Understanding Human Learning and its Link to Addiction

Humans are always learning new things every day of their lives, whether they are learning how to improve themselves or how the world around them works. They learn what is good and what is bad, what behaviors help increase their chance of survival, and what behaviors help get themselves a certain reward. Whether that reward is something vital to their existence or just brings some form of pleasure, humans will learn or teach others how to achieve that goal. Humans also teach each other what are terrible things to do and what the consequences are for those actions. It is an ongoing cycle that will last forever, parent to child and vice versa. However, how people learn and where they learn it from can cause or be effected by addiction. Certain

The newest student in a school will learn to act how people want them to act, an employee will work the way their employers want them to work, and a child will do what their parents do. The last bond, the one between parent and child, is the strongest one and where a person will learn the most from. From birth, people look up to their parents and learn from them, whether or not the person knows what they are learning from them. In some cases, some less than desirable behaviors are picked up, despite whatever the parent says about the behavior. This is what observational learning is. Observational learning is when a person learns by example, usually by seeing what other people do in certain situations (Spielman, 2014). More often than not, these people are authority figures or people who looked up to. If a child sees their parent doing something, whether its drinking after a stressful day at work or smoking an addictive substance, they begin to copy that behavior later on. A child, who will one day grow up, will remember how their parents decided to unwind, falling into the same addictions as they saw their parents did when they were young. A child would think that doing drugs or drinking large amounts of alcohol was a good way of dealing with problems or life, carrying that with them into their adulthood. Just because they saw their most trusted authority figures do

Addiction does go beyond just drugs and alcohol. Take gambling for example. People get addicted to gambling, paying more and money for a payout that may never happen, an especially prevalent problem for those with addictive personalities. People who are affected by this are on a variable reinforcement schedule, which is hard to break. A variable reinforcement schedule is when a person learns a behavior by being rewarded for doing something after a random amount of times (Spielman, 2014). That is what kind of conditioning schedule gambling parlors use to increase the amount of times a person uses their machines or bets on their cards. They make them believe that they can at any time, encouraging them to play more. The extinction of this behavior from this conditioning schedule is extremely slow. Extinction is when a behavior starts to die out and appears less and less, until its gone (Spielman, 2014). However, gambling addicts can stop. Either they begin to lose too many times or they are forced by their loved ones to stop and go to rehab, the addictive behavior will eventually regress and go through extinction. Addiction is a behavior that can be taught, but it can also be broken in time. However, people do relapse, so the process may have to be gone through all over