Leonard Mlodinow — Randomness and Choice (On Being)

Leonard Mlodinow is the author of Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (2012), among other books. Some of the material in this episode is from Mlodinow's earlier book, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (2008).

Leonard Mlodinow — Randomness and Choice

May 1, 2014

Fundamental forces of physics somehow determine everything that happens, as physicist Leonard Mlodinow has written, “from the birth of a child to the birth of a galaxy.” Yet he has intriguing perspective on the gap between theory and reality — and the fascinating interplay between a life in science and life in the world. As the child of two Holocaust survivors, he asks questions about our capacity to create our lives, while reflecting on extreme human cruelty — and courage.

Listen

• Radio Show/Podcast - (mp3, 51:00)
• Unedited Interview- Leonard Mlodinow - (mp3, 1:14:33)
• Transcript

Voices on the Radio

Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist, and the author of several books including The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives and Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life. He's also written for television, including "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

Production Credits

Host/Executive Producer: Krista Tippett
Executive Editor: Trent Gilliss
Senior Producer: Lily Percy
Technical Director: Chris Heagle
Associate Producer: Mariah Helgeson

The Mind Report - Laurie Santos and Tali Sharot on Optimism and More

On this week's episode of The Mind Report, Laurie Santos and Tali Sharot, author of The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain (2012), talk about optimism, neurobiology, choosing, and a whole lot more.



Tali Sharot is the principle investigator at Affective Brain Lab:

I am the director of the Affective Brain Lab (funded by a fellowship from the Wellcome Trust) and a faculty member of the department of Cognitive Perceptual and Brain Sciences at UCL. 

My lab investigates how motivation and emotion determine our expectations of the future, our everyday decisions, our memories and our ability to learn. By understanding the brain mechanisms that mediate these effects we aim to identify ways to encourage behavioural change that enhance well-being. I am interested in questions such as when and how do other people influence our decisions and judgments? why do we process information in a biased manner? when, how, and why do people deceive themselves? how do these process go awry in depression?

Laurie Santos is Director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at Yale University.

My research explores the evolutionary origins of the human mind by comparing the cognitive abilities of human and non-human primates.My experiments focus on non-human primates (in captivity and in the field) incorporating methodologies from cognitive development, cognitive science, and animal learning. My research examines the following broad questions: what domains of knowledge are unique to the human mind? Given that human infants and non-human primates both lack language, what similarities and differences do we see in the expression of non-linguistic domains of knowledge?

My current work explores whether primates possess precursors to a theory of mind, how primates reason about different kinds of things (foods, artifacts, and animals), and whether primates share human-like decision-making biases.

Cool discussion.

THE MIND REPORT

Aug 10, 2013

Laurie Santos (Yale University) and Tali Sharot (University College London)

Tali explains optimism bias 9:34

The optimal level of optimism 3:18

Optimism's neurology 3:21

Are animals also overly optimistic? 4:16

The act of choosing is hard to master 7:52

How to turn optimism bias to your advantage 4:52

LINKS MENTIONED

• Tali's book, "The Optimism Bias"
• Tali's new e-book, "The Science of Optimism"
• Tali's TED talk on optimism

Dr. Carl Hart's new book is High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society [his previous book is Drugs, Society, and Human Behavior, 2012, the 15th edition of a textbook]. 

Hart's memoir (he grew up in a tough, drug-riddled Miami neighborhood) examines the interconnected relationships among drugs, pleasure, choice, and motivation, from the social and a neuroscientific perspective. The book offers new and "eye-opening" insights into our ideas about race, poverty, and drugs - and highlights why the current "war on drugs" has failed.

This is his Google Talk on his work and his book.

Carl Hart - "HIGH PRICE: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society"

Published on Jul 22, 2013

High Price is the harrowing and inspiring memoir of neuroscientist Carl Hart, a man who grew up in one of Miami's toughest neighborhoods and, determined to make a difference as an adult, tirelessly applies his scientific training to help save real lives.

In this provocative and eye-opening memoir, Dr. Carl Hart recalls his journey of self-discovery, how he escaped a life of crime and drugs and avoided becoming one of the crack addicts he now studies. Interweaving past and present, Hart goes beyond the hype as he examines the relationship between drugs and pleasure, choice, and motivation, both in the brain and in society. His findings shed new light on common ideas about race, poverty, and drugs, and explain why current policies are failing.

Dr. Hart is an Associate Professor of Psychology in both the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology at Columbia University, and Director of the Residential Studies and Methamphetamine Research Laboratories at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. A major focus of Dr. Hart's research is to understand complex interactions between drugs of abuse and the neurobiology and environmental factors that mediate human behavior and physiology.

He is the author or co-author of dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles in the area of neuropsychopharmacology, co-author of the textbook, Drugs, Society, and Human Behavior, and a member of a NIH review group. Dr. Hart was recently elected to Fellow status by the American Psychological Association (Division 28) for his outstanding contribution to the field of psychology, specifically psychopharmacology and substance abuse.

THE MIND REPORT - Paul Bloom and Barry Schwartz

On this week's Mind Report from bloggingheads.tv, Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at Yale University, speaks with Barry Schwartz, the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action in the psychology department at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

Schwartz is author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2005), Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing (2011), and The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality and Modern Life (1987), among other books. Bloom is the author of Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (2005) and How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like (2011), as well as other books.

Paul Bloom (Yale University) and Barry Schwartz (Swarthmore College)

Barry explains the paradox of choice 5:11

Why you should settle for "good enough" 9:23

What Medicare Part D gets wrong about psychology 8:09

Can the market correct for the surplus of choice? 6:16

When rules are not enough 10:00

Barry: Make college admissions into a lottery 9:57

PLAY ENTIRE VIDEO

FOLLOW:  Paul Bloom  Barry Schwartz

Recorded: Apr 23 Posted: Apr 27, 2013
Download: wmv | mp4 | mp3 | fast mp3


LINKS MENTIONED:

• Barry's book, "The Paradox of Choice"
• New Yorker cartoon on Brown vs. Yale
• Thaler and Sunstein's book, "Nudge"
• Barry's TED talk on wisdom
• Atul Gawande's book, "The Checklist Manifesto"
• Gawande on 80/20 in medicine
• Barry on college admissions

Robert Burton's "Skeptic's Guide to the Mind" (Brain Science Podcast 96)

This week's episode of Dr. Ginger Campbel's Brain Science Podcast features a conversation with Robert Burton, author of On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not (2008) and his new book, the topic of this discussion, A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves (2013).

Book description:

What if our soundest, most reasonable judgments are beyond our control?

Despite 2500 years of contemplation by the world’s greatest minds and the more recent phenomenal advances in basic neuroscience, neither neuroscientists nor philosophers have a decent understanding of what the mind is or how it works. The gap between what the brain does and the mind experiences remains uncharted territory. Nevertheless, with powerful new tools such as the fMRI scan, neuroscience has become the de facto mode of explanation of behavior. Neuroscientists tell us why we prefer Coke to Pepsi, and the media trumpets headlines such as “Possible site of free will found in brain.” Or: “Bad behavior down to genes, not poor parenting.”

