How Companies Learn Your Secrets. The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code known internally as the Guest ID number that keeps tabs on everything they buy. If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e mail weve sent you or visit our Web site, well record it and link it to your Guest ID, Pole said. We want to know everything we can. Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether youve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. 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Find out more about education training programsTarget can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if youve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought or lost your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases. All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. Thats where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Targets Guest Marketing Analytics department come in. Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investmentbanks to the U. S. Postal Service, has a predictive analytics department devoted to understanding not just consumers shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. But Target has always been one of the smartest at this, says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a conference called Predictive Analytics World. Were living through a golden age of behavioral research. Its amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now. The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs. Its like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays, said Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist at Amazon. Mathematicians are suddenly sexy. As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine grained, the push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision making, shape 4. This research is also transforming our understanding of how habits function across organizations and societies. Lee Child Jack Reacher Epub For Pc here. A football coach named Tony Dungy propelled one of the worst teams in the N. F. L. to the Super Bowl by focusing on how his players habitually reacted to on field cues. Before he became Treasury secretary, Paul ONeill overhauled a stumbling conglomerate, Alcoa, and turned it into a top performer in the Dow Jones by relentlessly attacking one habit a specific approach to worker safety which in turn caused a companywide transformation. The Obama campaign has hired a habit specialist as its chief scientist to figure out how to trigger new voting patterns among different constituencies. Researchers have figured out how to stop people from habitually overeating and biting their nails. They can explain why some of us automatically go for a jog every morning and are more productive at work, while others oversleep and procrastinate. There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell. Inside the brain and cognitive sciences department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are what, to the casual observer, look like dollhouse versions of surgical theaters. There are rooms with tiny scalpels, small drills and miniature saws. Even the operating tables are petite, as if prepared for 7 year old surgeons. Inside those shrunken O. R. s, neurologists cut into the skulls of anesthetized rats, implanting tiny sensors that record the smallest changes in the activity of their brains. An M. I. T. neuroscientist named Ann Graybiel told me that she and her colleagues began exploring habits more than a decade ago by putting their wired rats into a T shaped maze with chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each animal was positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click. The first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the center aisle after the barrier slid away, sniffing in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldnt figure out how to find it. There was no discernible pattern in the rats meanderings and no indication it was working hard to find the treat. The probes in the rats heads, however, told a different story. While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animals head exploded with activity. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the maze with more and more speed. And within their brains, something unexpected occurred as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental activity decreased. As the path became more and more automatic as it became a habit the rats started thinking less and less. This process, in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine, is called chunking. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of behavioral chunks we rely on every day. Some are simple you automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth. Some, like making the kids lunch, are a little more complex. Still others are so complicated that its remarkable to realize that a habit could have emerged at all. Take backing your car out of the driveway. When you first learned to drive, that act required a major dose of concentration, and for good reason it involves peering into the rearview and side mirrors and checking for obstacles, putting your foot on the brake, moving the gearshift into reverse, removing your foot from the brake, estimating the distance between the garage and the street while keeping the wheels aligned, calculating how images in the mirrors translate into actual distances, all while applying differing amounts of pressure to the gas pedal and brake. Now, you perform that series of actions every time you pull into the street without thinking very much. Your brain has chunked large parts of it. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any repeated behavior into a habit, because habits allow our minds to conserve effort.