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Betting on Illusory Patterns: Probability Matching in Habitual Gamblers

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Abstract

Why do people gamble? A large body of research suggests that cognitive distortions play an important role in pathological gambling. Many of these distortions are specific cases of a more general misperception of randomness, specifically of an illusory perception of patterns in random sequences. In this article, we provide further evidence for the assumption that gamblers are particularly prone to perceiving illusory patterns. In particular, we compared habitual gamblers to a matched sample of community members with regard to how much they exhibit the choice anomaly ‘probability matching’. Probability matching describes the tendency to match response proportions to outcome probabilities when predicting binary outcomes. It leads to a lower expected accuracy than the maximizing strategy of predicting the most likely event on each trial. Previous research has shown that an illusory perception of patterns in random sequences fuels probability matching. So does impulsivity, which is also reported to be higher in gamblers. We therefore hypothesized that gamblers will exhibit more probability matching than non-gamblers, which was confirmed in a controlled laboratory experiment. Additionally, gamblers scored much lower than community members on the cognitive reflection task, which indicates higher impulsivity. This difference could account for the difference in probability matching between the samples. These results suggest that gamblers are more willing to bet impulsively on perceived illusory patterns.

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Notes

  1. Note that the education was slightly higher among community members, t(1,159) = 1.82, p = .071. Including education as a control variable in any of the subsequent analyses did not alter the results in any important way.

  2. Note that actual guessing would be at about 50 %, and most participants in that category were around that value. Yet the extremely few participants who consistently predicted the less event more often (i.e., below 50 %) were included in this category as (1) there were so few of them that an extra category was not warranted and (2) their behavior is similar to guessing in the sense that they have not learnt to perform well in the task.

  3. d expresses the difference between two means in terms of its (pooled) standard deviation. See Cohen (1992) for details.

  4. “The \(\upeta_{\text{p}}^{2}\) statistic is simply the ratio of the sum of squares for the particular variable under consideration divided by the total of that sum of squares and the sum of squares of the relevant error term. It describes the proportion of variability associated with an effect when the variability associated with all other effects identified in the analysis has been removed from consideration.” (Fritz et al. 2012, p. 8).

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Acknowledgments

We thank the members of the Evolution and Cognition Lab at Clarkson University for their help in data collection, Dominique Schmidt for programming the experiment, and the executive director of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Gaming Commission Todd Papineau for his support. The research was supported by grants from the National Center for Responsible Gaming and the T. Urling and Mabel Walker Research Fellowship Program of Northern New York that were awarded to the second author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Social Psychology and Decision Sciences, University of Konstanz, P.O. Box 43, 78457, Konstanz, Germany

    Wolfgang Gaissmaier

  2. Department of Psychology, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, USA

    Andreas Wilke & Paige McCanney

  3. Department of Economic Psychology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

    Benjamin Scheibehenne

  4. Department of Anthropology, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    H. Clark Barrett

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  1. Wolfgang Gaissmaier
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  2. Andreas Wilke
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Correspondence to Wolfgang Gaissmaier.

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Gaissmaier, W., Wilke, A., Scheibehenne, B. et al. Betting on Illusory Patterns: Probability Matching in Habitual Gamblers. J Gambl Stud 32, 143–156 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10899-015-9539-9

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