Several years ago, I bought a smartphone and soon came to love it. Being able to send an e-mail, look up a fact, or buy something no matter where I was meant a previously unimaginable gain in productivity. Every time I got an e-mail, the phone emitted a ping and I would deal with whatever it was, priding myself on my efficiency. Texts arrived with the tones of a French horn and were similarly dispatched. Soon, I was reaching for the device every time it made a sound, like Pavlov’s dog salivating when it heard a bell. This started to interfere with work and conversations. The machine had seemed like a miraculous servant, but gradually I became its slave.

I’d always prided myself on my will power. Like most people who’ve made it through medical training—with its early mornings and its long shifts when your friends are partying—I had an established track record of delaying gratification. It didn’t matter. When I tried switching the phone to silent, I ended up checking it perhaps even more often, just in case there was something to deal with. The only time I managed to resist was during Shabbos, when I don’t read e-mail. But I’d be watching the clock, counting the hours till I could turn the thing on. For the first time, I could imagine what it’s like to be a smoker craving a cigarette. Checking the smartphone had become a bad habit that I couldn’t break.

Habits, good and bad, have long fascinated philosophers and policymakers. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, surveyed existing notions of virtue and offered this summary: “Some thinkers hold that it is by nature that people become good, others that it is by habit, and others that it is by instruction.” He concluded that habits were responsible. Cicero called habit “second nature,” a phrase that we still use. And when Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist Paper No. 27, considered how to create citizens who would obey the federal laws of the newly formed republic, he used another proverbial phrase: “Man is very much a creature of habit.” If federal law permeated matters at the state level, it would seem part of everyday life. “The more it circulates through those channels and currents in which the passions of mankind naturally flow, the less will it require the aid of the violent and perilous expedients of compulsion,” he wrote.

In the modern era, habits have become a significant area of scientific inquiry. Psychologists have explored the genesis of habitual behavior and its impact on health and happiness. William James, echoing Aristotle, wrote, “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,—practical, emotional, and intellectual . . . bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny.”

Few of us like to think of ourselves in such passive terms. What about will power? Marketers flatter our sense of agency with slogans like “Just Do It” (Nike) and “Declare Your Path” (New Balance). Much popular psychology, too, bolsters our belief in self-control. In the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, devised by Walter Mischel, in the nineteen-sixties, children were seated alone in front of a marshmallow and were scored on whether they resisted gobbling it down. The resulting determination of a child’s level of “executive function” supposedly distinguishes life’s winners and losers, predicting such things as performance on the SAT, duration of relationships, and career success. But how can that be, if we’re just creatures of habit?

In “Good Habits, Bad Habits” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the social psychologist Wendy Wood refutes both James’s determinism and glib exhortations to be proactive, and seeks to give the general reader more realistic ideas for how to break habits. Drawing on her work in the field, she sees the task of sustaining positive behaviors and quelling negative ones as involving an interplay of decisions and unconscious factors. Our minds, Wood explains, have “multiple separate but interconnected mechanisms that guide behavior.” But we are aware only of our decision-making ability—a phenomenon known as the “introspection illusion”—and that may be why we overestimate its power. The executive functions that make will power possible give us, she writes, “the sense of agency that we recognize as ‘me.’ ” But that comes at a cost in terms of effort. To go about our lives, we need to make some behaviors automatic.

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Jerome Groopman, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, writes primarily about medicine and biology. He holds the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and is the chief of experimental medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. His research has focussed on the basic mechanisms of cancer and AIDS. He has been a major participant in the development of many AIDS-related therapies, including protease inhibitors, and he is active in regional and national education activities in AIDS and cancer medicine, as well as in the training and education of young scientists in these fields. Recently, he has extended the research infrastructure in molecular and cell biology to studies of how cocaine and methamphetamine, prominent drugs of abuse, may impair immune function. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. Groopman has served on many scientific editorial boards and has published more than two hundred research articles; his editorials on policy issues have appeared in the Times, The New York Review of Books, and the Wall Street Journal. Among his books are “How Doctors Think” and, most recently, “Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You,” written with Dr. Pamela Hartzband.