Behavioral and Social/Cognitive Approaches to Habits
PSY/250
March 21, 2011

Behavioral and Social/Cognitive Approaches to Habits One of the earliest memories I can recall is my mother playing records on the turntable in the living room while she cleaned the house. The sounds of Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow, Bread, or Abba filled the house with music. These are some of my most joyful memories. I can still see her vacuuming, dusting, and scrubbing different rooms of the house while pausing for the big fanfares within the songs to dramatically sing along or throw down an awesome air guitar solo on the broom in her hands. These moments are the reasons I always have loved music. The problem is that I have never learned how to settle for a few artists and albums like my mother. I have a habit of liking too many types of music, and too many artists within each type. This has led to the development of my bad habit of collecting too many albums. My mother is my musical role model, encouraging the exploration of music. She promotes trying out different styles and genres of music. She always exposed my sister and me to various types of music, from church hymns to off-Broadway musical productions. My mother bought me my first music album when I was four. It was a Christmas album by The Chipmunks. I love that album and still enjoy it every Christmas. Later in my childhood, I loved Michael Jackson, and had to have all of his albums. I have replaced those records with compact discs in my collection. In middle school and high school, I developed an eclectic love for classic rock, punk rock, heavy metal, hip-hop, and classical music. With this, my collection of albums took off on a broad spectrum. I had gone from a few records, to a few cassette tapes, to a nice collection of nearly 100 compact discs. I should have seen that this was becoming an addiction when I got a job at a music shop; barely making enough money to pay for the compact discs I was buying from the shop. All of my friends were musicians, and kept exposing me to new artists and genres of music, which, of course, I ran and bought. According to the definition of behavioral personality theory, I always have responded to the external stimuli of admiring music in all ways. The sounds of various musicians creating something beautiful in sound and tonal quality, the artistic abilities of the musicians to defy musical logic with diversities in key signatures and time changes, and tying it together with amazing cover art and liner notes. This accumulates into a force that drives my internal stimuli to crave the ownership of the album. I reinforce my internal and external stimuli and buy the album, and look forward to the next time I will do it (Friedman & Schustack, 2009). I seem to focus on the thoughts and curiosities about a musician’s works, the thought of exploring similar artists, and having thoughts of owning music from all of these artists before buying the albums. This is one of many definitions of social/cognitive theories (Heffner, 2004). My thoughts and desires about the placing the album in my collection determine my behavior and my personality. I have never had thoughts about completely stopping my habit of collecting albums. I love the feeling of getting my hands on a new album, regardless of artist or type of music. The excitement of opening an album, reading the liner notes, and playing the album for the first time feeds my senses. I cannot see myself breaking this habit. The closest I have come to giving up the habit are when I cannot afford to go buy new albums and have to add it to my list of albums to buy later. Operant conditioning, or changing how I respond to my musical environment, could allow me to develop a plan to break my habit (Friedman & Schustack, 2009). I could satisfy my curiosities about an artist by researching the album online and download samples from the artist and similar artists. I could download the mp3 files of the album and put the files on my iPod to listen to them. This would lessen the amount of physical albums I had in my collection, and if I find this method as rewarding, I could start replacing the albums already in my collection with digital formats and get rid of the physical album. This replacement could open a whole room in my house. Operant conditioning could work if I wanted it to, but I enjoy the physical and emotional sensation of the physical album too much. Julian Rotter’s locus of control social/cognitive theory best explains my personality. Rotter’s theory focuses on why an individual performs a behavior in a specific situation. This theory is based on outcome expectancy, or how an individual’s performance will have a positive impact, and reinforcement value, or how much we value the expected reinforcement (Friedman & Schustack, 2009). My personality exhibits a need to have the album as expected reinforcement for my research and curiosities, or outcome expectancies, about the artist. According to Friedman and Schustack (2009), the locus of control in divided into two parts: internal versus external locus of control. The first part is the internal locus of control, or the generalized expectancy that an individual’s own actions lead to desired outcomes. The second part is the external locus of control, or the belief that items outside of the individual determine whether desired outcomes would occur (Friedman & Schustack, 2009). This theory explains my habit. Internally, my actions of processing different artists and different styles of music lead to my expected outcome of purchasing the album to satisfy these desires. The external part of my locus of control is deciding whether I can afford the album, or do I need to add it to my list of albums to purchase later. I will always be a music collector. I cannot see a day when I will not desire that sensation of enjoying a new album. Technology changes and the music industry adapts to new formats. From records to cassettes, compact discs to digital downloads, my album collecting habit is forever satisfied.

References
Friedman, H. S., & Schustack, M. W. (2009). Personality: Classic Theories and Modern Research (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson: Allyn & Bacon.
Heffner, C. L. (2004, March 23). Personality Synopsis. Retrieved from http://allpsych.com/personalitysynopsis/contents.html