Smoking: The Social Learning of an Addiction

This paper criticizes the view that smoking is addictive for adults but socially determined among adolescents. Conditioning and attributional approaches to the explanation of addiction are compared. A synthesis is suggested on the basis of the assumption that smokers may come to attribute a variety of mood changes to smoking or smoking deprivation, including some not necessarily caused directed by nicotine. As for social factors, it is argued that their influence on smoking has been too often interpreted merely in terms of conformits pressures. However, an adolescent's reference group also provides a social identity distinct from other groups, a set of standards for self-evaluation, and a source of information and expectancies about smoking behavior and experiences. These comprise a process of social learning that may influence how adolescent smokers label their emotional states and their reasons for smoking in a way that may predispose them cognitively to later addiction.