Robert Burton believes that while some neuroscience observations are real advances, others are overreaching, unwarranted, wrong-headed, self-serving, or just plain ridiculous, and often with the potential for catastrophic personal and social consequences. In A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind, he brings together clinical observations, practical thought experiments, personal anecdotes, and cutting-edge neuroscience to decipher what neuroscience can tell us – and where it falls woefully short. At the same time, he offers a new vision of how to think about what the mind might be and how it works.

A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind is a critical, startling, and expansive journey into the mysteries of the brain and what makes us human.

Enjoy the podcast.

Robert Burton's "Skeptic's Guide to the Mind" (BSP 96)April 26, 2013

ROBERT BURTON, MD

In On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not Robert Burton showed that the feeling of certainty, which is something we all experience, has its origin in brain processes that are both unconscious and inaccessible to consciousness. Now in his new book A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves he extends these ideas to other mental sensations such as our feeling of agency and our sense of causation. The idea that much of what our brain does is not accessible to our conscious awareness is NOT new, but Dr. Burton considers the implications for our understanding of the MIND.

When we talked recently (BSP 96) Dr. Burton explained that his new book has two many parts. The early chapters he extends the principles he developed in On Being Certain to other mental sensations. We tend to take things like our feeling of certainty, agency, and causation for granted, but he points out that these are generated in parts of the brain that we can neither access or control. What makes A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind stand out is that Burton then explores the implications of this reality. He argues that while we can become ever more knowledgeable about how our brain works the MIND, which is something that we each experience subjectively, is much more illusive.

The fact that we are trying to study the MIND with the MIND has inherent limitations and I think that Dr. Burton is right when he says our response should be HUMILITY.

Download BSP 96 (mp3)

Free Episode Transcript (Coming Soon)

 

References:

• A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves by Robert Burton 
• On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not (2008) by Robert Burton 
• Are You Sure? The Unconscious Origins of Certainty by Ginger Campbell 
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume (1748) 
• See the free episode transcript for additional links and references. 

Related Episodes:

• BSP 42: A discussion of On Being Certain 
• BSP 43: Interview with Robert Burton about On Being Certain 
• BSP 67: Interview with Thomas Metzinger, author of The Ego Tunnel 
• BSP 85: Interview with Sebastian Seung, author of Connectome.

George Dvorsky Argues Against Free Will

Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them), Sam Harris (Free Will), Daniel M. Wegner (The Illusion of Conscious Will) and Michael Gazzaniga (Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain) are among the major contemporary thinkers to tackle the topic of free will - and of these, only Gazzaniga is supportive.

The problem, as I see it and have argued here before, is that researchers dismiss the possibility of free will based on the observation that few people in their studies exhibit features of free will. But that is like saying no human can run a sub-10-second 100 meters because none of the average people in their research can do so.  A lot of athletes can run 100 meters in under 10 seconds with a little training.

Likewise, a lot of people can possess free will (or more accurately, conscious control over actions and decisions) given a little training in mindfulness and awareness.

More importantly, however, the studies that "disprove" free will are poorly constructed and poorly interpreted. Just because motor control regions of the brain begin to fire mere fractions of a second before the subject is consciously aware of the movement says nothing about our ability to choose chocolate or vanilla ice cream.

And, contrary to what Sam Harris argues, his "deep causes" - all of the genetic predisposition and childhood experiences - that shape us are NOT written in stone. Just because I came from an ultra-conservative, Catholic family does not say anything about who I am today. Over years of personal work, I have jettisoned the influences that do not work for me and learned to be the person I WANT to be, i.e., I have CHOSEN this particular life.

This article comes from io9 and George Dvorsky.

Scientific evidence that you probably don’t have free will

by George Dvorsky
JAN 14, 2013

Humans have debated the issue of free will for millennia. But over the past several years, while the philosophers continue to argue about the metaphysical underpinnings of human choice, an increasing number of neuroscientists have started to tackle the issue head on — quite literally. And some of them believe that their experiments reveal that our subjective experience of freedom may be nothing more than an illusion. Here's why you probably don't have free will.

Indeed, historically speaking, philosophers have had plenty to say on the matter. Their ruminations have given rise to such considerations as cosmological determinism (the notion that everything proceeds over the course of time in a predictable way, making free will impossible), indeterminism (the idea that the universe and our actions within it are random, also making free will impossible), and cosmological libertarianism/compatibilism (the suggestion that free will is logically compatible with deterministic views of the universe).

Now, while these lines of inquiry are clearly important, one cannot help but feel that they're also terribly unhelpful and inadequate. What the debate needs is some actual science — something a bit more...testable.

And indeed, this is starting to happen. As the early results of scientific brain experiments are showing, our minds appear to be making decisions before we're actually aware of them — and at times by a significant degree. It's a disturbing observation that has led some neuroscientists to conclude that we're less in control of our choices than we think — at least as far as some basic movements and tasks are concerned.

At the same time, however, not everyone is convinced. It may be a while before we can truly prove that free will is an illusion. 

Bereitschaftspotential

Neuroscientists first became aware that something curious was going on in the brain back in the mid 1960s.

German scientists Hans Helmut Kornhuber and Lüder Deecke discovered a phenomenon they dubbed "bereitschaftspotential" (BP) — a term that translates to "readiness potential." Their discovery, that the brain enters into a special state immediately prior to conscious awareness, set off an entirely new subfield.

After asking their subjects to move their fingers (what were self-initiated movements), Kornhuber and Deecke's electroencephalogram (EEG) scans showed a slow negative potential shift in the activity of the motor cortex just slightly prior to the voluntary movement. They had no choice but to conclude that the unconscious mind was initiating a freely voluntary act — a wholly unexpected and counterintuitive observation.

Needless to say it was a discovery that greatly upset the scientific community who, since the days of Freud, had (mostly) adopted a strictly deterministic view of human decision making. Most scientists casually ignored it.

But subsequent experiments by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s reinforced the pioneering work of Kornhuber and Deecke. Similarly, Libet had his participants move their fingers, but this time while watching a clock with a dot circling around it. His data showed that the readiness potential started about 0.35 seconds earlier than participants' reported conscious awareness.

He concluded that we have no free will as far as the initiation of our movements are concerned, but that we had a kind of cognitive "veto" to prevent the movement at the last moment; we can't start it, but we can stop it.

From a neurological perspective, Libet and others attributed the effect to the SMA/pre-SMA and the anterior cingulate motor areas of the brain — an area that allows us to focus on self-initiated actions and execute self-instigated movements.
Modern tools show the same thing

More recently, neuroscientists have used more advanced technologies to study this phenomenon, namely fMRIs and implanted electrodes. But if anything, these new experiments show the BP effect is even more pronounced than previously thought.

