etter behavioral models should be, like us, habit driven. Our lives are often a stream of habitual actions. We repeatedly reap their harvest, on autopilot. We consciously decide only if that flow is interrupted. Thinking is expensive and reinventing cognitive or behavioral wheels is rarely productive, so we evolved to acquire second nature habits from others. As Darwin noted “much of the intelligent work done by man is due to imitation and not to reason.” We are habit-formers and habit-farmers. Each habit can be modeled as a situational trigger with an action script. Habits are behavioral tools enabling rapid action without costly conscious attention. In triggering situations, they can be overruled, but only with conscious effort. Action scripts likely use rule of thumb style conditional logic, rather than cognitively unnatural numerical methods. Habits can be rationally useful or irrationally unfit for a given situation. It’s worth considering whether cognitive biases are bad cognitive habits—badly triggered action scripts—rather than built-in brain bugs. Especially since what is called rational, requires training. - blogs.scientificamerican.com