Review
In what sense are addicts irrational?

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Abstract

Rationality is here considered from a functional viewpoint: How may the concept of rationality be best used in talking about addictive behavior? The article considers rationality in terms of overt behavioral patterns rather than as a smoothly operating logic mechanism in the head. The economic notion of rationality as consistency in choice – the property of exponential time discount functions – is examined and rejected. Addicts are not irrational because of the type of time discount function that governs their choices—or even because of the steepness of that function. Instead, rationality is here conceived as a pattern of predicting your own future behavior and acting upon those predictions to maximize reinforcement in the long run. Addicts are irrational to the extent that they fail to make such predictions and to take such actions.

Introduction

To get some sort of handle on what it means to behave rationally, let us look at the concept pragmatically. Instead of asking, “What does rationality really mean?” or, “Where is rationality located?” or, “How does rationality work?” or, “Is this or that animal fundamentally a rational animal?” or, “Is this or that behavior really rational or really not rational?”, it might be better to ask, “How should psychologists use the word ‘rational’?” and “What is its proper function in our scientific language?” It seems to me that there are at least two fundamentally different ways to use the term.

Fig. 1 illustrates a distinction between two ways of looking at behavior and, by implication, two ways of using the expression “rational behavior.” The thick vertical line divides the inside of a person, on the right, from the external world, on the left. On the right is my own version of a generic cognitive model of decision making. I mean it to be an illustration of a kind of model and not any particular model. Looked at from the right, information from the outside world comes into the person through the sense organs and enters the cognitive mechanism; the information proceeds through a series of sub-mechanisms; it is perceived, represented (or encoded), processed, and used in making a decision, and eventually an overt choice. All of these sub-mechanisms are affected directly or indirectly by memory, by feedback from the external world, and from below by motivational variables such as hunger, thirst, or other fundamental or not-so-fundamental drives. Each of the sub-mechanisms may in turn be divided into sub-sub-mechanisms, and so forth. Cognitive theorists may infer the states of the mechanisms from either non-verbal choice behavior or verbal reports of those states.

There is some dispute within cognitive psychology whether the lines of division in any particular cognitive theory correspond to, or may be reduced to, physiological mechanisms—that is, whether cognitive psychology is reducible to physiological psychology or whether cognitive psychology and physiological psychology each carve out non-overlapping units within the nervous system. In any case, the language of cognitive psychology does overlap with the language of physiological psychology. Our mental vocabulary, including terms such as “memory,” “perception,” and so forth, is common to both of them. I therefore call the model on the right side of the diagram a cognitivephysiological model. Cognitive and physiological psychologists both have the same ultimate goal—to discover actual mechanisms within the organism (Gazzaniga, 1998).

On the left side of the diagram is what I call the behavioraleconomic model. This model uses the very same inputs and outputs as the cognitive–physiological model but the boxes stand not for spatially defined mechanisms but for temporally defined contingencies. A classical contingency is a relationship between two environmental events—the bell and the food powder (in the case of Pavlov's dogs), or the train whistle and the train. An instrumental contingency is a relationship between behavior and consequences. A fixed-ratio schedule which says that a rat will obtain a food pellet after every 10 lever presses; the price of a loaf of bread which says that if you give the baker so much money he will give you so much food; the conflicting relationships between smoking and feeling good and between smoking and lung cancer, are all instrumental contingencies.

To contrast the cognitive–physiological viewpoint with the behavioral–economic viewpoint, consider the question, “Why am I sitting here at my computer and typing?” An e-mail came to me several months ago, stimulated my eyes, was perceived, represented, processed, and activated a decision mechanism. The output of that mechanism was a wholly internal decision in writing the article. Then that decision activated certain motor centers and actually got me moving. I wrote the due date on my calendar but I also encoded it, or a fuzzy version of it, in my memory. I responded to the various e-mails. Then, when my calendar indicated that the due date was rapidly approaching, my lower motivational processes – what Loewenstein (1996) calls “visceral” processes – became activated; in other words, I panicked – and I began to write. Every word I am writing may be seen in terms of the operation of the cognitive–physiological mechanism inside me. There is no question that some version of a cognitive–physiological theory has to be true. No organism, not even an amoeba – much less a person – is empty.

