Rational addiction or preference conflict: Cross-national evidence on mobile phone use

This paper presents an empirical test of rational addiction theory in the context of mobile phone use, using data from a recent survey of approximately 1000 college students from two public and two private institutions in the United States and South Korea. Rational addiction theory views addictive behavior through the lens of the mainstream economic model in which rational, forward-looking consumers with stable preferences, make choices that maximize their expected utility (for example, Becker and Murphy 1988). This model of the psychology of addiction is squarely at odds with most of the behavioral health literature, which views addiction as a pathology, and depicts the behavior of addicted individuals as the result of a battle between uncontrollable cravings for the addictive substance and a rational understanding of the damage done to self and loved ones by its use. Researchers such as Elisabeth Hirschman (1992) tie addiction to emotional trauma, often linked to dysfunctional family histories. They argue that addiction recovery can succeed only if the underlying emotional issues have been addressed. In recent years, neuroscientists have tied addiction to physiological brain processes, often citing evidence from the behavior patterns of laboratory animals exposed to addictive substances (Robinson and Berridge 2008). In a similar spirit, the neuro-economists Douglas Bernheim and Antonio Rangel (2004) model choice as the result of two separate brain pathways, one of which addictive substances can subvert, so that decision makers are systematically prone to make mistakes. In both these alternatives to rational addiction theory, the choices individuals make often do not maximize their expected utility, even when the decision maker has access to complete information. Our survey tested the validity of rational addiction theory by directly asking respondents to evaluate the effect of their mobile phone use on their own well-being. Approximately a third of surveyed students said that they would be happier if they used their phones less. About a quarter reported internal conflict about use of their mobile phones. Belonging to either of these groups was a statistically significant predictor of self-reported adverse outcomes due to mobile phone use with respect to grades and interpersonal relationships, after controlling for demographic factors using multiple regression analysis. If, in the spirit of Occam’s Razor, one accepts the validity of these students’ self-reports, this provides justification for public health interventions to support individuals in their efforts to mitigate the ill-effects of excessive mobile phone use on well-being.