With Amy Rodger as the strong lead on this project, we used the Situated Assessment Method to establish predictors of water drinking across everyday drinking situations, such as during work, exercise, or a meal (with a UK sample 213 UK adults). Factors associated habitualness (e.g. subjective effort), self-relevance (e.g. health consciousness) and immediate feedback (e.g. taste) explained 66% if the variance in individual water intake at the group level with mixed-effects modeling. As expected, the influence of these factors varied widely across individuals and situations, demonstrating that a comprehensive situated approach to water drinking is necessary to understand its natural complexity. Interestingly, a variety of findings strongly implicated the central role of reward in the development of water drinking habits.
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