Authors: Omar Manejwala
Hindsight Bias
Another bias I’ll frequently see in people who crave is called the hindsight bias. This is a bias that basically allows you to believe that, even though you recently acquired a belief, you really have thought that way for a long time. A more precise description is that when people are asked to recall a former response after having been told the correct response, what they remember tends to drift toward the correct response. Remember, biases serve important roles. They protect your sense of self. It is important for you to believe that you make good decisions, that you are in control, and that you have not been fooled. Protecting that belief is far more important to your brain than seeing the truth. Research shows that people who are more vulnerable to the hindsight bias are often more concerned with their image, social desirability, and need for predictability and control.
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The hindsight bias helps you protect those beliefs. I will sometimes see patients whose self-destructive behaviors have resulted in destroyed marriages, estranged children, lost jobs, and alienated friends. Sometimes it’s drug addiction; other times it’s gambling addiction or even eating disorders. When I meet such people and ask them why they engaged in these self-destructive behaviors, they will often tell me, “Doc, I knew what I was doing, I just was:
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.
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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.
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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 aspects of this bias in a groundbreaking paper published in 2001 entitled “You Don’t Know Me, But I Know You: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight.”
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The key observation she made was that “People think they know others better than others know them. People think they know themselves better than others know themselves.”
Pronin and her colleagues conducted very elegant experiments that assessed what people think they know about their close friends, how well roommates believe they know themselves and each other, how revealing people believe their own behaviors are compared to that of their peers, how well people believe that they can know someone after a brief meeting, and how “knowable” they think they are compared to their peers when performing certain types of psychological testing.
Their experiments clearly confirmed the existence and extent of the illusion of asymmetric insight. Pronin and her colleagues describe this bias as a special case of
naïve realism.
In other words, we believe we have special insight into the nature of the behavior of others and of ourselves, and that others don’t have such insight. As absurd as that sounds when spelled out, several of Pronin’s fascinating experiments have confirmed that we really do regularly exhibit this form of naïve realism.
The relevance for people with cravings is that, in my experience, they severely discount other people’s suggestions, because “they couldn’t know or understand me.” As a result, they often trust themselves and discount the suggestions of others, perpetuating the dysfunctional behaviors that either result in or result from cravings. Pronin went on to study how members of groups assess their own group’s bias versus an opposing group’s bias. In
chapter 7
, we’ll explore how membership in a group enhances trust and how this can be helpful when dealing with cravings. And in
chapter 8
we’ll discuss a technique for addressing this bias called the Johari window.
To further compound the bias problem, although the evidence is mixed, it does seem that, in general, people tend to attribute successes to themselves and failures to others. Psychologists call this the self-serving bias. This bias can create significant problems for someone who is trying to address cravings. Any of the attribution biases—biases where the credit for something is pointed in the wrong direction—can spell trouble when it comes to addressing cravings, because with all of these behaviors people are sometimes successful in controlling the behavior and sometimes not. If you are unclear why your efforts have succeeded or failed, then any attempt to correct the problem could be unsuccessful. People don’t always show a self-serving bias. The late Thomas “Shelley” Duval and Paul Silvia from the University of Southern California have suggested that success and failure attributions are driven by focusing on yourself, being aware of yourself, and believing that you can improve.
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According to Duval and Silvia, if a person is self-focused and believes he can improve, then success is attributed internally, and failure is also attributed internally; as a result, the bias is limited. In other words, the person would take credit for successes and accept personal responsibility for failures. If the same person believes he can’t improve, then there is a tendency to attribute failure externally; in other words, to blame others for their failures. This has significant implications for hope, which we’ll discuss in
chapter 10
.
Blind Spot Bias
Of course, there are hundreds of types of bias, and no one is immune. In fact, one type of bias, often referred to as “blind spot bias” (which is really a form of a broader bias called asymmetry bias), is used to describe people who think of themselves as less biased than others. Some very interesting research from Dr. Joyce Ehrlinger shows that people think they are more likely to exhibit bias in the abstract rather than in specific, defined examples. Additionally, people tend to believe that their personal connection to an issue renders their conclusions more likely to be accurate, but they discount the effect of a personal connection when assessing other people’s conclusions.