For example, a study by John-Dylan Haynes in 2008 showed a similar effect to the one revealed by Libet. After putting participants into an fMRI scanner, he told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers at their leisure, but that they had to remember the letter that was showing on the screen at the precise moment they were committed to their movement.

The results were shocking. Haynes's data showed that the BP occurred one entire second prior to conscious awareness — and at other times as much as ten seconds. Following the publication of his paper, he told Nature News:

The first thought we had was 'we have to check if this is real.' We came up with more sanity checks than I've ever seen in any other study before.

The cognitive delay, he argued, was likely due to the operation of a network of high-level control areas that were preparing for an upcoming decision long before it entered into conscious awareness. Basically, the brain starts to unconsciously churn in preparation of a decision, and once a set of conditions are met, awareness kicks in, and the movement is made.

In another study, neuroscientist Itzhak Fried put aside the fMRI scanner in favor of digging directly into the brain (so to speak). To that end, he implanted electrodes into the brains of participants in order to record the status of individual neurons — a procedure that gave him an incredibly precise sense of what was going on inside the brain as decisions were being made.

His experiment showed that the neurons lit up with activity as much as 1.5 seconds before the participant made a conscious decision to press a button. And with about 700 milliseconds to go, Fried and his team could predict the timing of decisions with nearly 80% accuracy. In some scenarios, he had as much as 90% predictive accuracy.

Different experiment, similar result.

Fried surmised that volition arises after a change in internally generated fire rates of neuronal assemblies cross a threshold — and that the medial frontal cortex can signal these decisions before a person is aware of them.

"At some point, things that are predetermined are admitted into consciousness," he told Nature, suggesting that the conscious will might be added on to a decision at a later stage.

And in yet another study, this one by Stefan Bode, his detailed fMRI experiments showed that it was possible to actually decode the outcome of free decisions for several seconds prior to it reaching conscious awareness.

Specifically, he discovered that activity patterns in the anterior frontopolar cortex (BA 10) were temporally the first to carry information related to decision-making, thus making it a prime candidate region for the unconscious generation of free decisions. His study put much of the concern about the integrity of previous experiments to rest. 

The critics

But not everyone agrees with the conclusions of these findings. Free will, the skeptics argue, is far from debunked.

Back in 2010, W. R. Klemm published an analysis in which he complained about the ways in which the data was being interpreted, and what he saw as grossly oversimplified experimentation.

Others have criticized the timing judgements, arguing about the short timeframes between action and movement, and how attention to aspects of timing were likely creating distortions in the data.

It's also possible that the brain regions being studied, namely the pre-SMA/SMA and the anterior cingulate motor areas of the brain, may only be responsible for the late stages of motor planning; it's conceivable that other higher brain systems might be better candidates for exerting will.

Also, test subjects — because of the way the experiments were set up — may have been influenced by other "choice-predictive" signals; the researchers may have been measuring brain activity not directly related to the experiment itself.

The jury, it would appear, is still out on the question of free will. While the neuroscientists are clearly revealing some important insights into human thinking and decision making, more work needs to be done to make it more convincing.

What would really settle the issue would be the ability for neuroscientists to predict the actual outcome of more complex decisions prior to the subject being aware of it themselves. That would, in a very true sense, prove that free will is indeed an illusion.

Furthermore, neuroscientists also need to delineate between different types of decision-making. Not all decisions are the same; moving a finger or pressing a button is very different than contemplating the meaning of life, or preparing the words for a big speech. Given the limited nature of the experiments to date (which are focused on volitional physical movements), this would certainly represent a fruitful area for inquiry.

Blurring science, philosophy, and morality

Moreover, there's also the whole issue of how we're supposed to reconcile these findings with our day-to-day lives. Assuming we don't have free will, what does that say about the human condition? And what about taking responsibility for our actions?

Daniel Dennett has recently tried to rescue free will from the dustbin of history, saying that there's still some elbow room for human agency — and that these are still scientific questions. Dennett, acknowledging that free will in the classic sense is largely impossible, has attempted to reframe the issue in such a way that free will can still be shown to exist, albeit under certain circumstances. He writes:

There's still a lot of naïve thinking by scientists about free will. I've been talking about it quite a lot, and I do my best to undo some bad thinking by various scientists. I've had some modest success, but there's a lot more that has to be done on that front. I think it's very attractive to scientists to think that here's this several-millennia-old philosophical idea, free will, and they can just hit it out of the ballpark, which I'm sure would be nice if it was true. 

It's just not true. I think they're well intentioned. They're trying to clarify, but they're really missing a lot of important points. I want a naturalistic theory of human beings and free will and moral responsibility as much as anybody there, but I think you've got to think through the issues a lot better than they've done, and this, happily, shows that there's some real work for philosophers.

Dennett, who is mostly responding to Sam Harris, has come under criticism from people who complain that he's being epistemological rather than scientific.

Indeed, Sam Harris has made a compelling case that we don't have it, but that it's not a problem. Moreover, he argues that the ongoing belief in free will needs to come to an end:

A person's conscious thoughts, intentions, and efforts at every moment are preceded by causes of which he is unaware. What is more, they are preceded by deep causes — genes, childhood experience, etc. — for which no one, however evil, can be held responsible. Our ignorance of both sets of facts gives rise to moral illusions. And yet many people worry that it is necessary to believe in free will, especially in the process of raising children.

Harris doesn't believe that the illusoriness of free will is an "ugly truth," nor something that will forever be relegated to philosophical abstractions. This is science, he says, and it's something we need to come to grips with. "Recognizing that my conscious mind is always downstream from the underlying causes of my thoughts, intentions, and actions does not change the fact that thoughts, intentions, and actions of all kinds are necessary for living a happy life — or an unhappy one, for that matter," he writes.

But as Dennett correctly points out, this is an issue that's far from being an open-and-shut case. Advocates of the "free will as illusion" perspective are still going to have to improve upon their experimental methods, while also addressing the work of philosophers, evolutionary biologists — and even quantum physicists.

Why, for example, did humans evolve consciousness instead of zombie-brains if consciousness is not a channel for exerting free will? And given the nature of quantum indeterminacy, what does it mean to live in a universe of fuzzy probability?

There's clearly lots of work that still needs to be done.

Barry Schwartz - The Tyranny of Choice: A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Maximizing-Satisficing Effects on Well-Being

Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. Among his many books is The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2005), explains at what point choice - the hallmark of individual freedom and self-determination - becomes detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being.

Schwartz shows how the dramatic explosion in choice--from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs--has paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution. Schwartz also shows how our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse.

By synthesizing current research in the social sciences, Schwartz makes the counterintuitive case that eliminating choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety, and busyness of our lives. He offers eleven practical steps on how to limit choices to a manageable number, have the discipline to focus on the important ones and ignore the rest, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices you have to make.

His article, The Tyranny of Choice, appeared in Scientific American in 2004; Is Freedom Just Another Word for Many Things to Buy appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 2006.

This article appeared in Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 7, no. 6, November 2012, pp. 689-704.

