Habits Are Not Goal Dependent: Commentary on Buabang et al. (2023)

People sometimes commit action slips by absentmindedly repeating unwanted responses, such as entering an old password instead of the current one. In most accounts, such slips demonstrate stimulus-response habits in which familiar contexts directly trigger well-practiced but now incorrect responses. In contrast, Buabang et al. (2023) claim that action slips arise due to the continued influence of old, no longer accurate goal outcomes. Yet our reanalysis shows that Buabang et al.’s participants actually provide striking evidence of goal-independent S-R habits; they correctly repeated well-practiced responses despite reporting incorrect goals. We also show that Buabang et al. misinterpreted the results of their mediation analyses by overlooking the direct influence of stimuli on responses. Understanding how habits work is important because habit change interventions are unlikely to succeed with goal-directed strategies that overlook context cues’ direct cuing of practiced responses.