Yet, there is another way to look at the relation among the heavy arrows of the diagram—from the outside rather than from the inside. For instance, there is another way to look at the question of why I am writing this article. You could say that I am writing because I hope to influence the behavior of readers or at least convince them to look more kindly on behavioral research than they already do, or I am writing it because the act of writing down my thoughts will help me to develop my ideas, or because I believe that writing this article will somehow further my career.

The boxes on the left side of the diagram look like the boxes on the right, but they stand for radically different entities. The boxes on the right stand for current states of currently existing mechanisms. You could, in theory, point to them in the same way that you could point to a car's carburetor. To the extent that the boxes on the right are hidden, they are hidden in space, somewhere inside the organism. On the other hand, the boxes on the left stand for temporally extended contingencies, that is, relationships over time between patterns of behavior and environmental events. You could not point to such contingencies any more than you could point to the relationship between the force of your foot on a car's accelerator and the speed of the car. I call this viewpoint (from the left in Fig. 1) “teleological behaviorism.”

Section snippets

Rational behavior and addiction from a cognitive–physiological viewpoint

How, then, should the concept of rationality or rational behavior be used in cognitive theories? For a cognitive theory, rational behavior is usually seen as the product of a smoothly functioning, unimpeded, logical decision mechanism. Different cognitive–physiological theories would have different ideas of how that machine works (i.e., differing normative models) and of how it may be impeded. If, as is often the case, the predictions of a given cognitive–physiological theory are disconfirmed,

Rational behavior and addiction from a behavioral–economic viewpoint

Molar behavioral theories and economic theories of individual behavior (microeconomic theories) take the same form. The instrumental contingencies of behavioral theories correspond to the constraints (prices and budgets) of economic theories. Both specify relationships between behavior and consequences. The behavioral concepts of reinforcement maximization and matching correspond to utility functions of economic theory (Rachlin, 1992).

How does the concept of rationality fit into microeconomics?

Crossing discount functions and rationality

Consider the practice of compounding interest by banks. With compounding, simple interest is calculated over some fixed period t, added to the principal, and repeated at intervals of t. If, the bank calculated simple interest from the time of deposit, when you came to withdraw your money, you would have an incentive, after a short period, to withdraw your money plus the interest and deposit it in another bank, thus compounding the interest yourself. So as not to lose your account in this way,

Rationality in social behavior

The following passage from Anthony Trollope's novel The Way We Live Now (1875/1982, Oxford: Oxford University Press) presents an analogy between a character's selfishness and his impulsiveness (p. 17):

Whether Sir Felix, …, had become what he was solely by bad training, or whether he had been born bad, who shall say? It is hardly possible that he should not have been better had he been taken away as an infant and subjected to moral training by moral teachers. And yet again it is hardly possible

Implications for treatment of addiction

Although the purpose of this article is to outline and discuss two viewpoints (cognitive–physiological and behavioral–economic) of the concept of rationality in addiction, and not to suggest treatment methods, it may be clarifying to consider how the two viewpoints result in two different approaches to treatment. The cognitive–physiological viewpoint would focus on the two internal sub-mechanisms of addiction—the logic mechanism and the motivational interference with that mechanism. Current

Rationality and self-control in everyday life

You are on the road in a place far from home—a place where, the odds are, you will never return again. You stop at a restaurant to eat. Should you leave a tip? Given that the point of leaving tips at a restaurant is to reinforce the efficiency and courtesy of the server so that when you come there again you will receive good service, or at least not deliberately bad service, a logic machine would say no, or at least that you should leave the minimum amount that would avoid a scene. Yet most

Acknowledgement

The writing of this article and the experiments described therein were supported by a grant from The National Institute of Mental Health.

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