Study Reveals 90% of Daily Actions Happen on ‘Autopilot’
You wake up, brush your teeth, make coffee, check your phone, and head out the door. But how much of that routine did you consciously think through? According to new findings, probably very little.
Researchers followed 105 people over the course of a week and uncovered a striking truth about human behavior: nearly 90% of what we do each day happens automatically, without deliberate thought.
The study—conducted by behavioral scientists from universities in the U.S., Australia, and the U.K.—used real-time tracking to measure how often daily actions run on “autopilot.” Participants received six text prompts a day, asking them to describe their current activity and to rate how automatic or intentional it felt.
Most of Life Runs on Habit
The data revealed that 88% of everyday actions were carried out with little to no conscious control. In addition, 65% of behaviors were automatically prompted by environmental cues rather than chosen through intentional decision-making.
“People rarely stop to deliberate over which behavior to enact or how to do a behavior at any given time,” the researchers wrote in their paper, published in Psychology & Health.
Lead author Amanda Rebar, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina, noted that the team identified two types of automatic behaviors. Habitual instigation is when something in the environment sparks an action—like checking your phone after hearing a ping. Habitual execution is when you perform a task fluidly without paying attention to the details, such as brushing your teeth or driving a route you know by heart.
“People like to think of themselves as rational decision makers, who think carefully about what to do before they do it,” Rebar said in a statement. “However, much of our repetitive behavior is undertaken with minimal forethought and is instead generated automatically, by habit.”
Interestingly, the researchers found no significant differences across age, gender, or relationship status. In other words, demographics didn’t affect how much people relied on habit.
“Whether a person’s behavior was generally habitual or aligned with intention did not vary as a function of demographics,” the study concluded.