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This blind spot bias is particularly dangerous when it comes to cravings, as people who struggle with cravings may severely discount the effect that bias plays in their decision-making; this underestimation can, in my experience, result in prolonged and more intense cycles of craving and acting out, as people simply don’t believe that their actions are affected by the cognitive biases we have explored in this chapter.
The Tenacity of Craving
“What is allowed us is disagreeable, what is denied us causes us intense desire.”
— OVID
Many of the people I have worked with over the years point out how stubborn cravings are. They often describe the sense that something has sunk its teeth into them and is not letting go. The harder they tug to try to remove it, the deeper the bite. Many of my patients describe this as wanting what they cannot have. Psychologists refer to our response to perceived constrained freedom as “reactance.”
But we don’t always want what we can’t have. Studies in the late 1970s demonstrated that when heroin addicts were given the medication naltrexone, which blocks the effects of heroin and other opiates, their cravings actually went down. Once the addicts were aware that they couldn’t get high, they were less likely to crave! This finding persisted even when they were around other heroin addicts who were actually getting high.
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When are we more likely to want what we can’t have? In a classic reactance experiment by Paul Cherulnik and Murray Citrin, 180 college students were shown four posters and asked to rank which was their first, second, third, and fourth choice.
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They were told they would get their first-choice poster. Cherulnik and Citrin measured the students’ “locus of control” using a validated scale that established whether their locus of control was internal (they tended to believe that they control their own lives) or external (they tended to believe that their lives were controlled by external factors beyond their own control).
Two days later, they divided the students into three groups: one group was told they lost their third choice because of a shipment problem (impersonal reason). A second group was told that their third-choice poster arrived in limited quantities and that their third choice was removed as an option for them on the basis of personal reasons (an assessment of their scholastic records). Finally, a third group was a control group and was simply asked to re-rate their choices.
The results were fascinating. The students with an internal locus of control showed an increased desire for the unavailable third-choice poster when the reason for elimination was personal. On the other hand, the students with an external locus of control showed an increased desire for the unavailable third-choice poster when the reason for elimination was impersonal. What does this mean, and what does this have to do with cravings?
What it means is that it’s not always true that you want what you can’t have. This study shows that what you believe about the reason you can’t have something affects whether or not you want it. If you believe that the primary power that controls your life is also the primary reason you can’t have something, you want it more. This has significant implications when it comes to cravings, because it means that if you can develop a different perspective about why you are experiencing cravings, you may be able to reduce the depth of the bite. In my successful patients who believe in a higher power, when they experience cravings, they don’t blame God. They simply describe it as a part of their illness that they can diminish or alleviate by talking with others and practicing their program. By separating the locus of control, they achieve success and a reduction in their desire. We’ll explore these concepts further in
chapters 7
and
10
.
The Vicious Craving Cycle
Thus far in this chapter we’ve seen how distortions and bias in thinking can lead to problems in how we handle cravings, resulting in more cravings because we cannot see clearly enough to address them. However, there is another force that drives cravings: cravings themselves. To see how this works, consider this example:
Tom is driving home from a particularly hard day of work after successfully quitting smoking for four days. He begins to crave a cigarette again but manages to resist the craving. He notices that his gas tank is down to less than a quarter full. There is enough to get home, but he may not have time tomorrow morning to fill it, so he decides to stop at a gas station. When paying for his gas, he notices the cigarette display. He decides he is only going to have one cigarette, but of course they aren’t sold individually. So he purchases a pack with the intention of smoking one and then throwing the rest away. After purchasing the pack, he thinks to himself, “Throwing these away would be a waste of money. I’ll just give the rest to my coworker tomorrow who is a smoker.” By the time he goes to bed, however, he has smoked the entire pack.