Latest / Why We Do What We Do / Gambling pt. 2

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Gambling pt. 2 · Why We Do What We Do

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You're listening to Why we Do what we Do. Welcome to Why We Do
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what we Do. I am your Still Wagering host Abraham and I'm your Jackpot
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host Shane. Oh. That was a good one. We're a psychology podcast.
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We talked about the things that people do, and lately we've been talking
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for several weeks now, a couple months at least, about the topics of
0:34
addiction, and we have allowed these conversations to mostly just evolve into these just
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marathon long discussions that have happened. But this last time we decided we had
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gone too far. We had to draw the last Someone had to stop us,
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and it was us. We stopped us. Yes, So if you
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are catching us right now, this is a follow up to our part one
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episode we were talking about, well, we were about to talk about gambling
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addiction. So we had set up the history of like gambling and casinos and
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talked a bit about the ideas of like things that we're trying to get people
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into casinos and how gambling sort of developed over time and what it is and
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all of that and and all that's great, but we didn't actually get to
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talk about gambling addiction, and so we will have to tackle that today.
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But first, if you were joining us for the first time, welcome.
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Most of these episodes will stand on their own. However, because this is
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a two parter, it would probably be helpful for you to go back and
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hear the discussion that we that preceded this one in the previous episode, where
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we talked about how casinos and gambling work. Yes, and nevertheless, this
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will have a lot of self contained content as well. We have been really
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taking kind of a loose flow format to this show or the series, at
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least I think so. I think that works really well for this discussion.
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So today we are finishing up the part on gambling addiction and talking about some
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of the things like we're going to talk about a lot of things underneath this.
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Before we do that, we've got to share some holidays. And the
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day that you're listening to this episode is bring Flowers to Someone Day. Who
2:07
that someone is I don't know. That is Levely, yes, so,
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and that means that by the way, it is May fifteenth. So just
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in case you weren't showing what day it is, I guess I'm telling you
2:16
now it is also Buddha Day. Ah, It's also Dinosaur Day, so
2:21
it's peace and dinosaurs and flowers. I love that. Yes, And it's
2:24
Emergency Medical Services Day that's important. Important. It's also International Conscientious Objector Day,
2:30
which I really like. Oh yeah, I definitely can get on board
2:35
with that. It is International Kangaroo Care Awareness Day, very important to take
2:39
care of our kangaroos. Oh yes, absolutely, those things. I mean,
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well, I don't know that here. They're kind of mean they drown
2:45
things. Oh uh oh yeah, they're like a little bit aggressive from what
2:49
I understand, But no, you should still take care of them. I
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guess maybe part of the care awareness is like, don't treat them in your
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bodies of water. There you go. It's a National Chocolate chip Day.
2:58
Love that, Okay. It is National Juice slush Day. Sure, I
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mean if you like slushies, I guess not my thing. I don't like
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really sweet sugary fruit drinks like that. But you know, everybody's got the
3:10
thing it is. This is a long one. This is a long one.
3:15
It is real live your past by listening to the first music you ever
3:20
bought, no matter what it was, No excuses day. Wow, what
3:23
would you be listening to? Let's see the first music I ever bought,
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I think I think was Chumbawamba. I actually kind of loved that. I
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think I think mine was blank what a too? Actually, oh, I
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wish that it was blankwinedy too, but I'm pretty sure that it is Chumble
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Woe. That's okay. I mean Chumba Bamba is like a pretty radical punk
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band, like like pretty like aside from their hit song, Yeah, yeah,
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it was the top thumping album. I think was the one that I
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got. So yeah. I don't know if you have followed their career since
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then, since you're such a huge fan. But the day that Margaret Thatcher
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died, they released a specific song celebrating her death. Wow, okay,
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yeah, they had it recorded for many, many years and they just will
4:13
were waiting for her to die. So yours you get to have Lincoln Eddy
4:16
two and I'm listening to get knocked down. But yeah. It is also
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importantly International Family Day. That's nice. No, I love that. It
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is also National straw Hat Day, which is fun, stay shady. It
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is Food Allergy Awareness Week, so spend one week not eating foods that you're
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allergic to. I like that, And the rest of the year just do
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with it what you will. It's hospital week, so go visit your favorite
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hospital. Sometimes they have good vegan food in their cafeterias, do they really?
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Because the cafeterias were open twenty four to seven, and this one hospital
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in Orlando, we would play shows and we would all go to the hospital
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and eat vegan chicken nuggets together. Wow. Okay, we have pictures of
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like fifty of us hanging out in the hospital cafeteria at like midnight with vegan
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chicken nuggets. It was great. It was such a good time. That's
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such a bizarre story. I just really love it. There's so many unexpected
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twists and turns and just that short story and just like imagining a bunch of
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punks sitting around a hospital eating vegan chicken nuggets is pretty funny. That's exactly
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what happened. Okay. It is National Bike to Work Week. I love
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this so much, and I wish that I biked to work every week.
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Technically I could, but I would just be riding back to my house.
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I would just do a little a loop around my neighborhood and then go right
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back to my house. Nice. It's a National women's health week, super
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important, definitely and Dementia Awareness Week also important, very very important. Absolutely.
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Now interestingly, as we said, this is our we're talking about gambling.
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We're following up our previous discussion on gambling, and today we're talking about
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gambling addiction. And this is this episode comes out on May fifteenth, and
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this is our our seven year and aniversary as a podcast. Happy birthday US,
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Yeah, Happy birthday US. So I guess this is our seven year
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episode and seven makes a lot of sense to be talking about gambling, as
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lucky number seven is a common thing in gambling circles. So yeah, so
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gambling, Yeah, it makes That's why we did it, I guess.
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Yeah. There is a really great song by a band called the Scandals,
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and they have a song called Lucky Seven's so go listen to that. You
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like that if you like kind of like Gainesville drunk punk type of stuff.
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And there was a goofy movie called Lucky Number sleven that I don't think had
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anything to do with gambling, but no, yeah, that was a fun
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movie. Though. Josh Harten it's back. Apparently he's doing a new movie
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for m Night Shamalan. Oh okay, I mean could choose a better director
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probably, but no, looks pretty good. It's it's called Trap and apparently
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he's the serial killer in it. Oh oh, okay, Well I do
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think so. He was in the most recent season of Black Mirror, okay,
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and he played quite the villainous character in that episode, very ruthless,
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and that was a lot of fun. I'm pretty sure that was him.
