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：原文最后一段首句提到ruthless advertising（无休止的广告）影响了人们的行为习惯。之后接着说到，随着这种新习惯科学的出现，当这些策略被用来销售有问题的美容霜或不健康的食品时，就引发了争议。可见广告对于人们习惯的影响是有问题且备受争议的，由此可以推断出作者对其态度是消极的、不赞同的，故正确答案为B。

错项排除：原文中作者对广告给人们生活习惯造成的影响进行了讨论，并表明了自己的态度，可见作者对此并不是漠不关心的，故A项错误。根据上述分析，可知作者对此影响的态度是消极的，并非积极的，原文第六段第二句提到了Creating positive habits..., 但此处指的是商家所说的观点，并非作者的观点，C项与原文意思相悖，故排除。原文中作者客观的描述了广告对人们习惯的影响，既描述了正面的影响，也指出了问题的存在，所以不能说作者的态度是由偏见的，故D项错误。