{"pk":49887,"title":"What is addiction? Substance-specific biases in human beliefs and LLMs","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Understanding how individuals conceptualize addiction is an important approach to the study of substance use etiology. We asked participants in a large free-response study of of intuitive conceptualizations of addiction among alcohol and cannabis users and co-users to share their beliefs about the benefits and harms of alcohol and cannabis, and to explain in simple terms what it means to be addicted. Using a frontier language model (ChatGPT-4o) we extracted structured representations of people's beliefs and explanations, assessing the extent to which responses represented 11 clinically relevant diagnostic symptoms from the DSM-5 section on Substance Use Disorders. People's beliefs showed clear substance-specific biases, attributing more clinically relevant symptoms to alcohol than cannabis. A prompt-context manipulation that contextualized participants' substance-neutral explanations as relevant to either cannabis or alcohol revealed evidence sometimes for similar, and for other times opposite direction, substance-specific biases imposed by the ChatGPT annotation process itself.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Artificial Intelligence; Linguistics; Psychology; Behavioral Science; Concepts and categories"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4bt6f9ns","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Maria","middle_name":"","last_name":"Martin Lopez","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Keanan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Joyner","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Bill","middle_name":"","last_name":"Thompson","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49887/galley/37849/download/"}]}