The tyranny of choice: a cross-cultural investigation of maximizing-satisficing effects on well-being

Arne Roets, Barry Schwartz, Yanjun Guan

The present research investigated the relationship between individual differences in maximizing versus satisficing (i.e., seeking to make the single best choice, rather than a choice that is merely good enough) and well-being, in interaction with the society in which an individual lives. Data from three distinct cultural groups (adults), drawn respectively from the U.S. (N=307), Western Europe (N=263), and China (N=218), were analyzed. The results showed that, in societies where choice is abundant (i.e., U.S. and Western Europe), maximizers reported less well-being than satisficers, and this difference was mediated by experienced regret. However, in the non-western society (China), maximizing was unrelated to well-being. Although in China maximizing was associated with more experiences of regret, regret had no substantial relationship to well-being. These patterns also emerged for the individual facets of the maximizing scale, although with a notable difference between the U.S. and Europe for the High Standards facet. It is argued that, in societies where abundant individual choice is highly valued and considered the ultimate route to personal happiness, maximizers’ dissatisfaction and regret over imperfect choices is a detrimental factor in well-being, whereas it is a much less crucial determinant of well-being in societies that place less emphasis on choice as the way to happiness.

1  Introduction

Autonomy and choice in individual decision making are highly valued in western societies. Greater choice can provide two types of benefits. First, it can enable choosers to find exactly what they want. And, secondly, it can enhance their feeling of autonomy and freedom. Nonetheless, various studies have recently cautioned that unlimited choice may come at a price and does not always benefit mental health and well-being (e.g., Botti & Iyengar, 2004, 2006; Botti, Orfali & Iyengar, 2009; Fisman, Iyengar, Kamenica & Simonson, 2006, Iyengar, Jiang & Huberman, 2004; Iyengar & Lepper, 2000; but see Chernev, 2003; Scheibehenne, Greifeneder & Todd, 2009, 2010, for contrary evidence). In this regard, Schwartz (2000, 2004) argued that, as options are added within a domain of choice, several problems may materialize. First, the process of collecting adequate and complete information about options makes choosing more laborious. Second, as options expand, people’s standards for what is an acceptable outcome rise. And thirdly, people may come to believe that any imperfect result is their fault, because, with so many options, they have no excuse for not getting the “right” one. Ironically, however, the more options there are, the more likely it becomes that one does not choose the best option (e.g., Hanoch, Rice, Cummings & Wood, 2009; Hanoch, Wood, Barnes, Liu & Rice, 2011). These problems have become especially relevant in contemporary western societies¹, where people are overwhelmed by near-unlimited options in all domains of life. In this regard, Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swinder, and Tipton (1985) already argued that people in western societies feel increasingly uneasy about their life decisions because they are unsure about whether they are making the right choices, and according to Schwartz (2000, 2009), this “excess of freedom” (p. 79) has resulted in a dramatic increase in people’s dissatisfaction with their lives and even in clinical depression.

However, not everybody may be equally sensitive to the problems that come with exposure to an abundance of choice. It has been argued that people who always want to maximize the outcomes of their choices are most vulnerable to the negative effects of too much choice (e.g., Schwartz, 2000; Schwartz, Ward, Monterosso, Lyubomirsky, White & Lehman, 2002). For these people, an excess of options becomes problematic because, to make sure they choose the optimal option, all information about each alternative has to be considered, which is often difficult or even impossible. Moreover, there is likely to be a lingering doubt that the best option has nevertheless been missed, especially when it has not been possible to consider all options. Hence, the potential for regret is ever present, because there is always the possibility that there is a better option “out there”, and failing to find it means a failure to optimize personal satisfaction. On the other hand, people can approach choices differently, using a “good enough” strategy, in which any option that meets a certain threshold of acceptability is considered satisfactory. In this approach to choice, the individual does not have to consider all information about each option, the standards for what is acceptable are more modest (meaning that several options can be satisfactory) and these standards do not depend on the number of options (because adding more options does not suddenly render a good option unacceptable). Moreover, there is no failure in choosing a merely decent, but not perfect, option when adopting a “good enough” approach to choice.

Importantly, Schwartz et al. (2002) found considerable, stable individual differences in people’s dispositional tendency to use either a “good enough” strategy or a “maximizing” strategy. People on either side of this dispositional continuum have been labeled satisficers and maximizers, respectively, and the latter group is expected to be more vulnerable to the problems that arise from an excess of choice. Indeed, various studies showed that maximizers experience higher levels of regret compared to satisficers and that they show lower levels of satisfaction with decisions, and lower levels of well-being more generally. They are more dissatisfied with their lives, less happy, more depressed, and less optimistic (e.g., Chang et al., 2011; Dar-Nimrod, Rawn, Lehman & Schwartz, 2009; Iyengar, Wells & Schwartz, 2006; Purvis, Howell & Iyer, 2011; Schwartz et al., 2002).

1.1  The potential role of society in the relationship between individual maximizing and well-being

Studies showing that a dispositional tendency to maximize (measured with the Maximizing scale, see below) can have detrimental effects on the individual’s psychological well-being have generally been conducted in the U.S., where choice is indeed abundant or even excessive in everyday life and where individual choice and self-determination are considered to be the ultimate way to pursue personal happiness and well-being (Schwartz, 2000; 2004). Importantly, the seminal cross-cultural work on value clusters by Shalom Schwartz (1999) has shown that personal autonomy is not only highly valued in the U.S. but also in Western Europe. Indeed, both cultures consider personal choice as an important path toward happiness, and although in Western Europe, the number of options for some choices in everyday life (e.g., buying cereal) may not be as excessive as in the U.S., the options are certainly also abundant (Henrich, Heine & Norenzavan, 2010). Hence, a negative relationship between maximizing and well-being can be expected in Western Europe as well.

However, Henrich and colleagues (2010) also argued that to understand human psychology, behavioral scientists cannot assume their findings obtained in western countries to be broadly generalizable. In particular, the authors explicitly referred to substantial differences between western versus non-western societies “in the extent to which people value choice and in the range of behaviors over which they feel they are making choices” (p. 71) as prime examples for their assertion. In non-western societies, the context and meaning of individual choice may be quite different from the U.S. and Western Europe; individual choice may be less valued, the number of options in everyday choices (e.g., job or consumer choices) may be more limited, and “personal” choices may to be more strongly directed by the government. For instance, in China, the opportunities to hold state sector jobs and have employer-provided healthcare benefits were greatly influenced by China’s hukou system, which is an institution that controls population movement (Liu, 2005). Moreover, in at least some Asian societies, the very notion of “choice” is less salient and less tied into definitions of self than it is in western societies (e.g., Markus & Schwartz, 2010; Savani, Markus, Naidu, Kumar & Berlia, 2010).

