Reflective and Impulsive Determinants of Addictive Behavior

Introduction

Probably the most intuitively compelling explanation of human behavior is that people do what they believe is good for them. Known as the Rational Model, this global explanation of behavior has been widely accepted in psychology (e.g., Ajzen, 1991; Bandura, 1977), economics, and the political sciences (e.g., Becker, 1976). Often, however, people seem to act in ways that contradict the rational model. They panic in objectively harmless situations, they behave aggressively although it only escalates the conflict, or they consume food or drugs to a self-destructive degree. Why does such behavior occur? One widespread explanation posits a lack of knowledge on the part of the actor as a cause. For instance, people may consume drugs because they mistakenly believe the benefits of consumption outweigh the costs (Becker & Murphy, 1988).

There are, however, instances of negative behavior that occur against all better [Page 46]knowledge (Berridge, 2003). Addicted persons are often very aware of the harmful long-term effects, but they continue their detrimental behavior (Robinson & Berridge, 2003). Pain or frustration may cause people to hurt other people or damage objects, even though they know that this is unfair or useless (Berkowitz et al., 1981). For a long time, such truly irrational behaviors were rationalized or ostracized from general psychology (Strack & Deutsch, 2004). More recently, these behaviors have gained considerable attention in social cognition research. Particularly, research has established that representations in memory such as stereotypes and attitudes can automatically shape cognition and behavior (for a review, see Greenwald et al., 2002), independent of what people know, believe, and endorse. Dissociations between automatic and controlled responses have stimulated the advent of dual-system models of social cognition and behavior (e.g., Lieberman et al., 2002; Smith & DeCoster, 2000; Strack & Deutsch, 2004). The core tenet of such models is that social behavior is determined by the joint operation of two systems that are characterized by qualitatively different representations and transformations of social information. The two systems may work synergistically or antagonistically, and, under specified conditions, they may promote seemingly irrational cognition and behavior.

Dual-system models may serve as a framework for understanding not only implicit/ explicit phenomena in social cognition, but also addictive behavior and its cognitive predecessors (cf. Stacy, 1997; Tiffany, 1990). We will elaborate this idea by using our recently developed Reflective-Impulsive Model (RIM; Strack & Deutsch, 2004) as an example, because it integrates various findings from motivational science into the dual-system idea. Moreover, it is closely related to a neurological model of reflective and impulsive processes that has been outlined in this volume (Bechara et al., chapter 15). Many psychological functions described in our general model of social cognition and behavior can be linked to the neural mechanisms of Bechara et al.'s model. There are, however, a few divergences, one of the most important being that our impulsive system describes a general memory system that also includes nonevaluative processes irrelevant to reinforcement, whereas the impulsive system as spelled out in Bechara et al.'s model specifically captures affective information-processing. In what follows, we will briefly describe the RIM (for a complete description, see Strack & Deutsch, 2004) and then discuss its potential implications for addiction research.

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