Project
Cascading Transitions in the psychosocial sciences (addiction)

We aim to create a formal model of addiction inspired by the model that Van der Maas et al., (2020) proposed for opinion dynamics. The key strength of this model is that it integrates a psychologically informed model of withing person decision making in a social network. A formal model of this type has so far been missing from the addiction literature where most models either focus solely on withing person decision making and neglect social structure or focus on addiction like an epidemic where individuals are reduced to binary nodes (Van den Ende et al., 2022). Because of this limitation of current models, our model could be a key contribution to help advance our understanding of the mechanisms involved in addiction. For the individual model of addiction we draw from a well-studied model from ecology (Ludwig et al., 1979), as we know that this model exhibits the three stable states we observe in alcohol consumption: zero use, moderate use and heavy use (Epskamp et al., 2020).

This project fits with IOPS because of its heavy focus on psychological methods and modelling.

Supervisors
Prof. dr. H.L.J. van der Maas
Prof. dr. R.W.H.J. Wiers
Dr. R.P.P.P. Grasman

Period
1 April 2022 – 1 February 2027