It could be argued that, if choices and options in a society are less abundant, gaining adequate information about the different options to make a choice is actually more achievable. Also, people’s standards for what is acceptable are likely to be more modest and an imperfect outcome can be more easily attributed to the mere lack of a perfect option in the limited set of possible outcomes, or to external factors such as government regulations. Finally, if notions of the self are less tied up with the idea of choice, making imperfect choices is likely to be less consequential. Hence, it seems that many of the choice-related problems leading to reduced well-being may be eliminated by the boundaries of the societal context. When it comes to individual psychological well-being, could it be that maximizers—who are most vulnerable to the negative effects of excessive choice—are actually better off in non-western cultures like China than they are in the U.S. or Western Europe? In particular, it is possible that maximizers in China experience regret over imperfect outcomes just like their counterparts in western societies, but, given that individual choice is less abundant and less valued as the way to happiness, such regret may be less detrimental to general well-being than it is in societies that have this abundance of choice, that attach paramount value to individual choice, and that attribute unhappiness to failure to make the right choices.

1.2  Measuring individual differences in maximizing

To measure individual differences in the tendency to maximize, Schwartz et al. (2002) developed a 13-item Maximization Scale consisting of three facet scales (see Appendix A). The Alternative Search facet scale contains six items and taps into the degree to which an individual keeps searching for “better” alternatives, even after having found a satisfying one. The Decision Difficulty facet scale is composed of four items and refers to experiencing difficulty in everyday choosing and decisions. The High Standards facet scale consists of three items and refers to being satisfied only by meeting the highest standards and choosing the single best option. As a general measure, Schwartz et al.’s (2002) Maximizing Scale has been successfully used in previous research, and individuals scoring high on the scale have repeatedly been found to experience lower levels of well-being (e.g., Chang et al., 2011; Iyengar et al., 2006; Purvis, Howell & Iyer, 2011; Schwartz et al., 2002). Nonetheless, there has been some controversy about the meaning of the scale and its relationships with well-being at the facet level. The High Standards facet in particular, and its relationships with the other facets and with well-being, has been the subject of scholarly debate. Recently, a study by Rim, Turner, Betz, and Nygren (2011) showed that, in line with expectations, the Decision Difficulty and Alternative Search facets were negatively related to optimism and self-regard, but the High Standards facet showed small positive relationships to optimism and self-regard in two samples of U.S. undergraduate students. Similar results were obtained by Purvis et al. (2011), who investigated the relationships of the facet scales with life satisfaction and happiness. Previously, Diab, Gillespie, and Highhouse (2008) had already focused on the High Standards facet, which they believed to be central to the maximizing concept. In particular, they constructed an alternative scale including the three items of Schwartz et al.’s (2002) High Standards facet and six additional items tapping into “a general tendency to pursue the identification of the optimal alternative” (p. 365). Subsequently, in a sample of U.S. undergraduate psychology students, these authors found that, unlike the Schwartz et al. (2002) Maximizing Scale, their alternative scale was unrelated to life satisfaction. Based on these findings, it has been argued that the high standards aspect of maximizing may not have a detrimental effect on well-being (Diab et al., 2008) or that it might even be beneficial (Rim et al., 2011).

Reviewing the literature in this debate and the items of the High Standards facet scale, we believe that the inconsistent findings regarding the effect of high standards on well-being may be due to the inherent ambivalence of the high standards concept and the items used to measure it. Indeed, having high standards in making choices can be interpreted (by both researchers and participants) as “nothing but the perfect choice is good enough for me”, but also as “I’m not easily content and I aim to get the most out of my choices.” These two interpretations are highly reminiscent of a recurrent issue in the related concept of perfectionism. In particular, in his seminal work on perfectionism, Hamacheck (1978) made a distinction between “Normal” and “Neurotic” forms of perfectionism, in which normal perfectionists are those who “derive a very real pleasure from labors of a painstaking effort and who feel free to be less precise as the situation permits” (p. 15), whereas neurotic perfectionists are those “whose efforts—even their best ones—never seem quite enough… and are unable to feel satisfaction” (p. 15). Various labels have been used in the literature (Stroeber & Otto, 2006) to denote this distinction between “positive” (adaptive) and “negative” (maladaptive) perfectionism, but evidence for their opposite effects on a variety of outcomes is plentiful and fairly consistent. In a recent review of the perfectionism literature, Stoeber and Otto (2006) concluded that, despite the mixed findings in previous research, there is overall evidence that the adaptive form of perfectionism is often associated with a variety of positive outcomes and higher well-being, whereas the maladaptive form is associated with negative outcomes and lower well-being. For example, recently, Chang et al. (2011) showed opposite effects of these two forms of perfectionism on life satisfaction. This study also revealed strong relationships between negative perfectionism and maximizing. Yet, most interestingly, weaker but substantial relationships between positive perfectionism and maximizing were obtained as well. Hence, insights from the perfectionism literature may prove helpful for a better understanding of the high standards aspect of maximizing and its ambiguous relationship with well-being.

Although we acknowledge the current controversy about what the Schwartz et al.’s (2002) Maximizing Scale measures, and what a maximizing scale should measure, we believe this three-faceted Maximizing Scale is the most appropriate and most informative for the present research to assess cultural differences in maximizing and its correlates, as well as to provide insights in the debated High Standards facet.

1.3  The present research

The main research objective of the present study was to investigate possible societal differences in the relationship between maximizing and general well-being. In particular, we hypothesized that 1a) there is a strong link between maximizing and well-being in the U.S., consistent with previous research, 1b) this relationship also emerges in other western societies (i.e., Western Europe), and 1c) this link is considerably weaker or even absent in non-western societies (i.e., China). Moreover, we investigated the role of regret—proposed by Schwartz et al. (2002) to be a principle mediator of the detrimental effect of maximizing on well-being—in each society. In particular, we hypothesized that 2a) maximizing increases the likelihood of experiencing regret, largely independent of the society in which one lives, but 2b) in societies were individual choice is abundant and explicitly proclaimed as the way to self-actualization and happiness (i.e., western societies), decisional regret has a much more profound impact on individual well-being than in societies in which choice is less central and less available. Hence, in our hypotheses, we propose that maximizing does not have the same detrimental impact on well-being in China as it has in western societies because, although maximizing increases regret, the experience of regret over imperfect individual choices does not affect the individual’s well-being as much in China as it does in western societies.

We tested our hypotheses for the overall Maximizing Scale, but also for the three Maximizing facet scales individually, and we particularly focused on the High Standards facet that has yielded inconsistent findings in previous research.

Also, whereas previous research usually considered only one or two specific measures related to well-being, we adopted a more comprehensive approach, using five different indicative measures to obtain a stable, global measure of well-being.

Read the whole article.

TEDxAthens - Rory Sutherland: Changing Perspective Leads to Happiness

Nice talk . . . . Sandra Kiume posted this at her Channel N blog at Psych Central.

TEDxAthens - Rory Sutherland: Changing Perspective Leads to Happiness

Perspective is essential to happiness, says Rory Sutherland. He gives examples of applied perspective and argues that the element of choice is what makes a situation more tolerable. Psychological factors should be added to mechanistic ideas in cost-benefit analyses. Things like train arrival clocks and traffic light timers have improved lives because they address human anxieties.

