Using Reinforced Implementation Intentions to Support Habit Formation.

Despite promising results, the psychological approach of implementation intentions remain underused in 'in-the-wild' habit formation apps. The majority of existing apps focus on using self-tracking and reminders but these hinder the development of habit. This study proposes a new mechanism to support habit formation by using reinforced implementation intentions. Our findings suggest that adding reinforcement is indeed useful to maintain the level of compliance but it is not necessarily the same in terms of automaticity. We also discuss how the potential use of reinforcement can be improved in the future.