![]() That is, they might developed their addiction through building social connections not through lacking them.ĭuring that testing period, animals had access to two kinds of water: tap water and the experimental batch. In fact, many of the habitual smokers I've known did not seem like people lacking social connections to begin with smoking was quite the social activity, and many people started smoking because their friends did. Now it's possible that they're incorrect - that has been known to happen when you ask people to introspect - but I don't see any reason to assume they are incorrect by default. By contrast, about 50% of the ex-smokers cited just deciding it was time and quitting cold turkey as their preferred method. Unfortunately for his hypothesis, only 6% of ex-smokers attribute their success to those social factors. If addiction is the opposite of human connection, as human connections increase, addiction should drop. If Johann's hypothesis is correct and people are like isolated rats in a cage when addicted, we might expect the number who quit successfully through social support to be quite high. Another number sticks out, though: the number of people who attribute their success in quitting to support from friends and family. That seems like a low number, and one that doesn't quite fit with the chemical hook hypothesis. From the gallup poll data I dug up, we can see that approximately 5% of those who have quit smoking attribute their success to the patch. One rather troublesome thorn for this explanation rears its head only a few passages later, when Johann is discussing how the nicotine patch does not help most smokers successfully quit about 18% is the quoted percentage of those who quit through the patch, though that percentage is not properly sourced. I find this interpretation to be incomplete and stated far too boldly. So let's talk about giving drugs to mice and men. As a result, some people might - intentionally or not - game their research towards obtaining certain patterns of results that reflect positively or negative on other groups or, as in today's case, highlight some research other people as being particularly important because it encourages us to treat others a certain way. Anyone who has feared being mugged by a group of adolescent males at night and not feared being mugged by a group of children at a playground during the day understand this point intuitively. ![]() After all, if I believed (correctly) that people like you tend to be more or less than others, it would be a fairly rational strategy for me to adjust my behavior around you accordingly if I had no information about you other than that piece of information. More generally, I believe that such an issue arises because of what the interpretation of some results says about the association value of particular groups or individuals. In my post, I mentioned the very real possibility that as people's personal biases make their way into research, the quality of that research might begin to decline.
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