Why do you Gamble?
by Yolandi on 11/06/10 at 8:11 am
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Why do people gamble? It is clear that gambling is an extremely popular activity, as online casinos and casinos in places like Las Vegas and Atlantic City make billions of dollars every year. But why? Most people understand that, for casino games at least, the odds are against them. So why do people continue to play? What is the psychology of gambling? And Why do they gamble with their businesses?
What Is Gambling?
First of all, it’s important to understand that every time we make a decision in life, it is, in effect, gambling. When we opt to cross the street at a particular time, we are weighing the odds that a car will come along and hit us against the benefits of getting to the other side. When we choose to take a particular project over another, we are betting that the project we choose will provide us an advantage with respect to financial status or quality of life. When we buy shares in the stock market, we are placing our faith on the belief that our chosen company will do well. However, when most people refer to “gambling,” they are talking about the specific act of wagering money on a specific event.
What is the Psychology of Gambling?
The reason that people find gambling so enticing is based on something that behaviorists call “intermittent reinforcement.” We are all familiar with the experiment by Pavlov where the scientist rang a bell every time he fed his dogs, thereby conditioning the dogs to drool at the sound of the bell, even if there was no food. The positive reinforcement of the bell created the conditioned response of the drooling. However, Pavlov also found that after repeated trials where the bell would ring but no food was given, the effect would eventually disappear, a phenomenon known as “extinction.”
The solution came with this idea of intermittent reinforcement. The way intermittent reinforcement works is that sometimes the reward is paired with the desired behavior, and sometimes it isn’t. The reward comes often enough for the subject to make the connection, but the subject never knows when it will come. This is the strongest form of reinforcement because even if the reward has not come in a very long time, the subject has reason to believe it will return. Sounds familiar?
Reinforcement and Gambling Psychology.
This is exactly how gambling works. Somewhere along the way, the gambler receives a monetary reward, which feels great. Even if they lose over and over again playing blackjack, for example, they are reinforced by that knowledge that sometime the reward will come again, and they have no idea how it will be. Thereby, just as dogs are conditioned to drool, humans are conditioned to gamble.
Yolandi Janse van Rensburg writes about social media, marketing, life and, of course, cars. We say “of course” because Yolandi is nuts about anything on 4 wheels. Besides moonlighting as the Heavy Chef girl at World Wide Creative, Yolandi runs Autofemme, a blog about cars, as a business on the side. View more articles by Yolandi.
Tags: Gambling
