Over the past decade, many companies had perfected the art of creating automatic behaviors - habits - among consumers. These habits have helped companies earn billions of dollars when customers eat snacks or wipe counters almost without thinking, often in response to a carefully designed set of daily cues.
过去的几十年里，许多公司已经完善了在消费者当中创造自动行为（也就是习惯）的艺术。当消费者们几乎不假思索地吃着零食或者擦拭柜台时，这些习惯帮助公司赚取了数十亿美元，因为消费者们总是在对精心设计的一系列日常暗示做出回应。
"There are fundamental public health problems, like dirty hands instead of a soap habit, that remain killers only because we can't figure out how to change people's habits," said Dr. Curtis, the director of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. "We wanted to learn from private industry how to create new behaviors that happen automatically."
伦敦卫生和热带医学学院卫生中心主任Curtis博士说到， “有一些基本的公共卫生问题，比如人们总是脏着手，却没有使用肥皂的习惯，这只是因为我们无法弄清楚怎么去改变人们的习惯，才导致这些问题仍然是生命健康的杀手。我们想要从私人企业那里学习怎样自发地创造新的行为。”
The companies that Dr. Curtis turned to - Procter & Gamble, Colgate - Palmolive and Unilever - had invested hundreds of millions of dollars finding the subtle cues in consumers' lives that corporations could use to introduce new routines.
Curtis博士向宝洁、高露洁和联合利华等公司寻求了帮助，这些公司投资了数亿美元去寻找那些在消费者生活中可以被公司用来引入新的日常习惯的微妙暗示。
If you look hard enough, you'll find that many of the products we use every day - chewing gums, skin moisturizers, disinfecting wipes, air fresheners, water purifiers, health snacks, teeth whiteners, fabric softeners, vitamins - are results of manufactured habits. A century ago, few people regularly brushed their teeth multiple times a day. Today, because of shrewd advertising and public health campaigns, many Americans habitually give their pearly whites a cavity-preventing scrub twice a day, often with Colgate, Crest or one of the other brands.
如果你观察得足够仔细，你会发现许多我们每天使用的产品，比如口香糖、润肤霜、消毒湿巾、空气清新剂、净水器、健康零食、牙齿美白剂、柔顺剂、维生素等，都是被制造的习惯的产物。一个世纪前，很少有人会规律地在一天之内刷几次牙。然而在今天，因为广告和公共卫生运动，许多美国人习惯性地每天两次使用高露洁、佳洁士或者其它品牌的产品，来为他们珍珠般洁白的牙齿做防蛀牙清洗。
A few decades ago, many people didn't drink water outside of a meal. Then beverage companies started bottling the production of far-off springs, and now office workers unthinkingly sip bottled water all day long. Chewing gum, once bought primarily by adolescent boys, is now featured in commercials as a breath freshener and teeth cleanser for use after a meal. Skin moisturizers are advertised as part of morning beauty rituals, slipped in between hair brushing and putting on makeup.
几十年前，许多人们餐后不再喝水。随着饮料公司开始将偏远地区的泉水装瓶做成产品，现在办公室的职员们整天都在不假思索地喝着瓶装水。曾经主要被青少年男孩购买的口香糖，现在作为饭后使用的口气清新剂和牙齿清洁剂而出现在广告上。润肤霜则被广告宣传成清晨美容程序的一部分，插入在梳头发和化妆之间。
"Our products succeed when they become part of daily or weekly patterns," said Carol Berning, a consumer psychologist who recently retired from Procter & Gamble, the company that sold $76 billion of Tide, Crest and other products last year. "Creating positive habits is a huge part of improving our consumers' lives, and it's essential to making new products commercially viable."
最近刚从宝洁公司退休的消费者心理学家Carol Berning说，“当我们的产品成为了人们日常或是周常生活模式的一部分，那就说明它们成功了”，宝洁公司去年共售出了760亿美元的汰渍、佳洁士以及其它产品。“创造积极的习惯是改变我们消费者生活的重要组成部分，这对于使新产品在商业上具有可行性也是至关重要的”。
Through experiments and observation, social scientists like Dr. Berning have learned that there is power in tying certain behaviors to habitual cues through ruthless advertising. As this new science of habit has emerged, controversies have erupted when the tactics have been used to sell questionable beauty creams or unhealthy foods.
通过实验和观察，像Berning 博士这样的社会科学家已经了解到，通过大量广告可以将某些行为和习惯性暗示联系起来。伴随着这项全新的习惯科学的出现，当这项策略被用于售卖那些可疑的美容面霜和不健康的食品时，争议也接踵而至。