ACX
Your Book Review: Addiction By Design
A review of 'Addiction By Design' examines how gambling machines are engineered for addiction and draws parallels to other digital technologies.
36 min read 5,435 words
A thread through the archive
behavioral psychology
Essays tagged “behavioral psychology”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Essays on behavioral psychology
6 essaysLW
Approving reinforces low-effort behaviors
Scott presents a framework of 'liking,' 'wanting,' and 'approving' to explain behavior, then shows how people use low-effort approving-influenced actions (like making public commitments) to influence harder behaviors through strategic self-manipulation.
8 min read 1,087 words
LW
The limits of introspection
Scott reviews psychological research showing that people don't have introspective access to their own mental processes and instead guess at their reasons for behavior in the same way they would guess at others' motivations.
12 min read 1,741 words
LW
To what degree do we have goals?
Scott argues against negotiating with unconscious desires, distinguishing between behavior-executors (which have context-dependent urges) and utility-maximizers (which have stable preferences), and suggests we mistakenly model ourselves as the latter when we're actually the former.
13 min read 1,971 words
LW
Wanting vs. Liking Revisited
Scott explains why 'wanting' and 'liking' diverge by examining reinforcement learning mechanisms like context-dependence, intermittent reinforcement, and hyperbolic discounting, concluding that this undermines the concept of stable preferences.
8 min read 1,231 words
LW
Basics of Human Reinforcement
Scott explains how reinforcement learning concepts like secondary reinforcers, generalization, and social learning apply to human behavior, while acknowledging these mechanisms don't fully explain complex decisions like quitting smoking on medical advice.
13 min read 1,986 words