Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Clinical disorders are multidimensional phenomena that are important to both clinicians and the lay public, as well as to cognitive scientists interested in understanding how people think and reason about complex domains. To date, however, little work has examined the factors that influence the folk psychiatry of addiction. Participants in the present study read a brief paragraph about addiction pitched at either an abstract or personal level, followed by a series of questions about the causes and treatment of drug addiction. We further manipulated whether addiction was described using a medical or psychological label. Results revealed that liberals and conservatives varied dramatically with respect to their folk psychiatric reasoning, with liberals preferring a more biological/medical view, which is associated increased support for medical interventions, reduced feelings of personal responsibility, and elevated feelings of stigma. Framing addiction using medical labels and at an abstract level pushed people towards this biological view, suggesting that media reports and messaging campaigns may influence how people conceptualize addiction.