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Yeah, I mean he's great. Go watch his body of work, the
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Faculty. Yeah, lucky number s eleven thirty days of Night to say,
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we were unpacking more of addition. Last time, we basically talked about everything
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except gambling addiction. I think we set up clearly the history of casinos,
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understanding that the history of gambling and wagering up all the way through, how
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the schedules of reinforcement and the probabilities of gambling really do support and I think
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initiate and maintain a high level of engagement that leads to gambling addiction. So
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it's worth an unpacking and actually diving into here what gambling addiction is. All
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right, So this is how gambling addiction starts. The casinos are specifically designed
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to keep you there as long as possible. Initially it was to prevent you
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from lee. Now they're finding they want you to sort of invite yourself in
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and be comfortable and want to stay. But going back to again, there
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are some reinforcers where the motivation does not have to build for very long,
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and it's very difficult to satisfy that motivation. And money is a really good
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example of this. This is very effective as a reinforcer. We're pretty much
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never finished earning it, like we I don't think anyone has ever said,
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like, I'm done earning money. Please don't give me any more. Stop
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here. I've had as much money as I can possibly take. No one
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has ever said that sentence. He hasn't even said that. No, he
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is not, and that is why he is where he's at. Anyway,
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we are always some money is very effective as a reinforcer. We always want
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to We want to earn it. And if you like the math of if
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I pay a dollar, I could win fifty dollars, or even I pay
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one hundred dollars, I could win fifty thousand dollars. That is arguably much
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better than I could work three hours and get fifty dollars, or work two
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thousand dollars hours and get fifty thousand dollars because the amount of input is much
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smaller for the output than the work. Once, like you sort of guarantee
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your work doing three hours of work getting fifty dollars for like the appation I
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think where people are sort of averaging their income right now versus you work two
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thousand hours and get fifty thousand dollars. And it's like you could put in
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that time, but with gambling, you could put in just a you know,
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one hundred dollars bill, walk away with that same output and have spent
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only ten minutes at that table, you know, right well, And I
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think that's the thing that we discover going back to Skinner's work on variable schedules,
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right, variable ratio schedules in general, what ends up happening is that
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behavior happens at such a high rate because you never know when the payout's going
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to come, right, You never know when that reinforce is going to come,
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So it gets reinforced just enough every now and again that it kind of
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maintains that behavior. But this is a little bit different because it's not just
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the number of responses, it's also a response effort. It's also the amount
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that gets It's all these other things that play into it, on top of
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just that randomness that goes along with it, and on top of the fact
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that like a lot of these places tend to be very welcoming. Now,
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yeah, as they're starting to like make them welcoming spaces. There's food,
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there's drink, there's social interaction, there's other reinforces that happen inside of this
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too. There's also the ability to decide how much, how often, and
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when you bet, along with various betting options and those intermittent successes of large
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payouts. All of that is very enticing. Like it makes sense that,
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like it's very easy to start in this space and go, ah, that
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felt really good or I really liked that, or that was really fun.
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Yeah, you know exactly. I mean, this is a space that you're
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having fun. It's easy. You can get a lot of money. They
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often give you free drinks, sometimes free food, sometimes free rooms, sometimes
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free flights. If you gamble enough with them and exchange you just all you
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have to do is give them everything you have and then some Yeah, like
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I guess free being used pretty loosely here, but yeah, like you can
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see how they build in so much opportunity by doing things like trying to hook
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you in with like all these incentives and offers, and then you go and
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you play their games that you will ultimately lose more than you will win,
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but you will be winning along the way, right and beyond that, the
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more we practice habits, the more ingrained they become. So I would kind
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of see this situation where we start building habits and building routines, and I
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believe this is the reason why people become You hear the kind of the phrase
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stuck in their ways, which is just an excessive routine, right, Like,
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this person is in a routine, they're in a habit, and they're
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like they're kind of doing this often and it's very very it's in strength,
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right, Like that is like such a strengthened behavior. Yeah. Yeah,
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those chains often become like almost like a single unit. Like once you start,
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you almost can't stop. You just go through the routine of doing this
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thing than this thing, than this thing, et cetera. And for some
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people that becomes really difficult to even want to escape. They're pretty happy just
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following their routine requires low effort, low thinking it, you can proceed it
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through it efficiently, et cetera. So as we practice doing any pattern of
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behaviors, particularly those that we find rewarding, the cues and patterns themselves become
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rewarding. So some people have found that quitting smoking can be aided by replacing
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the habit of lighting up a cigarette, by going through the motions of lighting
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up, but replacing the cigarette with something with little or no nicotine in it.
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And it's because part of the smoking is not just the chemical addiction to
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nicotine, but it's the routine of getting to go outside and take a break
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from work and you know, pull out your cigarettes and tap the box and
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then pull one out and then get your lighter, right, Like, all
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of that is a routine that you practice a lot, a lot. I
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mean you're doing this. You know, people who are even light smokers are
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doing this several several times a day, every single day. Like there's never
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a time when they don't go through that series of steps that form that habit.
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And so that that's why it could be helpful to as if you're trying
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to quit smoking, is essentially replace those steps with something that's identical. It
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just doesn't have the same sort of deleterious outcome, right, And also too
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on top of all that, you've also got this issue of gamification, right,
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which is when we can make more things more engaging by reward systems and
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kind of gammifying behaviors. And there's like a lot of really there's actually a
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lot of studies on gamification. There's a really great study on improving lunch room
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food waste and like where food went inside of a classroom with just kind of
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gamifying like lunch room cleanliness. Yeah, and I found this really interesting study
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that looked at gamifying people's exercises and physical therapy. And so essentially what they
13:45
did is they made sort of like a point system for where you would sort
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of be able to see how well you're doing the exercise, and it would
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give you feedback in terms of like points, and then the if you meet
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met certain thresholds, you'd be able to maximize as your points. And this
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was for people who would be undergoing physical therapy, and that one of the
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things that physical therapists struggle with is getting people to adhere to the stretches and
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exercises that they prescribe. And so what they did in the study is they're
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like, well, what if we sort of gamified it, what if we
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made it more of like a challenge and that sort of thing, and they
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found that they were able to get the highest rates of voluntary engagement and with
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the highest integrity when they had sort of gamified the exercises by sort of having
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them earn points. And it was kind of just a silly little thing,
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but it was it was really effective. And this was this study just came
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out I think twenty twenty one, so pretty recently, and this is actually
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published like peer review journal. That's wild, I mean, you know,
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and it's one of those things where I think of like going to the gym,
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like I get points every time I go to the gym. I get
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incentives and rewards. I don't have like a high score or anything. But
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I've seen, like you know, some step counters like Fitbit will have like
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competitions where they'll gamify and then people will get like thirty forty fifty thousand steps
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to kind of like compete with their friends. Yeah, that's a powerful tool.
