Social habits are most readily associated with synchrony, coordination, and the smooth flow of social interaction. This paper offers a complementary perspective, proposing that noise – moments of desynchronization, error, perturbation, stress, surprise – can be a generative force that drives the emergence and maintenance of social habits. We develop our account by drawing on recent work exploring the conditions necessary for noise to play a generative role in living and non-living systems and an autoethnographic account of a dyad repeatedly "running together" over an extended period of time. Combining these, we make the case for how noise can shape processes of social habit making at diverse timescales. Ultimately, this perspective reconcieves social habits as dynamic and multiscale alignments and highlights the generative potential of noise in supporting realignments across the levels and scales of human life. By placing noise at the heart of social habit formation, this paper offers an account of how through open-ended cycles of disruption and recovery minimal social systems adapt to their environments across scales.
James et al. (Fri,) studied this question.