Addiction and the Mental Accounting Barrier

I have been thinking about this blog/essay by Nick Szabo called The Mental Accounting Barrier to Micropayments in relation to addiction and recovery (if you don’t know who Szabo is trust me, you WANT to familirize yourself with his writings http://unenumerated.blogspot.ca/). The Mental Accounting Barrier calls attention to our unwillingness to sometimes spend the necessary time to maximize our cost-saving. Here he gives some examples:

Sometimes statements account for transactions in gratuitously small increments, such as the 100 watt-hour resolution on some electricity bills. There are plenty of things most folks normally don't work out regarding their electricity bills, which could improve the value they get for their electricity payments:

Which appliances are using more electricity with less personal benefit (not available on the electricity bill -- but one can conceive of a personal accounting program tied to smart appliances that let you do this).

How to better balance electric vs. gas heat (you could compute this in detail and save a few bucks, but you'd earn extra money faster by moonlighting).

If the electricity company was a less reliable and widely known entity, you also might not trust them with the billing and would recompute it to the resolution you felt comfortable with, and accept fraud or fine-print trickery below that level. (Since electricity is fungible and the pricing ruleset small you could have a program check the bill, which is efficient if it catches enough fine-print shenanigans for enough people to recoup software development & marketing costs).

The reason we don't do the things is that they're not worth the brain cycles: we have reached the mental accounting barrier.

I notice this barrier when shopping for groceries. It doesn’t seem to matter what item I am looking to purchase, I am always bombarded with a most disorganized presentation of choices. It’s not enough to see the prices, since each product has it’s own specifications that I don’t really have time to research when I am simply just trying to buy dinner and few other groceries. I always think about how I wish I had an app with my mobile that I could use as a lens that would tell me exactly what I am looking for and which item is the most cost-efficient in that regard.

We miss a lot of opportunities for value or savings because of this type of mental friction, and I can’t help but think that this is related to our emotional brain and our “fight or flight” responses. Having to do the necessary calculations getting tiring and confusing and eventually we get irritated and make an impulse buy on a close but not ideal fit to what we ideally are looking to buy. (We can note from the MERCHANT'S perspective this might actually be optimal and we should be wary of our emotions especially when dealing with salespersons.)

I think of this in relation to addiction. When someone is heavily addicted, I consider this akin to having their emotional brain flared. They get into a fight or flight mode until they can see a clear path to their drug or habit of choice. It can be pointed out, that in this state, there can be very little logical brain power used to sort out thoughts other than creating a clear path to their intended goal (usually to get high).

I think we can consider this from another perspective as well though.

There DOES seem to be a limitation that each addict will go through in order to fulfill their needs. I think we can consider this limitation to be very comparable and related to the mental accounting barrier and this barrier might be useful, if we can study and understand it in regard to getting clean and staying clean.

An addict might not take the quickest path to getting high. Given the choice between sawing off one’s own arm, or waiting one more hour to get high rather than immediately, it seems obvious in nearly all circumstances the addict would wait.

We might also bring awareness to the availability of a drug in regard to physical distance. Here I am thinking about how addicts often go away for treatment far from the town and networks they are used to being around. I suspect that once they are far away, the statistics will show many or most addicts do in fact stay clean. But I also suspect that it's only for that period they are away that the statistics are so favorable.

I’m not sure the scientific force I am thinking about here, but it seems to be akin to magnetism in that regard. That if drugs are near to the addict they are probably near impossible to stay away (like magnets that are relatively close in proximity), but as the ability to get near the drugs gets further and further away, especially physically in distance, the need to get high diminishes to a manageable level (like magnets that are far apart, the attraction is basically impossible to feel or see from the human senses).

To me this all suggests, that we CAN put small barriers in the way, including distance, of our mental functions that can help us stay clean. Traditionally I think we do tackle this problem from this perspective, like getting rid of dealers numbers for example or changing one’s own phone numbers.

But here I am also thinking from a different perspective which is keeping the mind and daily duties free from congestion in relation to mental accounting.

Often heroin addicts use methane to help them quit and recover from heroin addiction. They wake up feeling some withdrawal symptoms, weak, and sometimes craving, and yet if they can get to their medicine often they can keep these symptoms manageable. They are chained to this process, but it can help them bring their life back into order and create a new culture and habit for doing so.

But they have to get to the pharmacy every day and this can sometimes mean they have to battle through some of their old hang outs or see old contacts that might even be getting methadone themselves (or just hanging around down town).

We can imagine if the route the recovering addict must take to get their methadone didn’t involve any such triggers, and perhaps they had a ride, it might be quite easy to get to their medicine on a daily basis. But now imagine instead that their dealers house, or even a free sample of their drugs, was always on the way to their medicine. Or that the drug house was a short walk away, and the methadone clinic required a complex morning of traversing the bus system. I would wager in this circumstance staying clean, especially at least in initial recovery would be next to impossible.

So here we have the beginning of the basis for a theory in regard to addiction recovery that attends to Nick Szabo’s computer science and economic science based observations on our mental accounting barrier. Addicts wishing to recover could really use BOTH a congested path to their drug of choice while also having a cleared path to their recovery.

Such an observation might eventually be quantifiable in this regard (especially with a standard basis for a monetary unit), and I think the philosophy of it would be helpful not only for the addict trying to take back control of their life, but also the loved ones, and support works that wish to aid the addict in their recovery process.