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Gamification is a powerful tool more than people I think give it credit for.
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Yeah, I would like to use it more in life, but yeah,
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yeah, I just I just haven't unfortunately built in the time to use
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it. Yeah, Now, neurolg just a found that there is excessive expression
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of the protein delta fbjmuring osteosarcoma viral oncagene homologue B. Good lord, catchy
15:30
just you know, just a great name for a band. Okay, so
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just real quick, just to reiterate delta fbjmuring osteosarcoma viral oncagene homologue B,
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which is just delta FosB. That's not even short either, but that's shorter
15:46
than what I just said. Yeah, okay, what does all that mean,
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because now you've all glazed over. This protein is implicated in numerous addictions,
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including chemical addictions to drugs, as well as in people with behavioral addictions
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like Yeah, so the neurologists have found that there is this excessive expression of
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this protein across people with different types of addiction, which you find the similarities
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of chemical addictions and behavioral addictions like this in this kind of space, which
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is I think really fascinating. Yeah, and I think this was part of
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how they sort of built the foundation for the case that gambling should be treated
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as an addiction disorder, is because it has so many other markers of other
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addiction disorders, including these biological ones, right, And so they look at
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that expression of that protein and say, like, look, this is here.
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Whether or not you're addicted to heroin, or whether or not you're addicted
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to slot machines or you know, gambling in whatever thing, they see the
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same sort of occurrence. There. Another interesting one I found here is a
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gambling specialist and neurologist named David Nutt. He conducted MRI studies of the brains
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of gambling addicts, and what he was looking at was they would basically have
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them play these virtual gambling tasks while they were in the gambling in the MRI
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machine, and he reported that there was surprisingly little difference in the activity of
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brain of someone who is anticipating a win versus accomplishing a win. Oh wow
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in this yeah right. So basically it said it looks pretty much the same
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whether they're like anticipating the outcome or even achieving the outcome that they're looking for.
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Yeah. So basically what that is saying is, in kind of this
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entire section, is that the habit of gambling itself is kind of a self
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maintaining thing. Even significant consistent losses are not enough to end the behavior and
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might even perpetuate it as the person pursues the next remedial win because they're reinforced
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by the anticipation of the win, whether it's to get the jackpot or to
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make up for the loss. Like, so this is a situation where you
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don't have to win to get addicted, Yeah, exactly, because it becomes
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that like the actual gaming itself is like the win is not as much the
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reason to do it anymore, right, it's part of it. Like if
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there were no wins, it would it would be unlikely that it would persist.
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But they get about as much satis faction from the anticipation of the win
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as they do from the actual win. I think it's almost sort of like
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buyer's remorse, Like you're so excited to get this new thing, and then
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you finally get it and you're like, oh, that's cool, and it's
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like it was the looking forward to getting it that you were like, really
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had you hooked, right, And then once you get it, you're like
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happy that you got it, but you're just not that excited about it anymore.
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And it's not to say that it was not something you wanted. It's
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just like once you finally get there, you're like, oh, okay,
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I guess that's the thing I can check off now. Yeah, And I
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think that's that definitely shows up here. And part of it, I think,
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again trying to speak really clearly to the behavioral angle of this is considering
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that, like there's so many features of the environment. There's the sounds,
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there's the process and as we're talking about with smoking and all of these other
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things going through the habit, that is the routine of all the steps of
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gambling. All of those things, they sort of become a net work of
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reinforcers, even though they're sort of secondary and they're not most of them aren't
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tangible. A lot of them aren't, or they're very ephemeral, like they
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don't last very long. And a lot of these things they just become like
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they are cues for the experience of gaming and gambling, and that can be
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sufficient to create the motivation to want to engage. And I kind of imagine
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like if we were to say, like, okay, let's start stripping away
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this context and see what changes if we go in and we just take out
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like you never win anymore, you just always lose. How long would it
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persist a while, but it would not persist indefinitely if we're like, let's
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get rid of all of the sounds and the visual appeal and basically we'll have
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you just put your money in a black box and it may or may not
19:47
spit out some kind of outcome, like basically you just put it in,
19:49
you wait thirty seconds and then it'll say nope, or like you'll get some
19:52
money and say will it persist probably for a while, but I don't know
19:57
that it would even like it may not maintain that well and it may not
20:02
last. It probably wouldn't build at all to the point of addiction if that
20:06
if that was the way that gambling happened. And I think those points are
20:10
really valid, and I think that makes sense too. And I think there's
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another part of this where, you know, I think that we're just looking
20:15
at it from the perspective of like, this behavior happens in a particular context,
20:18
and there's cues and stuff like that, But I don't think this is
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accounting for things like risk addiction, where like people just like risky things,
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and so there is that piece where it's like, I guess maybe what I'm
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saying is that by itself. Gambling alone is probably not the thing that is
20:36
as much of the problem. It's probably all the other things that are kind
20:38
of bleeding into the behavior and leading to the behavior. And that's kind of
20:41
what behavior behavioral addictions are, right, Like, you've got a response that
20:45
is linked to ques, motivations, reinforcement, rewards, biological systems, environmental
20:52
systems, all these things that are happening now add to that, like you
20:56
know, for those folks that are high risk, like the high risk,
20:59
higher ward type of situations, like the thrill seekers. Yeah, the thrill
21:02
seekers, the adrenaline junkies, like those folks like you know, and those
21:04
are those are late person terms. But the truth is is for some people
21:10
there is a thrill of anticipating a really big win when it's all on the
21:15
line, right, Like you've got a lot to laugh so like, so
21:18
there is that piece where it's like that win, Oh man, if I
21:21
win this, like talk about the reward, it's millions of dollars. I
21:25
get this, I you know. I mean you see this in not just
21:27
in in casinos. You see this in street racing where people are racing cars.
