile phone Call Detail Records (CDRs) provided by telco operators and Location Based Social Networks (LBSNs) check-ins provided by popular applications such as Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. However, such datasets are often incomplete, anonymized, and/or inaccurate. Hence there is a need to partially reconstruct or extract more information from such data. In this dissertation, we propose a framework to analyze and augment spatio-temporal data related to human trajectories that could be used to further the understanding of regularities in human mobility. In particular, the aim is to be able to augment the data to make it possible to classify users and places.

Three studies examined the cognitive processes underlying the formation of goal-directed habits in a multiple means context. Repeated retrieval of target means upon goal activation was expected to result in inhibition of competing means for the same goal. In all studies, participants studied goal—means combinations and subsequently practiced the retrieval of certain means to attain the goals in a retrieval paradigm. Study 1 tested accessibility of the different means in a goal—means verification task and showed that competing means were not inhibited after a single retrieval but only upon repeated retrieval (three or nine times). Studies 2 and 3 extended these findings in a means—recognition task and demonstrated that inhibition occurred in the absence of explicit intent or instructions to suppress the competitors. These inhibitory effects of competing means are discussed against the background of current social cognition research on the processes underlying goal—means networks and the formation of habits.

This study used sources from selected databases to provide an overview of the role of habit in choosing a mode of travel. The articles were selected from two levels. The first included selected studies that considered the psychological aspects of travel mode choice and travel mode change. These created the context for the issues of mode choice and the change of travel mode. The second level was narrower and included studies that were directly focused on the role of habit in travel mode choice or that took the role of habit into account. These studies were used as the core of the review. Subsequently, the topic of habit and travel mode choice was divided into four fields: the theoretical definition of the concept of habit, both in general and in the context of travel mode choice; the theoretical bases of the selected studies; follow-up strategies for transport-mode change; and the measurements and methods used in the field. The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) is the most often used theory for explaining the travel mode choice. Other approaches include the Norm Activation Model and the Value Belief Norm Theory. The aim for other approaches is usually to trigger conscious choice processes, but most reaearchers believe that travel mode choices are automatic and habitual when made in a stable context. The Comprehensive Action Determination Model is a promising theoretical integration that may be used in future research. It integrates assumptions of the TPB, Norm Activation Model, theoretical habit conception, and ipsative behaviour theory in order to build on habitual processes, intention processes, situation effects, and personal and social norms. As habit seems to have the most important role in the choice of travel modes and the possible changes, it should also be considered for mode-choice models in the automation era.

This study analyzed consumer intention to repurchase a smartphone, using an analysis of previous research and suggesting this as a research model. To this end, factors influencing “intention to repurchase” the smartphone were derived as social influence, consumer satisfaction, emotional loyalty, and habit. In addition, statistical analysis was conducted to investigate consumer repurchase intentions and the causal relationships. It is also possible to investigate whether consumer habits are linked to repurchases by analyzing their psychological inclinations; therefore, in this study, 390 people who repurchased a smartphone over the past two years were surveyed, and data were collected. This study analyzed the causal relationships among the factors using SPSS 24.0. Moreover, the causal relationship analysis was enhanced using the artificial neural network (ANN) algorithm. With multiple regression analysis and the ANN algorithm, consumer satisfaction (0.71), emotional loyalty (0.108), and social influence (0.062) were determined to affect the intention to repurchase. This means that the ANN algorithm can be used over multiple regression analysis and improve the results of the analysis. In addition, this study also provided practitioners with a way to improve their understanding of consumer behavior intention to repurchase smartphones.

This study aims to test the efficacy of text messaging cues (SMS) to promote physical activity (PA) habit formation in the workplace. Employees (N = 49; 28 females and 21 males, Mage = 47.5 ± 8.29 years) were randomized into two parallel groups: a PA group enrolled in a 28‐week supervised PA program and a PA+SMS group enrolled in the same PA program with text messaging cues received before their PA sessions. The exercise habit was assessed every week from self‐reports on an online application. PA maintenance and several physical fitness measures were also assessed prior to and after the intervention to evaluate its general impact. Mixed model analysis of the 603 observations indicated a small but significant effect of the SMS cues on the speed at which participants engaged in PA behaviors, as the significant interaction effect revealed that the slope of the exercise habit over time was slightly steeper in the PA+SMS group (B = 0.0462, P = 0.0001) than in the PA group (B = 0.0216, P = 0.01). SMS delivery had a marginal effect on the maintenance of PA behaviors 1 year after the intervention. The results suggest that text messaging can help to form PA habits at the workplace and might facilitate long‐term maintenance of PA behaviors.

This paper shows how, in a quasi-metric space, an inexact proximal algorithm with a generalized perturbation term appears to be a nice tool for Behavioral Sciences (Psychology, Economics, Management, Game theory,...). More precisely, the new perturbation term represents an index of resistance to change, defined as a “curved enough” function of the quasi-distance between two successive iterates. Using this behavioral point of view, the present paper shows how such a generalized inexact proximal algorithm can modelize the formation of habits and routines in a striking way. This idea comes from a recent “variational rationality approach” of human behavior which links a lot of different theories of stability (habits, routines, equilibrium, traps,...) and changes (creations, innovations, learning and destructions,...) in Behavioral Sciences and a lot of concepts and algorithms in variational analysis.

This paper reviews the state of the science on psychological and neural contributions to appetite self‐regulation in the context of obesity.

This paper proposes criteria for design, measurement, analysis and interpretation when tracking real-world habit formation and potential moderators of the effect of repetition on formation.

This paper examines our understanding of recycling behaviour in the context of its increasing normalisation in the UK. It reflects on the recent history of dry recycling (i.e. recycling of ‘dry’ materials such as paper, glass, plastics and cans) and asks the question as to what influence policy drivers and the increased provision of facilities for recycling have had on people's behaviour. In reviewing the evidence for recycling being considered a norm, this paper explores what influence norms, habit and identities have on recycling behaviour. It then considers what lessons the evidence offers for using the normalisation of recycling behaviour in influencing more people to recycle and to adopt other sustainable behaviours. The somewhat contentious issue of whether engaging in recycling behaviours has a positive or negative effect on people engaging with other pro-environmental behaviours is discussed. The evidence shows that both positive and negative spillover occurs and understanding where the balance lies, as well as what effect recycling being a norm plays in this, is important in determining appropriate interventions to influence pro-environmental behaviours. The paper concludes with some observations on implications of the evidence on intervention approaches to influence pro-environmental behaviours.

This paper addresses the role of socio-spatial context on audiovisual media consumption by adopting a multi-paradigmatic approach that combines the Theory of Media Attendance, a socio-cognitive interpretation of Uses & Gratifications and Domestication Theory. We propose a framework that inquires (RQ 1) how goals and habits interface with each other as explanatory factors of consumption and (RQ 2) how the role of socio-spatial cues can be understood. Survey results show that different socio-spatial settings are associated with distinct explanations by goals and habits. Moreover, follow-up interviews indicate that these differences are best understood when framed in everyday life family dynamics.

This paper addresses the role of socio-spatial context on audiovisual media consumption by adopting a multi-paradigmatic approach that combines the Theory of Media Attendance, a socio-cognitive interpretation of Uses & Gratifications and Domestication Theory. We propose a framework that inquires (RQ 1) how goals and habits interface with each other as explanatory factors of consumption and (RQ 2) how the role of socio-spatial cues can be understood. Survey results show that different socio-spatial settings are associated with distinct explanations by goals and habits. Moreover, follow-up interviews indicate that these differences are best understood when framed in everyday life family dynamics.