Learning Mechanisms in Smoking by William A. Hunt

Author:William A. Hunt [Hunt, William A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Disease & Health Issues
ISBN: 9781351509282
Google: kyEuDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 13690709
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2007-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Internal Contingency

The discovery of membership in an ethically repugnant class could act to affect behavior in several ways. The discovery alone cannot be the whole story. It is, so to speak, only knowledge, a cognitive-emotional state of affairs, and a mechanism must be devised that will enable this knowledge to affect behavior. In one alternative the humiliation attendant upon the discovery would act like any other aversive event—with, however, some considerable potential advantages over the standard aversive events of the laboratory. All laboratory cases involve external contingencies: a conditional relation between an antecedent consisting of a response by the subject and a consequence consisting of an event in the world external to the subject. In classical examples, if a subject presses a lever, a food pellet is released or an electric shock is turned on or off. The antecedent is instanced by the subject, the consequence by the world outside him. The weakness of this kind of control mechanism has already been demonstrated for worlds containing more than one room.

If not only the antecedent but also the consequence is put inside the subject, what might be called an internal contingency obtains, a seemingly far more powerful mechanism of control. The power would come from the fact that the person is then his own source of food pellets or, in this case, electric shock and would be so no matter which room of the world he chanced to be in. At least it would be so if the moral standards were constant and did not fluctuate notably from room to room. Even though this view is not strictly true, the approximation may hold sufficiently to give the internal contingency its special power.

Some of the awkwardness of this machinery can be alleviated simply by invoking standard anticipatory mechanisms. To suffer humiliation, the person would not actually have to smoke but would merely have to contemplate smoking. The contingency would then be wholly internal—that is, the antecedent would no longer be smoking but the thought of smoking, and the consequence would be the equally internal humiliation. Now one could be guilty by intention alone, and the control mechanism would seem to have achieved not only power but elegance as well.

In summary, for an individual to discover that he is a member of a strongly interdicted class can be acutely humiliating. Each time the person engages in behavior that made him a member of the class—smokes or contemplates smoking—he reexperiences the humiliation. If humiliation acts like aversive shock it suppresses or, if the magnitude effect is proper, even totally eliminates smoking. But an internal contingency, though possibly a necessary condition for quitting smoking, is not a sufficient one; and other factors must be considered, not the least of which is smoking itself, an act conditioned to virtually every time and place in the individual’s environment.

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