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jimmy comments on New study on choice blindness in moral positions - Less Wrong
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This is common enough that I specifically watch out for it when asking questions that people might have some attachment to. Just today I didn't even ask because I knew I was gonna get a bogus "I've always thought this" answer.
I know a guy who "has always been religious" ever since he almost killed himself in a car crash.
My mom went from "Sew it yourself" to "Of course I'll sew it for you, why didn't you ask me earlier?" a couple weeks later because she offered to sew something for my brother in law, which would make her earlier decision incongruent with her self image. Of course, she was offended when I told her that I did :p
My wife, not long before she met me, became an instant non-smoker and was genuinely surprised when friends offered her cigarettes -- she had to make a conscious effort to recall that she had previously smoked, because it was no longer consistent with her identity, as of the moment she decided to be a non-smoker.
This seems to be such a consistent feature of brains under self-modification that the very best way to know whether you've really changed your mind about something is to see how hard it is to think the way you did before, or how difficult it is to believe that you ever could have thought differently.
It's the best way I've seen to quit smoking - it seems to work every time. The ex-smoker says "I'm a non-smoker now" and starts badmouthing smokers - shortly they can't imagine doing something so disgusting and inconsiderate as smoking.
The second of these claims would be extremely surprising to me, even if weakened to '90% of the time' to allow for figures of speech. Even a success rate of 50% would be startling. I don't believe it.
It's not surprising to me, though I imagine it's vulnerable to massive selection effect. My observation is about people who actually internalized being a non-smoker, not those who tried to do so and failed. I'm not surprised those two things are extremely highly correlated. So it might not be any better as strategy advice than "the best way to quit smoking is to successfully quit smoking".
Which is ironic, because the Wikipedia page you just linked to says that "95% of former smokers who had been abstinent for 1–10 years had made an unassisted last quit attempt", with the most frequent method of unassisted quitting being "cold turkey", about which it was said that:
Of course, the page also says that lots of people don't successfully quit, which isn't incompatible with what thomblake says. Among people who are able to congruently decide to become non-smokers, it's apparently one of the easiest and most successful ways to do it.
It's just that not everybody can decide to be a non-smoker, or that it occurs to them to do so.
Anecdotally, my wife said that she'd "quit smoking" several times prior, each time for extrinsic reasons (e.g. dating a guy who didn't smoke, etc.). When she "became a non-smoker" instead (as she calls it), she did it for her own reasons. She says that as soon as she came to the conclusion that she needed to stop for good, she decided that "quitting smoking" wasn't good enough to do the job, and that she would have to become a non-smoker instead. (That was over 20 years ago, fwiw.)
I'm not sure how you'd go about prescribing that people do this: either they have an intrinsic desire to do it or not. You can certainly encourage and assist, but intrinsic motivation is, well, intrinsic. It's rather difficult to decide on purpose to do something of your own free will, if you're really trying to do it because of some extrinsic reason. ;-)
wedrifid is asking for P(success|attempt), not P(attempt|success), and so a high P(attempt|success) isn't ironic.