Posted January 22, 2018
Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
This bias describes the tendency for individuals when “cold” (i.e., not craving) to mispredict how they will behave when “hot” (i.e., craving).
The behavior stems in part because people cannot recall the intensity of their own past cravings.
The failure to vividly recall or anticipate the discomfort of craving can explain why people overestimate their own abilities to resist the craving. The challenge for an ex-addict is to keep “alive” memories of the unpleasantness and power of craving.
In summary: Drug addiction is associated with altered decision making that appears to overvalue pleasure, undervalue risk, and cause failure to learn from repeated mistakes.
Thus, addiction might be best viewed as a chronic disease, such as heart disease or diabetes, and not a moral failure, so that most addicts will require long-term treatment, and relapse can be expected to occur sometime during the treatment. Therefore, the occasional relapse is only a predictable setback, not a failure of the treatment.
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