Samuli Reijula: Why Aren't We All Addicts?
The concept of addiction resides at an interdisciplinary junction of research on (the pathologies of) human decision making. Theories of intertemporal choice, on the one hand, and reinforcement learning theory, on the other, constitute two groundbreaking strands of such research effort, and both promise to provide a unified account for explaining a range of substance and behavioral addictions. However, the two theoretical perspectives originate in highly dissimilar research fields, experimental psychology and computer science, and I suggest that it is unclear how the mechanisms of addiction portrayed by them can be seen as mutually compatible (cf. Ross et al. 2008: Midbrain Mutiny). Nonetheless, I argue that together they provide the social sciences (and our everyday self-understanding) important conceptual resources for developing a novel view of the nature of rational agency and self-regulation.
The concept of addiction resides at an interdisciplinary junction of research on (the pathologies of) human decision making. Theories of intertemporal choice, on the one hand, and reinforcement learning theory, on the other, constitute two groundbreaking strands of such research effort, and both promise to provide a unified account for explaining a range of substance and behavioral addictions. However, the two theoretical perspectives originate in highly dissimilar research fields, experimental psychology and computer science, and I suggest that it is unclear how the mechanisms of addiction portrayed by them can be seen as mutually compatible (cf. Ross et al. 2008: Midbrain Mutiny). Nonetheless, I argue that together they provide the social sciences (and our everyday self-understanding) important conceptual resources for developing a novel view of the nature of rational agency and self-regulation.