21:32
You see this in situations where people are just risky, Like I mean,
21:36
people risk their health. There are things that people bet on that are
21:41
not just monetary. Most gambling addiction focuses on monetary and maybe some tangible things,
21:45
but like people bet their lives on making you know, risky liaisons with
21:52
with folks and stuff like that. Like there's all kinds of things that happen
21:55
inside of this kind of like gambling. What people are gambling with. It's
21:57
not just money, but that anticipation of like that possible reward is so intoxicating
22:04
or so powerful a reward in itself that you don't even really need the reward
22:10
all the time. That's such a great point. You're exactly right, is
22:12
I think there's a certain amount of like the risk is because you start usually
22:17
low stakes, like like okay, like I lose five bucks. I can
22:22
tolerate losing five bucks, sure, and you start like then it's like,
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well that wasn't you know, five bucks, I guess isn't really high stakes.
22:27
It doesn't feel as exciting anymore. I'm going to go up to twenty
22:30
bucks, then one hundred, then a thousand, and it's like now I'm
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playing really big. I'm betting like my car and it's like every time you
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manage to usually not every time, but like you squeak by with enough wins
22:42
that the losses feel less aversive and the risk itself becomes the sort of fun
22:48
thing. It's I kind of wonder like people who vote in elections. Sometimes
22:52
I'm like, maybe there's people who are supporting some of these candidates who are
22:56
clearly the worst people who have ever lived, right, And they're like,
23:00
it's all about the risk. They're like, I just want I just want
23:03
to feel something like I'm willing to put my life in the life of everyone
23:11
else in the line just for the thrill of embracing the chaos. Sure,
23:15
that's got to be it. Yeah, that must be. That must be
23:18
the explanation. So anyway I'm speaking of embracing chaos. Here's an ads.
23:29
Okay, So I think, you know, we more or less established how
23:33
I think the important and relevant features of understanding sort of gambling and what gambling
23:38
addiction starts to look like. So another I think important piece here is talking
23:41
then about treatment, Because anytime we talk about a what can be described as
23:47
a problem, we also want to look at solutions. So when we start
23:49
unpacking addiction, treatment we could probably do its own episode, which you know,
23:56
I mean, we've already broken this episode up into a million parts,
24:00
so it is very possible we could end up in there at some point in
24:02
time. But we are going to revisit kind of a little bit about what
24:07
has been done or what is being done. But it's also worth looking at
24:08
the history of attempts to treat various addictions. That will be a lot of
24:11
fun, but behavior addictions are a little different and often include a lot of
24:18
unique treatments, a lot of kind of people going well maybe this will work,
24:22
yeah, and then doing something really wacky. And as I said,
24:25
like, we'll probably spend a whole discussion at some point in a separate episode
24:29
talking about the history of treatments for addiction. So this will be sort of
24:33
a relatively brief overview as it pertains to gambling specifically. And also this isn't
24:37
really necessarily unpacking the history. This is just sort of talking about what is
24:41
out there. So gambling and other behavioral addictions in general are often characterized as
24:48
impulsivity or being impulsive, right sure, And this is something that is quantitatively
24:55
described by behavior analysts using something called the delayed discounting model. Essentially, this
25:02
states that the longer one must wait for a reward, the less valuable that
25:06
reward becomes. If we talked about delay discounting before and like a full treatment
25:11
lane, because I know we've talked about doing one on it, but I
25:12
don't think we have. I think that we've talked about it a few times
25:17
in terms of like it's come up in certain certain episodes, but I don't
25:19
think that we've ever done like a full on episode on it, which we
25:22
probably should. Yes, yeah, I think it would be worth doing a
25:26
deep dive on that model if we haven't already, because it's there's just there's
25:30
a lot that's been done on this and it's been applied to a lot of
25:33
different things. Right. But anyway, as I said, essentially, the
25:37
idea here is that people tend to if they have to wait for a reward,
25:41
even if it's larger, they'll tend to choose the reward that's more immediate,
25:45
even if it's smaller. So that's called delayed discounting. And the people
25:48
who are more willing to choose those sort of smaller sooner rewards over the larger
25:52
later rewards. They describe that behavior as being impulsive, and it suggests that
25:57
interventions that focus on impulse control may be effective at reducing gambling behaviors if people
26:04
who gamble are in fact impulsive, right, and so far and away the
26:08
most common and most researched of the interventions that are used for gambling are CBT
26:15
or conditive behavioral therapy for those of you who are not familiar in which the
26:18
intention of CBT, this intervention is to a correct cognitive distortions about gambling,
26:23
B develop problem solving skills, C teach social skills, and D teach relapse
26:30
prevention. So this kind of CBT package is designed to really address maybe what
26:34
they describe as what they think is the core problem, which is a cognitive
26:37
distortion of it, not necessarily a neurological addiction or a behavioral like all the
26:41
reinforcers and stuff. It's actually looking specifically at like how people are thinking about
26:45
addiction, changing that, creating skills and actually doing behavioral skills to address that
26:52
kind of the thought pattern and all that and go from there. Yes,
26:56
and I think you know, the more contemporary accept and commitment training and therapy
27:02
would suggest that you can't change people's thoughts. But what you can do is
27:07
you can have them be less distressed by those thoughts by essentially allowing themselves to
27:14
consider those thoughts as just being thoughts and then to engage in alternative behaviors.
27:18
Right, That's one important feature I think that you see most commonly is that
27:22
that cognitive behavioral therapy is really really frequently cited as an important component to treatment
27:29
for behavioral addiction or any kind of any I mean, it's for lots of
27:33
things, but for as far as behavioral addiction with respect to gambling goes,
27:37
that one comes up. Yeah. Another common strategy here is called motivational interviewing.
27:41
We did an episode on this back in episode two forty seven, so
27:45
like a little over one hundred episodes ago. That's all. Wow, Yeah,
27:51
that's all. That's great. And that consists of conversations to take the
27:53
person's perspective and help them identify their own reasons for wanting to change their behavior.
