Craving Read Online Free PDF

in these self-destructive behaviors, they will often tell me, “Doc, I knew what I was doing, I just was:
     
slowly trying to kill myself
dealing with my depression
coping with marital problems
self-medicating”
    The list goes on…but in each case, the stated reason was not their belief at the time they were using or engaging in harmful behavior. Rather, they are retroactively claiming they knew what they were doing the whole time, and because of the nature of these biases, they actually believe that. The hindsight bias is particularly troublesome when it comes to cravings, because research shows that this bias is motivation-independent—motivation alone does not affect vulnerability to the bias. 29 In other words, your motivation to get well does not help clarify your muddy thinking.
    The tendency toward hindsight bias sometimes decreases over time, especially when it relates to negative or dangerous information. This is important in cravings, because the further the dangerous behavior or event is in the past, the more likely we are to draw reasonable conclusions about it. (Of course, this is no guarantee that we’ll be reasonable about our past behaviors; it’s just more likely over time.) This is one reason why, early on, when attempting to reduce and eliminate cravings, it’s important to get help from others when making decisions. One study that demonstrates this “hindsight bias decay” was performed by Dr. Britta Renner, a German professor of health psychology. 30 Renner’s group asked people what they thought their cholesterol would be just before they were screened (foresight assessment), then gave them feedback on their score and assessed their recall bias. The group that received negative feedback based on their score had a tendency toward hindsight bias, whereas the group with the positive scores and feedback did not. Several weeks later, the hindsight bias actually reversed in the former group, and they tended to assert that they were blindsided by the results. This suggests that in the immediate aftermath of bad news, people tend to exhibit biases that are designed to control fear (hence, hindsight bias), but later on, the drive to control danger overrides this bias and mitigates the effect of hindsight bias.
    Asymmetric Insight
    Another fascinating bias (or really, set of biases) that is extremely relevant to people who struggle with cravings is called asymmetric insight. First a little background: people who observe another person’s behavior often attribute choices and actions to the person’s disposition, but individuals themselves tend to chalk it up to situational pressures or context. Research shows that the observers are wrong more often than the individual. That is, making observations about people’s dispositions often results in erroneous conclusions. Several other studies have shown that people generally believe that others don’t understand them well. At the same time, most believe that they can see things about their peers that their peers cannot see for themselves. We tend to believe that other people cannot see themselves accurately, perhaps because of defensiveness or various biases, but that being an outsider allows us to see our peers as they truly are. However, as noted above, we rarely accept the notion that others can see us better than we see can ourselves.
    People tend to believe that they are not very knowable, because their inner thoughts and feelings are complex and not accessible to their peers. Yet at the same time, they tend to believe that others are knowable, because their thoughts and feelings can be inferred from their actions. Simply put, people tend to think that the actions and words of others are very revealing. This bias—essentially that we believe we can see others clearly but they can’t see us clearly—was brilliantly demonstrated by Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin and her colleagues with a series of six experiments that confirmed certain