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Summary Choices: Agency, Autonomy and Addiction Notes

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Kings College London (KCL)

Lecture and Reading Summary consisting of 70 pages. Topics include: Psychology & Choice, Personal Decisions, Influences on Choice, Addiction and Substance use, and Gambling Behaviour

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Uploaded on May 22, 2020
Number of pages 73
Written in 2018/2019
Type Summary

psychology
choices
agency
autonomy
addiction
kings college london
kcl

patrycjak Member since 4 year 27 documents sold

TOPIC PAGE NUMBER
PSYCHOLOGY OF CHOICE 1
PERSONAL DECISIONS 5
INFLUENCE ON CHOICE 12
ADDICTION AND SUBSTANCE USE 27
GAMBLING BEHAVIOUR 45

Choices: Agency, Autonomy
and Addiction Notes – Level 5
KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

, THEME 1: PSYCHOLOGY OF CHOICE (Agency)

1.1 Traditio Agency
nal folk- • We perceive ourselves (others) as having agency when our chosen actions lead to our intended outcomes
psychologica • Can have ‘reduced’ sense of agency (if actions were not chosen; outcomes not intended; if outcomes not
l notions perceived as caused by action)
concerning • Agency - Capacity of the individual to act independently and to make their own free choices
our ability to
choose: Free will and Volition
rationality, • Free will – The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own
free will, discretion
volition and • Volition- the faculty or power of using one’s will
agency, • Questioning free will:
capacity & – Biology - If genes influence choice processes, what is ‘free will’
responsibilit – Behaviourism - Skinners view – free will is an illusion – our behaviour is controlled by reinforcement
y. history i.e. we do not deserve credit or blame, Behavioural descriptions lack ‘explanatory value’
– Philosophical - Our actions are caused by psychological processes, which are the result of biological
process in the brain, which are determined by the laws of chemistry etc

Impairments in choice
• Study of Phineas gage
– Blew a long piece of metal through his forehead
– Survived, and intelligence large intact. However, seemingly impaired decision making
– Damage to different ‘brain systems’ produce systematic changes in the choices made
• What we’d expect if our voluntary choices are the result of processes in the brain
– If those with damage tend to make different choices to those who are intact, it is reasonable to regard
the damage as ‘impairing choice processes’
– As long as the choices are less beneficial

Voluntary/Involuntary choices
• Psychologists tend to ignore this issue and think of voluntary choices as those which lack the properties would
make us regard them as involuntary E.g. coercion, external triggering
• We have a clear sense that some of our actions are less or not at all the result of our choices
• Not free will
– Reflex actions, habits, addiction, compulsions
• Skinner – behaviourist
– Studied ‘free operant behaviour’ = Organism is free to choose whether and when to respond
– Science should not describe free will (Skinner 1971)
– Our actions, + choices, should be described as behaviours selected due to their reinforcement history
– Rejecting – and accept that science can talk about unobservable psychological states, not only about
observed behaviour, we use skinner’s observations as demonstrating that desire or tendency to produce
a behaviour is increased through reinforcement
– Accepting – reinforcement history / operant conditioning influences our behaviour does not itself
challenge the notion of voluntary choice
• Other areas
– ‘voluntary choosing’ as a mental process that can be manipulated in the lab or can go wrong – certain
patient groups make systematically different choices to healthy individuals and when these choices
typically lead to poorer outcomes for these individuals, we would say their decisions making process are
impaired
– EXAMPLE – patients with lesions to the frontal regions of the brain
➢ Make choices which seem to weight short term goals more strongly than those of healthy
individuals or indicate a greater willingness to accept risks (Clark et al., 2000)

Pragmatic approach
• Perceiving agency may be functional in understanding the world
• Free will / volition / intention can be considered as the result of process which lead to choices being made
• We can use mental state language (preference, desire, choice) without needing to worry about dualism /
determinism
• We sometime claim a ‘reflex’ is caused / triggered by a stimulus and out selected action may be described as
involuntary (coerced, compulsion or habitual actions may not be ‘chosen’)

Agency, capacity and responsibility

1

, • In UK law, individuals may be identified as lacking capacity to make certain choices
• Concepts of agency – or “capacity to decide” is important in forensic psychology and psychiatry
• E.g. mental health act 1983/2007 ‘admission and detention for treatment’
• Simialrily certain individuals may be regarded as less responsible for their actions at certain times – e.g. defence
of ‘duress’ or ‘insanity’ ; mitigation by ‘diminished responsibility’
• Legal systems – generally include the outcome, the degree of perceived agency or intent if considering how
‘responsible’ an actor is
• Law – regard certain individuals as lacking capacity to choose, or responsibility for actions