People believe that a company that only sells one type of product is better than a company that sells a wide array of products, which means “Google is as much a psychological success as it is a financial one.” Economics and advertising often fail to understand that what something is, has value, he asserts. An interesting intellectual TEDxAthens Talk.

io9 - 10 of the Most Surprising Findings from Psychological Studies

A fun list from io9 on psychological studies that might be surprising to a lot of people. I know all of these studies, so I'd be curious to hear which ones are surprising to you?

10 of the Most Surprising Findings from Psychological Studies

daily 10

By Jeremy Dean - PsyBlog

Mar 19, 2012

Psychology has a reputation for being the science of common sense, or a field that simply confirms things we already know about ourselves.

One way of battling this misconception, explains Jeremy Dean — a PhD candidate in psychology and master of ceremonies at the always-awesome PsyBlog — is to "think about all the unexpected, surprising, and just plain weird findings that have popped out of psychology studies over the years." Here are ten of his favorite examples.
 
10. Cognitive dissonance
This is perhaps one of the weirdest and most unsettling findings in psychology. Cognitive dissonance is the idea that we find it hard to hold two contradictory beliefs, so we unconsciously adjust one to make it fit with the other.

In the classic study, students found a boring task more interesting if they were paid less to take part. Our unconscious reasons like this: if I didn't do it for money, then I must have done it because it was interesting. As if by magic, a boring task becomes more interesting because otherwise I can't explain my behaviour.

The reason it's unsettling is that our minds are probably performing these sorts of rationalisations all the time, without our conscious knowledge. So how do we know what we really think?

9. Hallucinations are common
Hallucinations are like waking dreams, and we tend to think of them as markers of serious mental illness. In reality, however, they are more common amongst 'normal' people than we might imagine. One-third of us report having experienced hallucinations, with 20% experiencing hallucinations once a month, and 2% once a week (Ohayon, 2000).

 Similarly, 'normal' people often have paranoid thoughts, as in this study I reported previously in which 40% experienced paranoid thoughts on a virtual journey. The gap between people with mental illness and the 'sane' is a lot smaller than we'd like to think. [Illustration by S. Stalkfleet]

8. The placebo effect
Perhaps you've had the experience that a headache improves seconds after you take an aspirin? This can't be the drug because it takes at least 15 minutes to kick in.

That's the placebo effect: your mind knows you've taken a pill, so you feel better. In medicine it seems strongest in the case of pain: some studies suggest a placebo of saline (salty water) can be as powerful as morphine. Some studies even suggest that 80% of the power of Prozac is placebo.

The placebo effect is counter-intuitive because we easily forget that mind and body are not separate.

7. Obedience to authority Most of us like to think of ourselves as independently-minded people. We feel sure that we wouldn't harm another human being unless under very serious duress. Certainly something as weak as being ordered to give someone an electric shock by an authority figure in a white coat wouldn't be enough, would it?

Stanley Milgram's famous study found it was. Sixty-three percent of participants kept giving electric shocks to another human being despite the victim screaming in agony and eventually falling silent. [The test setting is illustrated in the figure shown here, via]

Situations have huge power to control our behaviour, and it's a power we don't notice until it's dramatically revealed in studies like this.

6. Fantasies reduce motivation
One way people commonly motivate themselves is by using fantasies about the future. The idea is that dreaming about a positive future helps motivate you towards that goal.

Beware, though, psychologists have found that fantasising about future success is actually bad for motivation. It seems that getting a taste of the future in the here and now reduces the drive to achieve it. Fantasies also fail to flag up the problems we're likely to face on the way to our goals.

So what's a better way to commit to goals? Instead of fantasising, use mental contrasting.

5. Choice blindness
We all know the reasons for our decisions, right? For example, do you know why you're attracted to someone? Don't be so sure. In one study, people were easily tricked into justifying choices they didn't actually make about who they found attractive. Under some circumstances, we exhibit what is known as choice blindness: we seem to have little or no awareness of choices we've made and why we've made them. We then use rationalisations to try and cover our tracks.
This is just one example of the general idea that we have relatively little access to the inner workings of our minds. [Photo by Pablo Perez]

4. Two (or three, or four...) heads are not always better than one
Want to think outside the box? Do some blue sky thinking? Want to... [insert your own least-favourite cliché here].

Well, according to psychological research, brainstorming doesn't work. People in groups tend to be lazy, likely to forget their ideas while others talk, and worry about what others will think (despite the rule that 'there are no bad ideas').

It turns out it's much better to send people off to think up new ideas on their own. Groups then do better at evaluating those ideas.

3. Trying to suppress your thoughts is counterproductive
When you're down or worried about something, people often say: "hey, try not to think about it; just put it out of your mind!"

 This is very bad advice. Trying to suppress your thoughts is counter-productive. Like trying as hard as you can not to think about pink elephants or white bears. What people experience when they try to suppress their thoughts is an ironic rebound effect: the thought comes back stronger than before. Looking for distractions is a much better strategy.

2. Incredible multi-tasking skills
Despite all the mind's limitations, we can train it to do incredible things. Take our multitasking abilities, for example — did you know that, with practice, people can actually read and write at the same time?

One study of multitasking trained two volunteers over 16 weeks until they could read a short story and categorise lists of words at the same time. Eventually they could perform as well on both tasks at the same time as they could on each task individually before the study began.

Read a full description of the study, along with potential criticisms, here.

  

1. In life, it's all about the little things
We tend to think that the big events in our lives are the most important: graduation, getting married, or the birth of a child.

 But major life events are often not as directly important to our well-being as the little hassles and uplifts of everyday life; major events, on the other hand, mainly affect us through the daily hassles and uplifts they produce. The same is true at work, where job satisfaction is strongly hit by everyday hassles.

What most affects people's happiness are things like quality of sleep, little ups and downs at work and relationships with our friends and family. In other words: it's the little things that make us happy.

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This post by Jeremy Dean originally appeared on PsyBlog — a website (run entirely by Dean) dedicated to exploring the science of psychology by examining new, interesting, and exciting peer-reviewed psychology research.

RSA Animate - Choice w/ Professor Renata Salecl

A new RSA Animate! This one is about the anxiety and paralysis that we can experience with choice, especially when there are too many choices. Back in 2005, psychologist Barry Schwartz published a book on this same topic, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, for those who might want a more in-depth examination of this topic.


At the bottom, I am including the video of her entire talk on the Paradox of Choice.




RSA Animate - Choice w/ Professor Renata Salecl

In this new RSAnimate, Professor Renata Salecl explores the paralysing anxiety and dissatisfaction surrounding limitless choice. Does the freedom to be the architects of our own lives actually hinder rather than help us? Does our preoccupation with choosing and consuming actually obstruct social change?

Download video (MP4)

Taken from the RSA's free public events programme www.thersa.org/events

* * * * * * *

The Paradox of Choice

Fusing sociology, psychoanalysis and philosophy, Professor Renata Salecl shows that individual choice is rarely based on a simple rational decision with a predictable outcome.

