I am more favorable to the idea of a neural net model in which medical advice can forge a weak connection between the “smoking” pattern and the “cancer” pattern through cognition alone, separate from reinforcement processes but allowing such processes to propagate down it. Not a whole lot of motivational force can travel down such a weak link, blocking it from being effective against a strong desire to keep smoking.
On the other hand, as the experience with smoking bans in recent years has shown, the threat of a modest fine (perhaps also with some shaming involved) is enough to induce smokers to refrain from smoking for long periods of time—even before they’ve paid any fines. This is also true for smokers who otherwise swear that they are helpless addicts, unable to quit despite their best efforts. So assuming your hypothesis is true, a strong link between the “smoking” pattern and the “legal penalty”/”social opprobrium” patterns is established very easily. It’s an interesting question why doctors’ advice fails to have a similar effect, and how much this is due to rational thinking (or plausible rationalizations) involved in the model used in the internal reinforcement there.
As for heroin, obviously it evokes not just the image of a pleasurable high, but also the image of emaciated homeless junkies. The latter you can imagine in all its awfulness even if you’ve never experienced it, but you can’t imagine anything like the feeling of pleasure just from a verbal description. So it makes sense that you might be tempted to become (and remain) a junkie once you’ve tasted heroin, but as long as you haven’t, the negative reinforcement is much stronger.
The latter you can imagine in all its awfulness even if you’ve never experienced it, but you can’t imagine anything like the feeling of pleasure just from a verbal description
This is also the answer to the larger question: we may suppose that a person who clearly visualizes just how bad the cancer would be will be more likely to quit smoking. This seems a fairly testable prediction, since it would imply a greater likelihood of someone quitting smoking if someone they know has suffered lung cancer as a result of their smoking. It would also imply that people instructed to vividly imagine various graphic details of themselves, diseased, every time they want a cigarette, would be more likely to successfully avoid smoking.
The difference in individuals would then quite clearly be attributable to differences in what the person was doing internally when they heard the doctor tell them to quite. Some people more vividly imagine things than others, some have better reference memories for imagining with, some have different prior probabilities for how likely they are to be sick (thus influencing their ability to “see themselves” in that state), etc.
In contrast, the pain of a fine or reproach is quite easy to imagine and is so closely associated with bans of anything that it isn’t even necessary to intentionally imagine it in order for it to work as a reinforcer.
On the other hand, as the experience with smoking bans in recent years has shown, the threat of a modest fine (perhaps also with some shaming involved) is enough to induce smokers to refrain from smoking for long periods of time—even before they’ve paid any fines. This is also true for smokers who otherwise swear that they are helpless addicts, unable to quit despite their best efforts. So assuming your hypothesis is true, a strong link between the “smoking” pattern and the “legal penalty”/”social opprobrium” patterns is established very easily. It’s an interesting question why doctors’ advice fails to have a similar effect, and how much this is due to rational thinking (or plausible rationalizations) involved in the model used in the internal reinforcement there.
As for heroin, obviously it evokes not just the image of a pleasurable high, but also the image of emaciated homeless junkies. The latter you can imagine in all its awfulness even if you’ve never experienced it, but you can’t imagine anything like the feeling of pleasure just from a verbal description. So it makes sense that you might be tempted to become (and remain) a junkie once you’ve tasted heroin, but as long as you haven’t, the negative reinforcement is much stronger.
This is also the answer to the larger question: we may suppose that a person who clearly visualizes just how bad the cancer would be will be more likely to quit smoking. This seems a fairly testable prediction, since it would imply a greater likelihood of someone quitting smoking if someone they know has suffered lung cancer as a result of their smoking. It would also imply that people instructed to vividly imagine various graphic details of themselves, diseased, every time they want a cigarette, would be more likely to successfully avoid smoking.
The difference in individuals would then quite clearly be attributable to differences in what the person was doing internally when they heard the doctor tell them to quite. Some people more vividly imagine things than others, some have better reference memories for imagining with, some have different prior probabilities for how likely they are to be sick (thus influencing their ability to “see themselves” in that state), etc.
In contrast, the pain of a fine or reproach is quite easy to imagine and is so closely associated with bans of anything that it isn’t even necessary to intentionally imagine it in order for it to work as a reinforcer.