27:59
And that's how motivational interviewing sort of works. Yeah. Something that is
28:03
in the research right now is guide it self help, which is kind of
28:07
what it sounds like. It's just kind of mostly workbooks. I say,
28:10
research, it's just out there. Yeah, but it is something that people
28:12
are doing. It's just kind of looking through workbooks and looking at different scenarios
28:17
and practices and role play scenarios and kind of working through those with maybe with
28:21
some guidance. Yeah. Yeah. It's intended to sort of help you answer
28:25
the kinds of questions that you might encounter in a therapeutic environment in such a
28:29
way that you can engage with it at your own pace, on your own
28:32
time, and it may have a similar impact. If it was that effective,
28:37
I think that those would be much more commonly talked about. I think
28:38
that it does work really well for some people, so if you're one of
28:41
those to seek those out, but for others that they need something different for
28:47
sure. There's another strategy here called personalized feedback, and this is a strategy
28:52
to measure and compare people's behavior to other people's behavior, and it's sort of
28:56
specifically designed to try and help them see the discrepancy and what they're doing compared
29:00
to what other people are doing. So they're sort of saying, like,
29:03
I think this is relevant, particularly for people who think that they don't have
29:07
a problem, or that their problem isn't very much of a problem. Is
29:11
that might say, like, okay, well, let's just look at how
29:12
much you gamble relative to how much most people gamble, Like you are there
29:17
every night this week. Most people did not go even one night this week,
29:19
So right, that's higher than average, you know. I think the
29:26
rationale and the part of the intention of this as a component to intervention is
29:30
to help people, I think, recognize what may be considered a pathology in
29:36
their behavior. Right. There's also relapsed prevention, which is kind of an
29:41
isolated component of CBT. It seems like that, but what it does is
29:45
it consists of helping the individual identify higher situations that are likely to result in
29:49
gambling behavior. So essentially what they're saying is, hey, like, if
29:52
you walk into the scenario, you know that you are highly likely or you
29:56
are at risk of doing X, Y and Z, Like I think,
29:59
like Charles McKay, like, if jos Bakowski didn't want to gamble on horses,
30:03
then putting him in a horse a race track would be a problem.
30:06
Right, So what they would go with, they say, is say,
30:07
okay, you know that you bet on horses, and bet on horses often,
30:11
maybe don't go here, yeah, absolutely, Or if you do go
30:15
here. Here are some strategies that you might use to prevent you from gambling,
30:18
And here's X, Y, and Z, And it's kind of like
30:22
looking at that spot where it's like, what are the higher situations and how
30:25
can you address that by with some skills that you need to learn. That
30:30
actually specifically segues beautifully into the last one here, which is that gambling is
30:34
a time consuming habit and it also one that often requires a specific geographical location,
30:41
unless you're gambling online, of course, but like you have to and
30:45
what I mean by that is you have to go to the casino, you
30:47
have to go to the horse racing place, like to place a bet.
30:51
You have to go somewhere to do it, and it often takes time to
30:53
do it, like you're there for an hour or a few hours maybe.
30:57
So there's a lot that is involved in in engaging in gambling. That's actually
31:03
part of the reason that persists in the first place, right, So being
31:06
that that's the case, one strategy that people have used as far as trying
31:11
to treat gambling addiction is to plan with these sort of quote unquote activity schedules
31:17
is the sort of the idea and with activity schedules. The whole point is
31:19
to avoid the kinds of downtime that might enable someone making the choice to gamble.
31:25
You could sort of think of it as like a distraction. It's just
31:30
can I keep you so busy that you don't find the time or opportunity to
31:33
build gambling into your schedule. And I think that to a point that could
31:40
work. I think you could get people who if they're willing, if they
31:42
want to quit gambling, they're willing to adhere to a schedule. You probably
31:48
could get some success with giving them enough other things to do. But I
31:52
also know that like people will find a way to sacrifice something else if they
31:56
can, if they're like motivated. So like, if you've managed to fill
32:01
up their whole day such that like from waking to going to bed, they
32:07
did not have an opportunity to choose gambling, they might then choose gambling instead
32:12
of sleep, And so they're like, that's one thing they can definitely control.
32:16
So it's not to say that it wouldn't work a very well mighte for
32:20
some people, but that is a consideration around that. Yeah, absolutely that
32:23
makes sense. Now, one of the things to consider is that we start
32:27
looking at activity schedules. One of the things that we have to put into
32:30
our activity schedules is ads, and so we're sorry that that's built in and
32:34
it might distract you from other things that are going on. But here's NAD
32:37
just in case it works for you. So we have some more sort of
32:46
interesting I think tidbits to pull in and talk about here related to gambling and
32:52
gambling addiction. But we had talked about this whole delayed discounting model, and
32:57
the reason that that was relevant to gambling is because we were saying that people
33:00
who are more impulsive may be more likely to gamble, right. And so
33:07
there was a study that I found where what they did is they basically took
33:10
people who were already sort of self proclaimed gambling addicts, and they gave they
33:15
made delayed discounting task, meaning they would propose hypotheticals would you rather have you
33:21
know, a dollar now or ten dollars two weeks from now? And it's
33:25
sort of how those scenarios are set up. It's not exactly that, but
33:29
they look for like, at what point how long in time would it have
33:32
to be before more money stops being worth it because you had to wait so
33:36
long and then they basically say that that's how much the value of that reward
33:40
has diminished, and so that's how the whole thing is set up. Anyway,
33:44
point being that in this study, what they did with people who were
33:47
gamblers is that they did find the gamblers tended to have a steeper discounting rate,
33:53
meaning that they were more impulsive, is how they would describe that than
33:59
people who who were not gamblers, And so that did sort of show.