FORA.tv - The Power of Choice (Jared Diamond and Daniel McFadden)

FORA.tv posted this short video discussion with Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse) and Daniel McFadden from the National Geographic Weekend Live gathering.

The Power of Choice

Why do humans make decisions the way they do? And what does that mean in the context of the current threats to our species’ survival? Daniel McFadden, the 2000 Laureate in Economics Studies, whose work focuses on how people make choices and sort themselves into groups, will discuss questions of human choice and their repercussions with Nat Geo Explorer-in-Residence Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the bestseller Collapse, which analyzed the phenomenon of societal failure. The conversation will be moderated by National Geographic Weekend host Boyd Matson.

 The Power of Choice from National Geographic Live on FORA.tv

Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and the widely acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which won him a Pulitzer Prize as well as Britain's 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize.

Diamond is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (Genius Award); research prizes and grants from the American Physiological Society, National Geographic Society, and Zoological Society of San Diego; and many teaching awards and endowed public lectureships. In addition, he has been elected a member of all three of the leading national scientific/academic honorary societies—National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Philosophical Society.

Diamond's field experience includes 22 expeditions to New Guinea and neighboring islands to study ecology and evolution of birds; the rediscovery of New Guinea's long-lost golden fronted bowerbird; and other field projects in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. As a conservationist, he devised a comprehensive plan, almost all of which was implemented, for Indonesian New Guinea's national park system. He has also taken part in numerous field projects for the Indonesian government and World Wildlife Fund. He is a founding member of the board of the Society of Conservation Biology and a member of the board of directors of World Wildlife Fund/USA and Conservation International.

Daniel McFadden

Daniel Little McFadden is an econometrician who shared the 2000 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James Heckman. McFadden's share of the prize was "for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice". He was the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

In January 2011, Dr. McFadden was appointed the Presidential Professor of Health Economics at theUniversity of Southern California (USC), and the announcement of this appointment was published on January 10, 2011. Professor McFadden will have joint appointments at the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development and the Department of Economics at USC College to examine fundamental problems facing the health care sector, looking specifically at how consumers make choices about health insurance and medical services.

Alva Noë - Addiction Is Not A Disease Of The Brain

This article by Alva Noë was posted a couple of months ago at NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, but I had not got around to sharing it yet. Noë is making an argument, with which I agree, that addiction is not simply about brain chemicals but, rather, it is a whole person issue. He followed this article with another one in which he looked at Gene M. Heyman's 2009 book on addiction - I've included that one as well.

Addiction Is Not A Disease Of The Brain

September 9, 2011

by Alva Noë

Addiction has been moralized, medicalized, politicized, and criminalized. And, of course, many of us are addicts, have been addicts or have been close to addicts. Addiction runs very hot as a theme.

Part of what makes addiction so compelling is that it forms a kind of conceptual/political crossroads for thinking about human nature. After all, to make sense of addiction we need to make sense of what it is to be an agent who acts, with values, in the face of consequences, under pressure, with compulsion, out of need and desire. One needs a whole philosophy to understand addiction.

Today I want to respond to readers who were outraged by my willingness even to question whether addiction is a disease of the brain.

Let us first ask: what makes something — a substance or an activity — addictive? Is there a property shared by all the things to which we can get addicted?

Unlikely. Addictive substances such as alcohol, heroin and nicotine are chemically distinct. Moreover, activities such as gambling, eating, sex — activities that are widely believed to be addictive — have no ingredients.

And yet it is remarkable — as Gene Heyman notes in his excellent book on addiction — that there are only 20 or so distinct activities and substances that produce addiction. There must be something in virtue of which these things, and these things alone, give rise to the distinctive pattern of use and abuse in the face of the medical, personal and legal perils that we know can stem from addiction.

What do gambling, sex, heroin and cocaine — and the other things that can addict us — have in common?

One strategy is to look not to the substances and activities themselves, but to the effects that they produce in addicts. And here neuroscience has delivered important insights.

If you feed an electrical wire through a rat's skull and onto to a short dopamine release circuit that connects the VTA (ventral tegmental area) and the nucleus accumbens, and if you attach that wire to a lever-press, the rat will self-stimulate — press the lever to produce the increase in dopamine — and it will do so basically foreover, forgoing food, sex, water and exercise. Addiction, it would seem, is produced by direct action on the brain!

(See here for a useful Wikipedia review of this literature.)

And indeed, there is now a substantial body of evidence supporting the claim that all drugs or activities of abuse (as we can call them), have precisely this kind of effect on this dopamine neurochemical circuit.

When the American Society of Addiction Medicine recently declared addiction to be a brain disease their conclusion was based on findings like this. Addiction is an effect brought about in a neurochemical circuit in the brain. If true, this is important, for it means that if you want to treat addiction, you need to find ways to act on this neural substrate.

All the rest — the actual gambling or drug taking, the highs and lows, the stealing, lying and covering up, the indifference to work and incompetence in the workplace, the self-loathing and anxiety about getting high, or getting discovered, or about trying to stop, and the loss of friends and family, the life stories and personal and social pressures — all these are merely symptoms of the underlying neurological disease.

But not so fast. Consider:

All addictive drugs and activities elevate the dopamine release system. Such activation, we may say, is a necessary condition of addiction. But it is very doubtful that it is sufficient. Neuroscientists refer to the system in question as the "reward-reinforcement pathway" precisely because all rewarding activities, including nonaddictive ones like reading the comics on sunday morning or fixing the leaky pipe in the basement, modulate its activity. Elevated activity in the reward-reinforcement pathway is a normal concomitant of healthy, nonaddictive, engaged life.

Neuroscientists like to say that addictive drugs and activities, but not the nonaddictive ones, "highjack" the reward-reinforcement pathway, they don't merely activate it. This is the real upshot of the rat example. The rat preferred lever-pressing to everything; it dis-valued everything in comparison with lever-pressing. And not because of the intrinsic value of lever-pressing, but because of the link artificially established between the lever-pressing and the dopamine release.

If this is right, then we haven't discovered, in the reward reinforcement system, a neurochemical signature of addiction. We haven't discovered the place where addiction happens in the brain. After all, the so-called highjacking of the reward system is not itself a neurochemical process; it is a process whereby neurochemical events get entrained within in a larger pattern of action and decision making.

Is addiction a disease of the brain? That's a bit like saying that eating is a phenomenon of the stomach. The stomach is an important part of the story. But don't forget the mouth, the intestines, the blood, and don't forget the hunger, and also the whole socially-sustained practice of producing, shopping for and cooking food.

And so with addiction. The neural events in VTA clearly belong to the underlying mechanisms of addiction. They are necessary, but not sufficient; they are only part of the story.