What makes a good choice
• Whether the outcome was good – substantive criterion
• But we cannot claim something is a good or bad choice until we know the final outcome
• The same decision could be both good and bad on this criterion

Terminology
• Normative = do we follow the optimal procedure (e.g. mathematical solution) to obtain the best answer, using
relevant information
• Adaptive = do we follow a process that, overall, is good enough for our purposes / goals
• Substantive = do we get it right (for whatever reason)
• Bounded = do we follow a process that is under specific circumstances (information, time, and resources)

Irrationality
• A normative theory of (‘rational’ choice based on value of outcome) suggests that our preferred options will not
change based on e.g. irrelevant comparisons
• But they do – phenomena sometimes referred to as ‘decision paradoxes’ in economics
• When human behaviour does not match predictions of a theory of human behaviour – economists label the
human choices as paradoxes

Bad decisions are informative
• We don’t always choose badly (If we did, how would we know they were bad choices?)
• But we make some bad choices, so a normative theory that proposes ‘we are always optimal’ isn’t enough.
• Can we learn how choices are made by trying to understand the mistakes?

Normative theory
• We wish to evaluate choice processes not outcomes
• A normative theory describes the ‘best possible strategy’ for selecting a choice
• It describes what one should do, just like a social ‘norm’
• A normative account of a choice
• Defines the ‘best way to select an option’

How do we choose
• Kahneman & Tversky point out that deviations from normative choice due to task features (biases) implies that
these features are incorporated into our decision-making.
• Suggest (some) decisions based on simple, quick rules based on limited information (heuristics).
1.2 Psychol
ogical
theories
describing
the ‘quality’
of choices:
Normative,
Descriptive
and
Prescriptive
views. (S)

Describing rationality
Substanti A choice that led to a good outcome
ve

2

, Normativ A choice based on the best possible strategy (given the information available to the chooser)
e
Adaptive A ‘good enough’ choice for the overall goals (a good trade-off between outcome and the effort or resourced
required to do better)

Theories of Decision
Prescripti A theory of which choice is best/ what one should choose (i.e. a theory that describes which is the best
ve possible / rational choice).
Descripti A theory that describes how/what people actually choose (even if this is ‘wrong’, or inconsistent)
ve
Normativ A theory that tries to explain ways to improve people’s decision- making
e
1.3 Ways How can we measure the process of voluntary choice in the lab
that • Franciscus Cornelis Donders
researchers – Measure the amount of time “choosing” takes
have found – Choosing time = choice RT – simple RT
to study – Calculated how much took longer to press a button when a light came
volition in on if a decision whether to press was involved.
the – This approach started the technique of mental chronometry –
laboratory, measuring reaction times to answer questions about the processes
including the involved.
measureme • Donders’ method of subtraction
nt of agency – Obvious criticism: assumes pure insertion of a choice process
and free will – E.g. the ‘press’ stage is more complicated to plan?
via mental – Perhaps processes “overlap” in time
chronometr • W.E. Hick
y, and – Choice time increases with more alternatives
understandi – RT is linear with logarithm nOptions + 1
ng of some – Roughly – doubling number of choices has fixed effect on RT
key findings – Found that the time to decide increased in proportion to the logarithm of the number of choices (so
(e.g. Libet’s doubling the number of choices adds a fixed amount of time to the process)
methods; – This result is still an important principle used by those who design choice menus for people to use (e.g. in
intentional restaurants or computer operating systems).
binding). • Hick’s law
– Hick suggested RT increase due to amount of information required to select action (‘number of bits
required’)
– This notion of choosing / thinking being form of ‘information processing’ was the dominant notion in
1950s lab psychology
– Applied (to this day) in designing choice menus, and is used in some forms of IQ test
– Slope is ‘time per “bit” of information’
– Faster processing = shallower slope

How do we choose?
• Hick suggested that the process of “selecting one response option from many” was like the operation of a digital
computer – we need to ‘process enough information’ to identify the correct response.

Subjective timing (Libet, 1999)
• Laboratory study of free will has focused on the perception of time. Libet (1985)
• Method
– Asked participants to judge when they felt
the urge to act by matching the time on a
rotating clock, and found this was after EEG
signals predicting the response.
• Libet suggested the role of conscious choice was to
stop actions, not start them.
• The subjective ‘wish’ occurs later than an EEG signal
predicting the response
• Conscious will is later than starting of action
• Free will = veto or “stop signal”
• Of our estimate of when our urge occurs is more “late-biased”

3

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