34:04
Now this is maybe a chicken and egg sort of situation. Were they gambling
34:07
because they were impulsive or do they become more impulsive because they were gambling a
34:12
lot? Probably a little bit of both. At least we know that they
34:15
were gambling at some point and then they engaged in impulsive behaviors, So that
34:19
could be the direction. But it's possible that they found gambling so rewarding because
34:23
they sort of had that impulsivity. But again, who knows whether that's a
34:29
relevant way to sort of unpack gambling necessarily, but it was something that they
34:32
found in that study. At least that's super interesting. I mean, I
34:36
wish I maybe the words not wish. I'm glad to see the behavior analysis
34:43
is trying to tackle gambling or at least address it in some conceptual way,
34:46
because and that's actually feel like such a big part of behavior analytic literature is
34:51
like looking at gambling and like the schedules and the behaviors and all that stuff
34:54
too. Like I feel like it's one of kind of the maybe more under
35:00
scored, but not necessarily underscored. What's the word I'm looking for, underappreciated,
35:05
under discussed. Maybe there's a lot of gambling research, is what I'm
35:08
saying, and we don't talk about it a lot. It's true, there
35:12
is a ton. It is interesting that I think there have been some behavior
35:15
analysts who were really interested in gambling and they did, you know, sort
35:21
of make their careers mostly about that at least for a while, and it
35:24
just it's never really comprised a huge amount of the literature. And I think
35:28
it's because if I had to guess of sort of where funding is for different
35:32
types of interventions inside of behavior analysis services, gambling has not been high on
35:37
that list, I think, and so research and treatment have not been as
35:43
sort of thoroughly informed by the work that's been done inside of this. But
35:47
I do appreciate that people have put in the time and all that. Yeah,
35:51
I think it's the mobs. That's what's what it is. It's the
35:53
mobs that are putting a kibosh on it. We don't want you to be
35:57
successful at this intervention, so they're shutting it down. Yeah. They show
36:01
up and they're like, you keep doing this research, We're going to break
36:04
your legs. There is another piece of this that I didn't really talk about
36:08
in the probabilities section, but is worth discussing. I think as far as
36:12
understanding treatment here is there's something called the near miss effect, and at least
36:19
that's been talked about in research. Have you heard about this? No?
36:22
I haven't, Okay. So the idea here is that, particularly on slot
36:25
machines, this is where they've done the majority of matter of fact, another
36:29
study I found by Dixon and colleagues, like two thousand and nine, maybe
36:34
they did a survey of the type of research on gambling that's been done,
36:37
and like eighty five percent of it or more is on slot machines. So
36:42
anyway, the near miss effect pertains the slot machines. The idea here is
36:45
that those those like drums that roll that have the pictures on them, like
36:47
the sevens. You know, people are looking for like the three sevens in
36:51
a row or something, or it says jackpot on it. Maybe, Yeah,
36:53
that the near miss effect is that you like, you get two of
36:57
those and then the third one was just off line. Yeah, and so
37:00
it was really close to getting it, and that the idea was that that
37:05
would maintain gambling more if people sort of got really close to winning but not
37:10
quite there. Sure, And I think that the research on that that I've
37:14
seen, because I sort of looked up a little bit of it for this
37:17
has been a little bit mixed in terms of whether the actual effect is maintaining
37:23
gambling, because just speaking behavior analytically looking at schedules, I would expect that
37:31
only the actual payouts that maintained gambling. And to be clear, I don't
37:36
know if we've talked about this in here, but a payout often there are
37:39
tons of payouts that are not a jackpot. So like let's say you put
37:45
in twenty dollars in a slot machine. A really common outcome is that you
37:49
win like a dollar fifty. Yeah, and it's like, so you went
37:52
into a twenty, you pulled the lever, or you hit the button is
37:54
more common anymore, and your twenty dollars went to now you have twenty in
38:00
there, Like that's not a huge jackpot, that's not a huge payoff.
38:04
Most people are not going to cash out at that point. Now they're gonna
38:07
place more beats, like well that was pretty cool. I have a dollar
38:09
fifty, so I'm gonna play some more bets and it drops down, it
38:12
drops down. They're down to like ten dollars left after all their gambling,
38:15
and the next one hits and it's like you won five dollars, Like,
38:17
wow, that's even more than last time. I got five dollars. Your
38:21
overall pots only at fifteen dollars now, but like, hey, here's a
38:23
big win. So I think that the thing that maintains gambling more is a
38:29
bunch of small wins that are not jackpots. And even as I said,
38:32
the research I saw in the near miss seem to suggest that like for some
38:37
people that did seem like they were responding to it as if it were a
38:40
win in terms of how it affected their behavior, but I think it's not
38:45
consistent enough of an effect to really explain the addiction part. And maybe once
38:51
like once year at full blown addiction mode where like the anticipation is as satisfying
38:55
as the win. Then maybe at that point that's where the near miss is
38:59
likely to maintain. But it seems like it's not predictably a variable that's likely
39:06
to like have people engage in more gambling. I remember the first time I
39:09
went to Vegas and I, you know, I said some really clear rules
39:13
because I'm like, I'm somebody who can get sucked into stuff really quickly.
39:15
So I was like, I, I know, I'm gonna spend X amount
39:17
of money and that's it. Yeah, And so I you know, I
39:21
was telling my wife and I, you know, I don't I know how
39:23
to play the games, but I'm not confident enough to walk up to a
39:25
table and be like, I'm gonna play this game. So slot machines are
39:29
kind of my go to, which, you know, I'm sure that I
39:32
am just throwing money away. But it was one of those things where I
39:36
put like twenty bucks in and I ended up losing like all of it,
39:42
and then put another twenty bucks in and then like one ten bucks on it,
39:45
so like I got my twenty plus another ten. I was like,
39:47
ah, I'm you know, and I was telling my wife. I was
39:50
like, I, you know, I won fifty bucks. She's like,
39:52
no, you won ten bucks, but you lost twenty, Like you lost
39:54
twenty bucks like and I was like, no, I won this, and
39:58
she's like no, that's what I was like. And I I was kind
40:00
of just egging her on and being that person, but I was like,
40:02
no, I won ten bucks. I won this, and she's like,
40:05
you are ridiculous. So you can't go to Vegas anymore. So there you
40:09
go. Yeah, so what the next time I went, I did.
40:13
I just didn't gamble. I was like, I'm good, I don't need
40:15
to do that anymore. Yeah. No. The rule I always set for
40:17
myself, which did work, it worked until it didn't, was that I
40:21
was like, I'm willing to lose this amount of money, Like I'd have
40:23
like twenty dollars in cash, right, and so then I would take that
40:27
and I would gamble with that. Once I lost it, I was just
40:30
done. I would walk out and if I made more than that, then
40:34
I would pocket the original now and then just gamble off of my winnings.
