Habituation
Habituation is the ordinary process by which a repeated sight, sound or change stops drawing a reaction. It describes getting used to something rather than learning something new.
What it is
The vault's note on habituation describes it as adjusting to a change. It appears in the article on how long a new habit takes, where a 21-day figure is traced to a 1960 book that described patients adjusting to a changed face, not people forming new routines.
In effect
In the spotlight effect literature, a variation of the 2000 shirt experiment had wearers spend about fifteen minutes in the shirt before meeting a group. Their estimates of how many people would notice it were lower. The authors of a later paper describing the experiment read that drop as habituation: the wearer had grown used to the shirt.
What it does not say
This page defines the term as the vault uses it and describes one use of it in the spotlight effect literature. It does not survey the wider research on habituation.
Sources
- Macrae, C. N., et al. (2016). 'Noticing future me: Reducing egocentrism through mental imagery.' Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 42(7), 855-863. doi:10.1177/0146167216644961