Decoy habits are harmful, I think, because they allow us to pretend to have certain aims or values that we don’t really have. Maybe we don’t want to admit what we really want to do, or maybe two values are in conflict. Ironically, I suspect that if my dinner partner had said, “I don’t intend to exercise,” and accepted the consequences of that habit, he might help convince himself that he should exercise. But by voicing the decoy, by saying, “I plan to start exercising,” he avoided acknowledging his true intentions.
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