Addiction Mindsets and Psychological Processes of Quitting Smoking

Abstract

Background: Lay belief systems about the malleability of human attributes have been shown to impact behavior change in multiple domains. Addiction mindset—i.e., beliefs about the permanence (vs. malleability) of addiction — may affect cigarette smokers’ ability to quit, but this has never been examined. Objectives: The aims of the present research were to develop a measure of addiction mindset (study 1) and examine its associations with various psychological aspects of quitting smoking (study 2). Methods: In Study 1, using factor analysis of current smokers’ and nonsmokers’ (n = 600) responses to 22 items designed to measure addiction mindset, we developed a reliable six-item Addiction Mindset Scale (AMS). In Study 2, adult smokers (n = 200) completed the AMS, and measures of a number of psychological processes related to smoking. Results: Higher scores on the AMS, indicative of the belief that addiction is malleable (referred to as a growth mindset), were positively and significantly associated with greater motivation to quit, greater commitment to quitting, greater self-efficacy to abstain, less attribution of failure to lack of ability to change addiction, and fewer self-reported barriers to cessation (all p’s < .05). Conclusions: The results of this study show a relationship between the beliefs about the permanence of addiction and psychological processes relevant to quitting smoking. The findings underscore the potential of future research exploring how addiction mindsets relate to successful smoking cessation as well as other types of addictive behavior and how they can be applied to change people’s behavior.

Keywords:

• Addiction
• psychology
• mindset
• cigarette smoking
• beliefs

Disclosure statement

Dr. Bricker has served as a consultant for GlaxoSmithKline and serves on the advisory board of Chrono Therapeutics. Dr. Heffner has received research support from Pfizer. None of the other authors have financial conflicts to disclose.

Notes

1  Among smokers, six items with high loadings on the first factor also had non-trivial loadings on the second or the third factor. Among non-smokers, seven items cross-loaded on the first and second, or first and fourth factors. One item (“addiction is something you either have or don’t have”) uniquely loaded on a third factor and was removed.

2  The mean, median, and mode score on the AMS in study 2 was 4.00. The scores ranged from 1.16 to 6.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this project comes from the Hutch United Doctoral Fellowship awarded to Vasundhara Sridharan and from National Cancer Institute R01CA192849 awarded to Jonathan Bricker. Funders had no role in the study design, collection, analysis or interpretation of the data, writing the manuscript, or the decision to submit the paper for publication.