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Clarity comments on Open thread, Jan. 25 - Jan. 31, 2016 - Less Wrong
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How true is the proverb: 'To break habit you must make a habit'
In animal training it is said that best way to get rid of an undesired behaviour is to train the animal with an incompatible behaviour. For example if you have a problem with your dog chasing cats, train it to sit whenever it sees a cat -- it can't sit and chase at the same time. Googling "incompatible behavior" or "Differential Reinforcement of an Incompatible Behavior" yields lots of discussion.
The book Don't Shoot the Dog talks a lot about this, and suggests that the same should be true for people. (This is a very Less Wrong-style book: half if it is very expert advice on animal training, half of it is animal-training-inspired self-help, which is probably on much less solid ground, but presented in a rational, scientific, extremely appealing style.)
When it comes to training animals you can only go through behavorism. On the other hand when training people you can use CBT and other approaches.
Excuse my ignorance, but isn't CBT based on behaviorism?
Behaviorism in its original form assumed that thoughts or emotions don't exist, or at least that it is unscientific to talk about them. Later behaviorists took less extreme positions, and allowed "black boxes" in their models corresponding to things that can't be measured (before inventing EEG).
In CBT the "B" stands for behavioral, but "C" stands for cognitive, which is like the exact of behaviorism. CBT is partially based on behaviorism, but the other essential root is so-called Rational Therapy. (Fun fact for LW readers: the Rational Therapy was inspired by Alfred "the map is not the territory" Korzybski. It's a small world.)
CBT has many parts like the acceptance paradox that have nothing to do with behaviorism.
I think it's certainly true. I suppose it depends on your definition of "habit"...
Isn't much of what we do habitual, whether it benefits us or not? In this way, you have either good habits or bad that are reciprocals of one another.
For example, people who refrain are not said to have a "habit of not biting their nails". But that is, I think, what is happening.
I stopped biting my nails (coating them in a bitter substance to remind myself not to bite them if I tried) and I did not make any replacement habit. I don't have a "habit of not biting my nails" any more than I have a habit of breathing. It happens automatically without conscious effort, so calling "not biting nails" a habit is misusing the word.
This is why I mentioned the definition of "habit" in my comment.
From Wikipedia:
Was that "How true?" or "How true!"?
I think it is true, with the proviso that the habit to make can be the habit of noticing when the old habit is about to happen and not letting it.
'?'