40:37
So like if I put in twenty and I won twenty, I'd put twenty
40:39
in my pocket and then I'd just play off the twenty and that way,
40:43
worst case scenario, I'd walk out with exactly as much money as I walked
40:45
in with, right, and I would have just had fun playing games.
40:49
That was a rule that I was able to follow until I stopped following it.
40:52
And chase chase the losses, and that's what you get into trouble.
40:57
Yeah, but I think if you use that strategy, you're more likely to
41:00
end up at least not really regretting a bunch of decisions. Sure, sure,
41:04
okay, we do have some interesting tidbits to get to. I think,
41:08
but given that I don't even know how much time it's been, it's
41:12
been some ut time, I should probably take an ad break. Let's do
41:14
it, eh break? Why not? Okay, So some fun things.
41:23
The first one I'm gonna share I actually did not include in our notes here
41:28
is I had found another study on gambling that I read where what they did
41:31
this confused me greatly. This isn't a this isn't an I'm not gonna throw
41:36
the authors under the bus or the journal, but suffice it to say it's
41:38
a pretty big journal and one that we both know. In this journal,
41:44
they sort of started by talking about the problem of gambling addiction. And then
41:49
the point of the study that they did was to teach people to count cards
41:53
better so that they'd be better at blackjack. Yeah. I was like,
41:59
that's gonna get you thrown out of casino real quick. Yes, And also
42:02
I'm like, this is illegal. It also is like giving people who already
42:07
have a problem a reason to do it more, right, Like not even
42:12
just making it easier or more available, you're actually making it more enticing.
42:15
So I was like, I don't, I don't know that I would support
42:21
this as being something that we like try and help people necessarily. I don't,
42:25
But I also on the like, having people be more successful maybe is
42:30
good. I don't. I don't know. It felt weird. I feel
42:31
like that's one of those discussions about like ethics and research ethics and also the
42:37
scope of competence, like you have to know the legal boundaries of whatever you're
42:40
studying. I wonder what kind of permissions they would have had to get to
42:43
do that, because like they've got to know that it was illegal, right,
42:47
Yeah, So it was a hypothetical like they weren't actually they weren't actually
42:52
gambling addicts. That were the people they were working with. They weren't actually
42:54
going to casinos, but they were like teaching them in the simulation out account
42:59
cars better and they got better at it as an outcome of practice, which
43:01
wild surprise. Yeah. I was like, this is the kind of question
43:05
that makes me think, I'm like, how did hmmm, I just I
43:12
don't I don't want to. Like, sure they did find designing their study,
43:15
but it just seems like that's not like a great thing to teach people
43:20
who may find themselves in a position of like addiction to do right. That's
43:25
not the tool that you give somebody. Yeah, So anyway, that was
43:30
I thought that was interesting. Maybe it was a harm reduction. Maybe that
43:32
was it. They just like lose less money. Yeah, I don't think
43:36
it was. One thing that is super interesting is people will actually gamble longer
43:39
at slot machines that smell good as opposed to slot machines that smell bad or
43:43
even neutral. That makes logical sense. Yeah, I've also seen situations where
43:50
like it might not be the slot machine that smells bad. Maybe it's the
43:52
area around the slot machine that smells bad. Like if somebody is like,
43:55
you know, on a streak and they pissed themselves at the slot machine.
44:00
That people do that, and so you know, they're like they don't want
44:02
to lose their spot, they don't want to lose their streaks. So like
44:05
the area, maybe the carpet smells like urine, but they get caught really
44:08
quick and thrown out usually if that's the case. But yeah, people like
44:12
to hang out. Word smells good. I mean, Disney's got this figured
44:14
out. Like if you walk down main Street of Magic Kingdom, they're pumping
44:19
in fresh popcorn smells like, or sweets or bakery stuff like they pump in
44:23
the sense to get people to buy stuff Like smell is a really powerful thing.
44:29
Yeah, yeah, I understand why they would try and leverage that.
44:32
Yeah, So Nevada is actually not the only state with legalized gambling. Louisiana
44:38
is also a state that has statewide legalized casinos. Now that being said,
44:44
forty eight of the fifty US states do have some sort of gambling. The
44:49
only two that have no form of gambling whatsoever are like diametrically opposed and how
44:54
I think of them politically, and that is Hawaii and Utah. And they
45:00
don't even have a lottery or online gambling. Wow. Yeah, so Nevada
45:05
and Louisiana have full statewide legalized casinos. Most other states, how allow some
45:10
form of gambling, at least online, or they'll have like a designated spot
45:15
where you can potentially go gamble. Only Hawaii and Utah you will find no
45:20
gambling of any sort. That's fascinating. Yeah, Hawaiian in Utah two very
45:24
different places. Yeah, like so so different. Like they have in common
45:30
is that they're like close to salt water, I guess, which is funny
45:36
because like Utah really shouldn't have that designation, but here we are. Yeah,
45:40
that's true. Yeah, they're landlocked. Geography is weird. Yeah,
45:43
they're landlocked. Why are they in the AsSalt water? Oh wait, yeah,
45:45
there's a very salty water. Now. Non human animals do not seem
45:50
to do anything like gambling, although some primates will engage in suboptimal choice making
45:54
and gambling like tasks. So like you'll see that there's like maybe like a
45:59
kernel of that, but not necessarily a gambling type of behavior, or at
46:01
least on the level that we understand it. So yeah, and so a
46:06
lot of gambling research they've tried to do, they've tried to do with animals
46:08
and they seem to have a really hard time getting animals to gamble because it's
46:13
a fairly complex language type thing to understand, giving up something in the hopes
46:19
that you might get something more that requires you understanding exchange, understanding, temporal
46:23
delay, understanding now versus then, Like those foundational components are things that most
46:30
animals do not demonstrate the ability to do the way that we do them,
46:34
and so gambling just means nothing to them in that way, at least in
46:37
the way they've tried to arrange it in the research so far. Maybe they'll
46:40
figure it out and they'll find like, oh, it just turns out all
46:44
you have to do is like do this thing, and then they'll gamble it
46:45
crazy, right anyway, So the closest they've gotten is to get them to
46:51
make suboptimal choices, essentially meaning that they could optimize their rewards by doing X,
46:57
but instead they chose to do why, which had less than optimal rewards,
47:00
right, So they sort of then equate that to gambling in some ways.