Remember: normally there is a dynamic quality to our actions and preferences, just as there is with those of rats. We enjoy exercising, but we soon get tired or bored. But rest, too, soon loses its appeal. We eat, and then we are sated. And then we are ready for the tread mill again. And so on. Things have gradually changing and complementary values. In addiction, this dynamic goes rigid. The addicts goal assumes a fixed value, and the value of everything shrinks to zero, and with terrible costs.

Our strategy was to look for systematic effects that all and only the addictive drugs and activities have on addicts. And we've found what we were looking for. The effects are behavioral and experiential. The things that addict us all produce a very distinctive breakdown in the organization of our preferences, actions and choices.

Is addiction a disease of the brain? This strikes me as a dubious falsification of what is, really, a phenomenon that can only be understood in terms of the life, choices, needs and understanding of the whole person.

Here is the second article:

Addiction: A Disorder Of Choice?

September 16, 2011

by Alva Noë

"Shall I have Chinese food tonight, or Italian?

I like Chinese more, but I had it last night, and I find that I enjoy it less if I have it two nights in a row. And anyway, I guess I'm kind of in the mood for Italian."

This imagined interior dialog brings out an interesting fact about values, preferences and choices. I may prefer one thing to another (Chinese food to Italian), but the current value of my preferences fluctuates dynamically as a response to my actions and past choices. If I eat Chinese food every night, the value to me of those meals will gradually reduce to zero.

This is a general truth about life and choice. Exercise is wonderful, until you get tired; rest is wonderful, until you get bored, and then restless. In a good life — if I can be permitted such a phrase — there is a kind of interplay and balance in the dynamic of shifting values, preferences and choices. What we like and want affects what we do; what we do in turn affects what we like and want.

The Chinese food example comes from Gene M. Heyman's 2009 book on addiction; Heyman makes an interesting observation in this connection. It isn't only the case that our choices and actions bring about dynamic fluctuation in the values we place on things; it is further the case that there are always different ways of framing the choice problems that we face.

So consider the dining example again and notice that there are two different ways I might reason about the question what should I eat? According to the first way, I say to myself: what do I want to eat now? Chinese, or Italian? If I take this local approach, I am likely to tend, over time, to alternate nightly between Chinese and Italian cuisine (perhaps, given my antecedent preference for Chinese food, with a slight tendency to eat Chinese more often).

But there is also a global approach available to me. Instead of thinking of the choice I face on a meal-by-meal basis as a choice about what to eat right now given what I want right now, I might ask myself: how can I get the most out of my meals by planning a series of meals? And if take up this global perspective, I am likely to be led to a very different conclusion about what to do. After all, from this perspective it may become immediately clear that the way to get the most out of my meals is by eating fewer Chinese than Italian meals, not because I like Chinese less, but because I like it more, and because I realize that I can enhance my pleasure in the Chinese food I do eat by eating it less often. The local perspective leads me to eat approximately equal amounts of Chinese and Italian food; the global perspective leads me to eat more Italian than Chinese. And even though I like Chinese food more, by eating it less, I maximize my overall eating pleasure.

There's a lot to be said for the global perspective. It's smart. It's rational. And, as Heyman lays out convincingly, it may lead to an outcome which is better over all (that is, I get more pleasure from what I eat). Of course, the local perspective is much easier to take up. On the local perspective, we simply respond perceptually to the options before us here and now. What do I want to eat, now? Taking up the global perspective requires discipline; we need step back and think about the best course of action. We need to abstract away from present impulse.

Whatever we say about the relative merits of local versus global perspectives, the critical thing is this: values are dynamic and the choices we make affect not only what we do but the pleasure we take in what we do.

When Heyman says that addiction is a disorder of choice — this is the title of his book, Addiction: A Disorder of Choice — he does not mean that addicts are weak willed or that they make dumb choices. This is not a blame-the-victim book. He means something different, something subtle. His point: the distinctive hallmark of addiction is the fact that in addiction the normal interplay we've just been contemplating between choice, value and preference breaks down.

And this is because addictive substances are, in Heyman's phrase, behaviorially toxic. They neutralize the value of everything else. Work, sex, food, friendship, children — looked at locally, nothing outweighs the value the addict places on his desired substance. If I take up the local perspective on whether I should consume my drug or go to sleep, or exercise, or make love, the drug will win out every time. Addictive behavior is the natural outcome of taking up the local perspective in the presence of behavioral toxicity.

Of course the more I use my drug, the more I come to tolerate its effects, and so the less pleasure an episode of drug use can afford me. This suggests that if I were to take up the global perspective, it would lead me in the direction of abstinence. After all, from the global perspective I'd realize that by using the drug less, the pleasure of using drugs would go up; abstaining from drug use would also enhance the pleasures of non-drug activities. From the global perspective it becomes clear that I'd be a happier drug user to the extent that I minimized my use of drugs.

Why doesn't the addict take up this global perspective? And why doesn't this give him or her a route to abstinence? Why can't the addict manage this? This is an interesting and important question. And it is, of course, tantamount to the question: Why is the addict addicted? What is it to be addicted?

And now we come to the main upshot of Heyman's discussion, an upshot which is as provocative as it is, in a way, modest. The idea is this: if we are to understand addiction, we must view it precisely in this setting where wants, values, preferences and choices are in play. Addiction is in this sense a disorder of choice.

To say this is not to deny that addiction is a disease, although it is to put pressure on what we mean by disease. Nor is it to deny that addiction has critical neurological aspects. Indeed, as we discussed last week, it is doubtless that the mechanism whereby addictive substances produce their behaviorally toxic effects are in part neurological. What Heyman's proposal does rule out, though, is the idea that we can understand addiction apart from the setting of a person's dynamic life as an agent. And for this reason, I believe, it rules out the now familiar reductive dogma that addiction is a disease of the brain.

Here is a remarkable yet rarely remarked fact about addiction. Only a very small portion of drug users are drug addicts. About 15 percent of people who drink develop alcoholism; about 10 percent of those who experiment with drugs become drug addicts. (See Heyman's book for the references.)

Why is this? What governs these outcomes?

Genetic and neurological factors may play an important role. But perhaps there are other choice-related factors that play a role as well. Here's a possibility: as Heyman informs us, the majority of addicts are single; moreover, no one is better positioned and more motivated to resist the addict's problem than his or her spouse. Having a spouse raises the costs of addiction and may be a factor, a choice-pertinent factor, in predisposing someone to avoid the trap of addiction.

It may even help the addict break free from addiction. For there is a second remarkable but rarely noticed fact about addiction (again, see the book for the details). Despite the oft-chanted dogma that addiction is a chronic incurable disease of the brain — "once an addict always an addict" — the best data available clearly demonstrates that more than 75 percent of hardcore drug addicts will eventually cease to take drugs and that they will do so without having received treatment. How can this be? What could explain this? And what determines who breaks free from the trap of addiction and who fails to do so?

If Heyman is right, we might hope to find the answer to these questions by turning our attention not to the nervous system of the addict, to his or her internal life, but rather to the pattern of needs, options, values, preferences and pressures that structure the person's ongoing life in a community with others.

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