Anyone who has witnessed a loved one's life fall apart because of addiction has wondered: Why can't they just stop? Research on how users make decisions sheds some new light.
, health, and social relationships. Due to this devastating impact, researchers have made major efforts to understand what promotes and maintains substance use despite these negative outcomes.at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research has found that there may be important differences in how individuals with substance use disorders learn from negative outcomes [1; 2].
Importantly, this learning process can be largely automatic; it does not typically require any mental effort. For example, if an action leads to a positive outcome several times, you may simply feel a stronger desire to make that decision again. In fact, it can often take a lot of mental effort to avoid making that same choice. Similarly, with repeated negative outcomes, you may automatically feel stronger and stronger desires to avoid acting in the ways that caused them.
You have two options. First, you could keep choosing the same machine. After all, the two recent losses might have just been due to chance. The machine seemed good in the beginning and it might still be the best on average. The other option would be to decide that this machine is probably not the best and to switch to a different one instead.
When we invited several individuals with substance use disorders into our lab and had them play a similar game, they tended to choose the same option more times despite repeated losses. In contrast, healthy participants switched machines more frequently after fewer losses. Those with substance use disorders also showed more randomness in their choices than the healthy participants .
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