47:06
But Yeah, interestingly, humans seem to be the only animals that do
47:09
anything like gambling exactly. That's I mean, just fascinating, and I think
47:15
that goes back to like our discussion for our patrons. We we're talking about
47:17
language being a powerful tool. If you want to see that discussion, join
47:22
the Patreon because we discussed it a whole lot. Yes, whether that is
47:27
true? All right, I think that that's all that we have to talk
47:30
about with respect to gambling addiction. Is there anything that I missed or anything
47:32
you'd like to add before we wrap it up today? No, I think
47:36
that covers it. We cover quite a bit. We did, all right.
47:38
Well, credit where credit is due. If you would like to support
47:42
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Michelle. Thank you all so much, y'all are the best, and of
48:14
course I could not do this without my team of people writing and fact checking
48:17
from Shane, Jess and myself. Just As back with us. She was
48:22
matter a long time ago in his back in the crew, which is great.
48:24
Audio editing and production comes from Justin Greenhouse. Our social media coordinator is
48:29
Emma Wilson. If you would like to talk to us about gambling or gambling
48:32
addiction or anything else that we got right in here, or just send us
48:37
compliments, you can do that. You can email us directly at info wwdwwdpodcast
48:42
dot com. You can reach out to us on the social media platforms.
48:45
If you like to complain about us, you can go over to truth Social
48:46
where no one will hear you perfectly. Fine, yeah, and that's totally
48:52
fine. Of course we're happy to hear constructive criticism. You can reach out
48:55
to us with that too. Anyway. Thank you all very much for listening,
49:00
and thank you for recording with me today. Shane, is there anything
49:02
that I missed or anything you like to add before we get to some recommendations.
49:06
Nope, I think that covers it on that front, all right,
49:08
that is gambling. We have done it, so let's recommend some things recommendations.
49:22
My recommendation is a record. By the time this is this episode is
49:25
out, it will have been released. But it's a band I've always really
49:29
enjoyed, and I think that they were really fascinating, kind of interesting group
49:32
of musicians. And that band is called Into It over It. I don't
49:36
know if you're listening to them, but I think you would actually really like
49:37
them just from like a music standpoint, Like I think that they're just like
49:40
a fascinating kind of like Midwest emo style, but like they're musicians, like
49:45
just really good musicians that do really cool things. So and they've just kind
49:50
of every album they've put out has gotten progressively more interesting. Wow. Love
49:53
that. Yeah. They So they're called into It over It and Alan May
49:57
third, they put out a full length LP call Interesting Decisions twenty twenty to
50:01
twenty twenty three, and this is what they said about the album. They
50:04
said, here's an album that we've been excited about for some time. Into
50:07
It over It have said that in the studio for many years, if you
50:09
cannot make a good decision, make it interesting one. And so this album
50:15
is like, yeah, which I was like, that's actually really an interesting
50:19
way to put it, and so they Originally it was this guy Evan Thomas
50:22
Weiss, who was like it was a solo project, into it over it
50:24
and he had he does he always kind of does these cool things. He
50:28
had a full length called fifty two Weeks where he wrote a song a week
50:30
and recorded all of them. He did one where it was just names of
50:36
cities that he had toured and like a song about that city that he had
50:37
toured in. So he's done a lot of really cool things and this one
50:42
is just a bunch of B sides stuff that they had recorded together, stuff
50:45
that they put out with like comps and different EPs and different splits, and
50:49
they finally put them all together on this one album that you can buy and
50:54
it's it's really cool. And I pre ordered this album and got it two
50:59
weeks ahead of time before it was even released. So I'm really excited that
51:01
to like dive into it, So congratulation. It's worth checking out. You
51:05
can, yeah, thank you. You can go to their band camp but
51:07
into it over it dot bandcamp dot com, and you can check out the
51:10
album called Interesting Decisions and it's a really fun interest. I think it's a
51:14
really cool listen like, especially if you're a fan of stuff like this.
51:17
Yeah, cool, all right, good to know I'm interested in their decisions.
51:22
Yeah, I like that. I am recommending a YouTube channel. This
51:29
is it's so nerdy. I guess I would like to qualify this by saying
51:35
this is probably not for everybody, but I'm gonna recommend it anyway. And
51:37
So this is a YouTube channel. It's called Dice Tower. They're just it's
51:40
a board game YouTube channel. Okay. They do reviews, they do like
51:45
playthroughs, they do rules, they do a lot of like opinion discussions,
51:52
and I don't know, I mean, I feel like it's just it's it's
51:54
a fun channel that just talks a lot about board games. So if you're
51:58
interested in in board games, I do so many different ways of talking about
52:02
board games. Sometimes they'll do like they'll they'll do like, all right,
52:05
here's our top ten three player board games. Here's our top ten two player
52:08
board games. Here's our short ten science board games. Here's our top one
52:13
hundred board games of all time. Here's like they just every every single thing
52:16
that you could think about that's related to board games they do in some capacity.
52:22
And so the Dice Tower is just it's a fun channel that I recommend
52:27
checking out if people are like interested in learning about board games or or watching
52:30
anything about board games. Literally, like most people aren't, but like because
52:35
they're so variable and the kind of things that they produce, maybe people will
52:37
want to check it out. So anyway, if that's it, the YouTube
52:40
channel Dice Tower, they just talk about board games and that's the thing that
52:44
I talk about, So I like to watch YouTube videos about it. Yeah.
52:45
You like to share, you like to share your joys. I love
52:47
that. Yeah. I mean that's what recommendations are. It's just sharing our
52:50
joys. Yeah, exactly. I think that's all we have for today.
52:53
Thank you so much for listening. Is there anything else to add before we
52:57
wrap up? Nope, I got nothing else. Okay, we'll see you
53:00
next time for more addiction stuff. Probably this is Abraham and it's a shadon
53:02
We're out. See. Yeah, you've been listening to Why We Do What
53:07
We Do. You can learn more about this and other episodes by going to
53:10
WWDWWD podcast dot com. Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an
53:16
awesome day.