Our ideas about deciding divide into two kinds, each of which goes back to ancient times. Theorists from classical Greece to the present have focused on two conspicuous experiences in choice-making, wanting and judging, and have built models around each of them. Models based on wanting say that people weigh the feeling of satisfaction that follows different alternatives and selectively repeat those behaviors that lead to the most satisfaction. Models based on judging take a hierarchy of wants as given and focus on how a person uses logic – or some other cognitive faculty – to relate options to this hierarchy. The weighers, who include the British empiricist philosophers like David Hume, the psychoanalysts, and behaviorists like B. F. Skinner, developed satisfaction-based models that are called “hedonistic” or “economic” or “utilitarian.” On the other side, the German idealists, Jean Piaget, and modern cognitive psychologists like Roy Baumeister and Julius Kuhl have centered their explanations on judgments; this approach is called “cognitive” or “rationalistic.”

Skinner said that not only choice but also deliberation depend on differential reinforcement:

His explanation of addictions is simple: “The effects induced by [addictive] drugs reinforce the behavior of consuming them.” By contrast, cognitivist writers attribute addiction and other “misregulations” to various kinds of interpretive errors, as we're about to see.