Cognitive explanations of addiction

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Blue: AO2 - Evaluation - studies
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Cognitions are thoughts, perceptions, reasonings and beliefs. The cognitive approach suggests that addictive behaviours develop due to faulty and irrational thought processes, and suggests several mechanisms for how these thought processes lead to addiction.

Gelkopf developed the self-medication model of addiction, which states that individuals carefully select addictive substances or behaviours based on perceived problems in their life, believing that the substance or behaviour will provide an effective solution to these problems. For example, someone may start smoking to alleviate stress, start drinking alcohol in social situations due to a lack of confidence, or gamble due to financial difficulties.

This model can explain initiation - people start an addictive behaviour due to a pre-existing stressor, maintenance - the behaviour can appear to help in the short term due to associations formed between the addiction and alleviation of the stressor (e.g. nicotine with calmness, alcohol with confidence), and relapse - once someone stops carrying out the addictive behaviour, they will relapse as soon as the initial stressor reoccurs, believing that the stressor has reocurred due to stopping the addictive behaviour.

People often carry out addictive behaviours without any underlying social or psychological hardships to resolve - confident people drink alcohol, non-anxious people smoke, and rich people gamble, so the self-medication model fails to explain initation of addictive behaviours in the absence of a triggering stressor.

Cause and effect is an issue with this model - it is often unclear whether the addictive behaviour develops to medicate for a pre-existing issue, or whether the issue is caused by the addiction. Many pathological gamblers also suffer from depression, and though the model would suggest that people with depression turn to gambling as a form of self-medication escapism, other psychologists have suggested that the causation is the other way round - that depression can develop as a result of poverty brought on by a gambling addiction. Becona (1996) found evidence of major depressive disorders in the majority of problem gamblers, but it is not clear whether the gambling caused the depression or vice versa. A similar cause and effect issue exists with smoking - it could be a self-medication coping response to stress, or stress could be brought on by illnesses caused by smoking.

The self-medication model can explain the disparity between genders in rates of depression and alcoholism reported by the NHS. In the UK, 1 in 4 women will undergo treatment for depression at some time, compared to 1 in 10 men, while men are twice as likely to show signs of alcohol dependency as women. The self-medication model explains this as a result of increased social acceptability of alcoholic self-medication for men - men are more likely to turn to substance abuse to treat their mental health issues than women, who are more likely to seek professional help.

Kassel (2007) found that adolescent smokers most commonly reported smoking when they were experiencing negative moods, supporting the theory of addictive behaviours developing as a coping mechanism to deal with stressors and negativities in daily life.

Parrott (1988) explained maintenance and relapse in terms of self-medication to avoid withdrawal symptoms. Abstaining from nicotine, even for a brief period, causes increased stress and anxiety in the form of cravings - smoking immediately relieves this anxiety and stress. This supports the self-medication explanation of smoking - that of nicotine as a coping mechanism for anxiety.

Heuristics are mental shortcuts that allow us to quickly solve problems and come to judgements based on prior experience. Heuristics theory suggests that gamblers maintain their behaviour through the use of a number of irrational heuristics in their information processing, overestimating their ability, overplaying their winnings, and downplaying their losses to support the perceived rationality of their behaviour.

Representative bias (Gambler’s fallacy) suggests that we apply a law of averages to a very small sequence of numbers, assuming that if something happens frequently during a short period of time, it will happen less frequently in the future.

Availability bias suggests that we put too much weighting on information from recent events, claiming that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than information from events which are not recalled.

Illusory correlations are where the brain irrationally draws a correlation between two variables where there is none – often as the result of an associative accident. A perception of a relationship between two variables is formed where no relationship exists.


Henslin (1987) found that American players of the dice game Craps would roll the dice slowly when hoping to get a low number, and roll them quickly and hard when attempting to get a high number, even though there is no logical reason to believe that this would affect the outcome. This supports the concept of illusory correlations playing a role in gambling addictions, helping gamblers justify their behaviour to themselves by perceiving themselves to be more in control of outcomes than they actually are.

Griffiths (1994) found that regular gamblers over-estimated their skills, made more irrational verbalisations suggesting cognitive biases and were more likely to engage in machine personification, talking to the machine - supporting the concept of cognitive biases being used by gamblers to justify their own behaviours to themselves.


(Not much AO2 - supporting evidence to go with the final mechanism - cognitive dissonance - so seeing as we aren't asked more than 12 markers on a single aspect of addiction, learning the above in great detail is likely to be more useful than this final approach. It is easier to apply to smoking than Heuristics Theory is, though, so it could be very useful if an application question comes up in that area.)

Cognitive dissonance is another mechanism that cognitive psychology uses to explain addictive behaviour, and it results from a conflict between reasoning and behaviour. When an imbalance in our perception of the risks and benefits of an addictive behaviour occurs, this causes discomfort in the form of cognitive dissonance, so we alter our thought processes to minimise perceived costs and to maximise perceived benefits.

On a rational level, addicts understand smoking to be a negative behaviour, leading to social stigma, health problems and long-term illness. However, they are addicted to the behaviour of smoking, so adapt their belief systems to reconcile their behaviour with their rational understanding. They would make changes to their beliefs such as mentally minimising the risk or maximising the perceived benefits of smoking to help accommodate their addiction – “alleviating their cognitive dissonance” by changing from rational to irrational thinking.

Cognitive dissonance theory can explain maintenance of addiction – why people carry on an addictive behaviour despite being fully aware of the risks involved. They distort their own cognitive processes to to minimise perceived cost and maximise perceived benefit, leading themselves to believe their addictive behaviour is self harmful than it actually is.

It can explain initiation - people with negative views towards a substance or behaviour that feel pressured into starting it could mentally minimise risks and maximise rewards in order to justify their own initiation of the behaviour. 

It can explain relapse - maximising benefits and minimising risks of starting again and alleviating negative conseqences when withdrawal symptoms kick in, making reinitiation of the addictive behaviour seem more desirable than it otherwise would without cognitive dissonance.