I grew up in Central New Jersey. When I was about 10, the state legalized
casino gambling in Atlantic City, making it the only place on the East Coast of
the US at that time where people could gamble legally. I have some relatives who live near Atlantic
City. There are lots of cheap buses to
get there from all over the New York and New Jersey area, and so I would hop on
with all of the gamblers to go visit family.
The ride down was always tense with anticipation, but the ride back had
lots of tired and dejected gamblers. I
always felt like many of those people on the bus with me had real gambling
problems.
What exactly is it that drives people to gamble too
much?
Intuitively, it seems like there are two possibilities. One is that people with gambling problems are
focused on the thrill of gambling. When
you walk through a casino, there are lights and bells and the sounds of people
winning money. There must be a real jolt
when your number comes up on a roulette table, or the bars all align on a slot
machine.
Of course, another possibility is that gamblers are just
focused on the money. They want to win
money and gambling seems like a way to do it.
An interesting paper by Cheryl Hahn, Tim Wilson, Kaichen
McRae, and Dan Gilbert in the October, 2013 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin explored these two
possibilities.
As a measure of the vulnerability to problem gambling, they
asked participants to fill out the Gambling
Attitudes and Beliefs Survey, which has been used in past research. This scale asks people to rate their
agreement with statements like “I know when I’m on a streak” and “If I lose, it
is important to stick with it until I get even.”
In one study, participants were given the gambling
survey. Later, they were given a chance
to play what seems like a strange gambling game. Two decks of cards were placed in front of
them. One deck had 9 red cards and 1
black card. The other deck had 5 red
cards and 5 black cards. At the start of
each trial, the decks were shuffled and placed face-down on the desk. Participants could choose which deck they
wanted a card drawn from. If the card
was red, they would get 10 cents. If the
card was black, they would get nothing. The
game was repeated for 20 trials. A
second group was shown the experimental situation, but they just predicted how
may cards they would want to take from each deck over the course of the study.
Economically, it seems clear that participants should always
choose from the deck with 9 red cards, because they have the best chance of
winning when they draw from that deck.
If they choose often from the deck with only 5 red cards, then they must
value the suspense of whether they will win and the thrill of winning despite
lower odds.
People who scored highly on the gambling survey predicted
that they would choose somewhat more cards from the risky deck (with 5 red
cards) than people who scored low on the gambling survey. In actuality, though, people who scored high
on the gambling survey actually chose fewer cards from the risky deck on
average than those who scored low on the survey.
That is, these results suggest that people who scored highly
on the gambling survey were more interested in the money than in the potential
thrill of beating the odds. The
researchers obtained a similar result in a second study.
In one final study, participants who had filled out the
gambling survey were given 3 minutes to do a series of math problems. Some people were told that they would be paid
5 cents for each problem they got correct.
Others were given no monetary incentive.
The people who got a low score on the gambling survey answered about the
same number of items correctly regardless of whether they were being paid. Those who got a high score on the gambling
survey answered more questions correctly on average when they were being paid
than when they were not.
Putting these results together, it suggests that people who
are vulnerable to problem gambling are more strongly motivated by obtaining
money than by the suspense of gambling or the thrill of winning.
Of course, this finding was obtained with college students,
and there may have been few real problem gamblers in this sample. As the researchers point out, the stakes in
this situation were also low. More work
still needs to be done to see whether this focus on winnings over the thrill of
gambling holds up in further studies.