Carrots and sticks fail to change behavior in cocaine addiction
"Addiction does not happen overnight but develops from behaviour that has been repeated over and over again until individuals lose control," said Dr Karen Ersche from the Department of Psychiatry, who led the research. In a study reported today in the journal Science, Dr Ersche and colleagues tested 125 participants, of whom 72 were addicted to cocaine and 53 had no history of drug addiction, on their inclination to develop habits. They found that people with cocaine addiction were much more likely than healthy participants to make responses in an automatic fashion, but only if they had previously been rewarded for responding in the same way. The addicted individuals simply continued repeating the same responses they had previously learned, regardless of whether their actions made sense or not. In a different context, however, where participants had to perform an action to avoid electrical shocks, people with cocaine addiction did not develop habits. In fact, they wer...