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- One individual differences explanation of addictive behaviour is personality

Introduction

Supporting evidence

-            Francis (1996): addicts (nicotine, alcohol, heroin) scored higher in neuroticism and psychoticism than non-addicts.

-          Supports the idea that personality traits contribute to substance addiction.

-            High psychoticism may be linked to impulsivity.

-           High neuroticism may drive individuals to use substances to cope with emotional instability.

Methodological

-           A key methodological issue with personality theory is the inability to establish cause and effect.

-            Most supporting research is correlational, not causal.

-            Two possibilities:

• Personality traits may predispose individuals to addiction.

• Addiction itself may alter personality (e.g., increase impulsivity or neuroticism).

-            This limits the theory’s explanatory power, as it’s unclear which causes which.

Intro

-          A second individual differences explanation of addictive behaviour is cognitive biases  

Supporting

-           Griffiths (1994) studied 30 regular and 30 non-regular fruit machine gamblers.

-           Regular gamblers showed significantly more irrational verbalisations (14%) than non-regular gamblers (2.5%).

-            These verbalisations reflected cognitive biases and heuristics (e.g., illusion of control, gambler’s fallacy).

-           Supports the idea that cognitive biases are more common in addicted individuals.

-            Findings reinforce the role of individual differences in gambling addiction.

Refuting

-           A key issue with cognitive biases as an explanation for gambling is that they may only describe gamblers’ thoughts, not explain the cause of gambling.

-            Effective explanations should be able to predict behaviour, but cognitive biases lack predictability.

-           It is unclear when or why a particular bias will occur.

-            Even the same person may use different biases at different times without a clear pattern.

-          Therefore, cognitive biases offer an incomplete explanation for gambling addiction.

Methodological

-           Methodological issues exist in research on cognitive biases and addiction.

-           Questionnaires (e.g., Gambling Belief Questionnaire) rely on self-report, which may not be accurate.

-          Responses can be affected by:

• Demand characteristics – participants guessing the aim of the study.

• Social desirability bias – reluctance to admit irrational thoughts.

-            Gamblers may hide or downplay irrational beliefs, reducing the validity of findings.

-            Therefore, research using questionnaires should be interpreted with caution.

Ignores social context of gambling

-            A limitation of individual differences explanations (e.g., personality, cognitive biases) is that they often ignore social factors.

-            Social influences, such as financial stress, can play a key role in the development of addiction.

-           For example, someone in financial difficulty may be drawn to gambling as a quick fix.

-           These explanations fail to consider contextual and environmental factors that may trigger or sustain addictive behaviour.

-            This makes them incomplete as stand-alone explanations for addiction

Reductionists

-            Both individual differences explanations (personality and cognitive biases) are reductionist.

-            They focus narrowly on internal traits, ignoring environmental and biological factors (e.g., peer influence, genetics, neurochemistry).

-           As a result, these explanations are limited in scope and less useful for fully understanding addiction.

-            A more holistic approach is needed to account for the complexity of addictive behaviour.

Deterministics

-            Both individual differences explanations are deterministic, suggesting that certain traits or biases inevitably lead to addiction.

-          This view ignores free will and personal choice in behaviour.

-           In reality, not everyone with high neuroticism, psychoticism, or cognitive biases becomes addicted.

-           This limits the explanations, as they overlook individual agency and variation in outcomes.

conclusion

In conclusion, these individual differences explanations do shed some light on certain personality types associated with addictive behaviour and certain cognitive biases that addicts may display which could prove useful in helping to treat addiction.

However, biological explanations such as the role of dopamine and social explanations, such as peer influence can also be useful and therefore, we shoul