alt Hacker NewsMuch like many substance use disorders, I am inclined the to believe the substance is merely a self-medication technique for a deeper rooted issue.
I am curious what about the gambling makes it so addictive? I refuse to believe that people are addicted solely because of bro-science's elementary understanding dopamine. What makes people continue despite the negative consequences in their lives? Is it the hope? The hope that if they win big, then a better life awaits them or that the money will fix all their problems?
I am not sure if I have ever had a "real addiction^1," but I definitely have had psychological dependencies/self-medication strategies with things like video games and Internet usage.
I am quite an introspective person, thus the underlying reasons were never a mystery to me. I wasn't "addicted" to gaming nor the Internet because they are just fun or entertaining. Each served a different purpose in my life. Mostly through out my early childhood and into my young adult life.
With games, I felt that, in whatever virtual world I was playing in, that I was able to be more than I could in real life. I could gain competence and mastery of "skills." I felt like I was a useful; a person people that could count on. My hard work would materialize right before my very eyes. Do <insert task> and get <insert reward>. I was no longer the [undiagnosed] weird, anxious and depressed person with ADHD. In the games, I was no longer "lazy" nor a "failure." People weren't trying to "discipline" the issues out of me. Games allowed me to be something the world would never allow me to be -- myself.
The Internet was different though. I was like Ponce De Leon in search of the Fountain of Youth. I believed that there was some sort of knowledge, that once discovered, then all my problems would subside. Like some sort of metaphorical magical spell. Once I came across it, I would know it. The answers were out there, and I just needed to find them. However, much like Ponce De Leon, what I was looking for did not exist. But hey, at least I read and learned a lot. =D
There has to be something deeper to gambling addiction. If so, then what is it?
[1] I define addiction as a dependency in which one is unable to resist despite it causing real, tangible harm in one or more areas of one's life -- school, work, relationships, etc..
Replies
> There has to be something deeper to gambling addiction. If so, then what is it?
I believe that B.F.Skinner and his pigeons answered this question.
As a legend tells us, once upon a time Skinner's apparatus that controlled reinforcements for his pigeons got broken. But Skinner didn't noticed it and went home to sleep. In the morning when he came to his lab, he watched how a pigeon did weird things in his cage. The pigeon walked in circles, dragged one of his wings, and it was like the pigeon danced some weird dance. Skinner was very interested what is wrong with the pigeon, and it turned out that his apparatus gave random reinforcements to the pigeon all the night.
Pigeon pushed the lever, and sometimes it got something crunchy, but mostly it didn't. Naive person might think, that it would lead pigeon to get frustrated and tired from the lever, but instead the pigeon doubled down and... Let me anthropomorphize to make things easier. It was like pigeon invented all kinds of omens and rituals to make the lever work. Like "I dragged my wing last time when lever had worked, so I'll drag my wing next time...", "ohh, it didn't work, lets try again, and again, ..., Yeah! it worked again, now I was standing on one leg, it seems to be the key to success".
Skinner was very intrigued and he developed "variable ratio of reinforcements", which led him to sharpen his methods and he easily could turn a pigeon into a maniac that push lever obsessively and just can't stop. One of the key findings was that less frequent and seemingly random rewards working much better than deterministic rewards on each push of the lever. When lever "just works" pigeon gets as much rewards as it needs and then goes to sleep. But when lever works sometimes, pigeon pushes the lever more and doesn't stop when it got all it needs.
Why brains do this to animals? I don't know what psychology thinks about it, I think that there are two possible (not mutually exclusive) explanations:
1. curiosity, a drive to learn how to control the reality around you. Maybe if you spend more time with the lever, you will learn how it works? Maybe you can learn how to get higher frequency of rewards? It would be beneficial.
2. it is a mechanism to create seeking behavior. If you get reward when doing something, then your brains would better believe that doing this is an interesting pastime. If rewards are rare, then your brains need to believe that it is a very interesting pastime, or you'd get bored in no time and die from hunger.
When I was teen I often went with my father to pick mushrooms in the forest. It is a pastime which teaches you in no time at all to look everywhere for mushrooms. You can chat, but your eyes constantly searching the surroundings, your legs wander around to look behind or underneath of bushes. Now, when I'm in a forest, I habitually look for mushrooms, I feel urge to wander off the trail to check on something looking like a dead leaf: maybe it is a mushroom? This behavior is beneficial for animals and the ability to develop such a behavior is beneficial also. Gambling just exploits it.
I don't understand what makes gambling addictive, but I do remember studies done on cats that we read about in psych 101. Cats had implants surgically implanted to their pleasure centers of the brain. A lever would trigger the implant to give them pleasure. If the lever gives pleasure everytime it's pressed, the cat would get bored of it. If the reward was random, the cat would sit there and press it all day. I think of slot machines in a similar way. I spent some time near Casino's. I heard about old people going there and wearing diapers because their greatest fear was getting up from the slot machine, and someone else sitting down at it and winning "their" prize. They thought that since it hasn't paid out for a while, it's due to pay out soon. They would play two machines side by side. Some people would have two jobs, one to pay for gambling, the other for living. It can be an addiction and can ruin lives.