Habit plays role in system use

Business and management researchers generally acknowledge two basic stages of information-systems usage: adoption and continuance. Past research has focused on adoption, the initial, critical stage in which users are introduced to a given computer application or program, learn about it and come to accept it. But recently, organisational managers and researchers have begun to explore the importance of continuance, the post-adoption stage of information-systems usage.

In one of the first studies to thoroughly examine the role of user behaviour during the continuance stage, an information-systems researcher at the University of Arkansas, collaborating with researchers in Spain and China, developed and tested a model of information-systems behaviour and found that habit – rather than intention or conscious decision toward behaviour – plays a much more significant role than previously thought.

“While plausible in the case of the adoption stage, the assumption that usage is determined mainly by intention may not be applicable to continued behaviour,” said Moez Limayem, professor and chair of the department of information systems in the Sam M. Walton College of Business.

“The assumption ignores the fact that frequently performed behaviours tend to become habitual and thus automatic over time. And that is precisely what we found, that habit becomes prevalent during the continuance phase, and it influences the relationship between intention and behaviour. This means that in the effort to understand technology acceptance, we can no longer assume that only intention will drive actual behaviour in predictable ways.”

For the purposes of their study, habit was defined as behaviour in which cognitive processes were not used to perform a given task. In other words, users did not evaluate why and how they performed the task.