Humans are always learning new things every day of their lives,

whether they are learning how to improve themselves or how the

world around them works. They learn what is good and what is
bad, what behaviors help increase their chance of survival, and
what behaviors help get themselves a certain reward. Whether
that reward is something vital to their existence or just brings
some form of pleasure, humans will learn or teach others how to
achieve that goal. Humans also teach each other what are
terrible things to do and what the consequences are for those
actions. It is an ongoing cycle that will last forever, parent to
child and vice versa. However, how people learn and where they
learn it from can cause or be effected by addiction.
Certain…show more content…

The newest student in a school will learn to act how people want
them to act, an employee will work the way their employers
want them to work, and a child will do what their parents do.
The last bond, the one between parent and child, is the strongest
one and where a person will learn the most from. From birth,
people look up to their parents and learn from them, whether or
not the person knows what they are learning from them. In some
cases, some less than desirable behaviors are picked up, despite
whatever the parent says about the behavior. This is what
observational learning is. Observational learning is when a
person learns by example, usually by seeing what other people
do in certain situations (Spielman, 2014). More often than not,
these people are authority figures or people who looked up to. If
a child sees their parent doing something, whether its drinking
after a stressful day at work or smoking an addictive substance,
they begin to copy that behavior later on. A child, who will one
day grow up, will remember how their parents decided to
unwind, falling into the same addictions as they saw their
parents did when they were young. A child would think that
doing drugs or drinking large amounts of alcohol was a good
way of dealing with problems or life, carrying that with them
into their adulthood. Just because they saw their most trusted
authority figures do…show more content…

Addiction does go beyond just drugs and alcohol. Take

gambling for example. People get addicted to gambling, paying
more and money for a payout that may never happen, an
especially prevalent problem for those with addictive
personalities. People who are affected by this are on a variable
reinforcement schedule, which is hard to break. A variable
reinforcement schedule is when a person learns a behavior by
being rewarded for doing something after a random amount of
times (Spielman, 2014). That is what kind of conditioning
schedule gambling parlors use to increase the amount of times a
person uses their machines or bets on their cards. They make
them believe that they can at any time, encouraging them to play
more. The extinction of this behavior from this conditioning
schedule is extremely slow. Extinction is when a behavior starts
to die out and appears less and less, until its gone (Spielman,
2014). However, gambling addicts can stop. Either they begin to
lose too many times or they are forced by their loved ones to
stop and go to rehab, the addictive behavior will eventually
regress and go through extinction. Addiction is a behavior that
can be taught, but it can also be broken in time. However, people
do relapse, so the process may have to be gone through all over
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