Sometimes, the "Why" Really Isn’t Crucial

December 19, 2006

Essay

Sometimes, the "Why" Really Isn’t Crucial
By SALLY SATEL, M.D., NY Times

“Why do I use drugs?” I am asked every few weeks by a patient in our methadone clinic.

I take the query as a good sign; curiosity about oneself is usually healthy. But the premise behind the question — that a person can reliably identify the psychic roots of an addiction, or any other act of self-sabotage — is highly overrated.

Research psychologists have known for decades that it is very difficult to determine causation in mental life and thus, of behavior. For one thing, we can never perform an experiment. Take my patient Karen, 50, who spent most of the 1990s smoking crack. She is certain that the decade-long binge would never have happened had her mother not died when she was 12. We will never know if she is right because we cannot rewind Karen’s life, play it again, and see what would have happened if her mother had lived.

Reconstructing the story of one’s life is a complicated business for other reasons. What scientists call hindsight bias kicks in when we try to figure out the causal chain of events leading to the current situation. We may well come up with a tidy story but, inevitably, it will contain large swaths of revisionist history. It’s not that we bias ourselves deliberately; it happens because the mind tends to make events in the past appear comprehensible and orderly. We forget the uncertainties that might have beset us as we struggled in real time.

For complete article go to:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/health/psychology/19essa.html?ref=psychology

Don Phillips
daphil15 [at] hotmail [dot] com