Intertemporal Bargaining in Habit
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Intertemporal Bargaining in Habit George Ainslie
Received: 9 September 2016 / Accepted: 22 November 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht (outside the USA) 2016
Abstract Lewis ascribes the stubborn persistence of addictions to habit, itself a normal process that does not imply lack of responsiveness to motivation. However, he suggests that more dynamic processes may be involved, for instance that “our recurrently focused brains inevitably self-organize.” Given hyperbolic delay discounting, a reward-seeking internal marketplace model describes two processes, also normal in themselves, that may give rise to the “deep attachment” to addictive activities that he describes: (1) People learn to interpret current choices as test cases for how they can expect to choose in the future, thus recruiting additional incentive (willpower) against a universal tendency to temporarily prefer smaller, sooner to larger, later rewards. However, when this incentive is not enough, the same interpretation creates incentive to abandon the failed area, leading to the abstinence violation effect and a localized weak will. (2) Normal human value does not come entirely, or even mainly, from expectation of external rewards, but is generated endogenously in imagination. Hyperbolic discounting provides an account of how we learn to cultivate the hedonic importance of occasions for endogenous reward by building appetite. In this account, expectations of the far future have to be rewarded endogenously if they are be as G. Ainslie (*) University of Cape Town, 151 Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Coatesville, PA 19320, USA e-mail: [email protected] G. Ainslie e-mail: [email protected]
important as currently rewarded alternatives; and this importance is prone to collapse. Both will and hedonic importance are recursive and thus hard to study by controlled experiment, but do represent modelable, reward-based hypotheses about the dynamic nature of habit. Keywords Habit . Hyperbolic discounting . Reward bundling . Willpower . Endogenous reward . Abstinence violation effect
In Addiction and the Brain, Lewis argues that addiction is a pattern of choice, rather than involuntary behavior imposed by a disease. He describes the neural changes in addicts’ brains that have been held to demonstrate the disease model, and points out that all changes in people’s behavior must have neural substrates. The changes seen in addiction just reflect “recurrent desire for a single goal,” and are reversible. He acknowledges the role of dispositional and environmental factors in making some people more liable to addiction, but points out that everyone has a tendency to overvalue imminent rewards. He ascribes addictions’ especial resistance to change to the “deep learning” of the relevant neural connections. He argues that this depth is the product of habit, so belief in a disease model of addiction is mistaken. His points are all well taken. We are learning more about the great plasticity of neural connections. The fact that most addicts g
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