Consider the waiting room. It is a small thing, and small things are where habits live. The strange thing about the waiting room is not that it exists but that it works, most of the time, for most people. A better account of habit would begin with the ordinary case rather than the laboratory one. The textbook treats habit as a preference to be revealed. In practice it is a story we tell ourselves after the fact.
Where it overreaches
We describe the departure from the model as an error. We might equally describe the model as a hopeful guess about us. Consider the waiting room. It is a small thing, and small things are where habits live. Institutions know all this, of course, which is why the waiting room is so rarely left to chance. The evidence here is thinner than the confident commentary suggests, and the honest position is a shrug with a direction of travel.
