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36 pages 1 hour read

Charles Duhigg

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2012

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Part 3, Chapter 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “The Habits of Societies”

Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott”

Chapter 8 opens with the history of Rosa Parks, an African American woman who in 1955 refused to give up her seat for white passengers while riding on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus. Parks’s arrest sparked a bus boycott during which African Americans chose to walk or carpool until the city reversed the law that imposed racial segregation on its buses. Despite the fact that other African Americans in Montgomery had performed the same protest in the months prior to Parks’s refusal to move, Duhigg argues: “When [Rosa Parks] was arrested, it triggered a series of social habits—the habits of friendship—that ignited an initial protest” (219)

Duhigg introduces the terms “strong ties” and “weak ties.” Strong ties are intimate, familiar relationships between family and friends. Weak ties are looser connections between members of a community. Both strong ties and weak ties are at the heart of all successful social movements. Parks, for instance, had strong ties with a robust group of family, friends, employers, NAACP members, and church members; she was deeply respected by people across both class and racial divides. In turn, those individuals had a broad network of weak ties across Montgomery’s larger population.

From the civil rights movement, Duhigg jumps to the story of Rick Warren, a Baptist pastor who opened a church in the Saddleback Valley in Southern California. Warren used the power of human habits within societies to build an extremely large congregation. Instead of converting and drawing individuals into his church one at a time, Warren understood that he needed to convert entire groups: “The only way you get people to take responsibility for their spiritual maturity is to teach them habits of faith” (235). In the case of Warren’s church, these habits included weekly Bible study in small groups at congregants’ homes.

Part 3, Chapter 8 Analysis

As Duhigg enters the third and final part of the book, “The Habits of Societies,” he makes a significant shift from the corporations and consumerism of the previous chapters to deeper, culturally significant histories. Whereas Duhigg easily explained the book’s earlier case studies within a few pages, the civil rights movement, although a much more complex example, is still approached as a cut-and-dry case study. Lacking space and detailed sources, the process by which societies perform habits is less clear. Despite the drastic differences between this chapter and the prior ones, consumerism still appears as a central theme. In the case of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, for instance, individuals chose not to purchase bus fares.

The habit loop (cue > routine > reward), which Duhigg presents often in the earlier chapters, also fades in Chapter 8. Instead, the chapter’s major contribution is to show that larger populations of people participate in social movements due to strong social connections and peer pressure, often at play without an individual’s awareness. From this perspective, the habits of individuals and the habits of societies both relate to automatic behaviors that are deeply engrained within our brains. In order words, when it comes to brushing our teeth, going to church, or participating in civil disobedience, we often participate without a thorough understanding of why we are participating. It’s an automatic behavior.

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