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.

    “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.”

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.

    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.

    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.

    “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.”

    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.

答案精析：原文最后一段首句指出，通过反复不断的广告，把某些行为与习惯性的暗示联系起来是很有影响力的。综合前文分析的，私营企业会针对消费者创造自动发生的新行为，而且我们在日常使用的许多产品都是商家针对消费者制造新习惯的产物，由此可推断广告可以促使人们形成新的生活习惯。C项中的commercial对应原文中的advertising，故正确答案为C。

错项排除：A项是对原文首段had perfected the art of的干扰，原文说的是许多公司已经完善了在消费者中创造自动行为习惯的艺术，并非是完美的产品艺术，故A项表述错误。B项中automatic behavior（自动的创造行为）指的就是题干中的consumer’s habits（消费者的新习惯），这并不能作为原因来对题干进行解释，故排除B。文章最后一段首句出现了experiments，但该句是说，通过实验和观察，专家们认识到了消费者的习惯是由于商业广告而养成的，experiments并不能作为习惯养成的原因，故D项错误。