The cognitive explanation of gambling Flashcards
What is the basis of the cognitive explanation?
Emphasises irrational thought processes. They are faulty information processors. Addicts make a series of misattributions about their addiction - eg: they may view losses as a near miss.
How is gambling initiated?
Self-medication beliefs
What are self-medication beliefs?
The cognitive approach believes that many addictions are created through self-medication.
This means that addictive gambling has started to alleviate negative cognitive states.
Gambling may also create a ‘buzz’ of excitement that initially raises mood levels.
How is gambling maintained?
Cognitive biases
What is cognitive myopia?
Cognitive myopia’ (short-sightedness) suggests that gamblers focus on the immediate gratifying state far more than the long term consequences of heavy gambling (financial, social and family problems). This is a biased way of processing information, and suggests decision making is at fault. This is an irrational belief or a cognitive bias.
What is the gambler’s fallacy?
This is basically the mistaken notion that the odds for something with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending upon recent occurrence. E.g, the probability of winning will increase with the run of ongoing losses i.e. a win must be coming as there have been so many losses it is time for a win!
What is availability?
Availability – memories of wins can be more easily accessed than losses. This can also be seeing people winning (e.g. the lottery) and not the masses of people who lose.
What is hindsight bias?
Gamblers look back at big wins and big losses and say they expected it. This is thought to give them an irrational sense of control over their gambling.
What is flexible attribution?
When they win, it is down to their ability or skill. When they lose, it is due to factors outside their control e.g bad luck, the machine is in a bad mood, it has already paid out
What is illusion of control?
Illusion of control - belief you can affect the chances of winning when the chances are actually random - choosing “lucky numbers” on a lotto ticket. Encourages gamblers to believe they can influence chance.
COGNITIVE EXPLANATION OF GAMBLING - Research support?
For example Griffith’s (1994) study compared the verbalised cognitive biases of regular gambler (RG) compared to non-regular gamblers (NRG) whilst they played on fruit machines at an amusement arcade.
He found that there were no differences in skill between RG and NRG BUT Regular gamblers did make more irrational verbalisations than non regular gamblers. 14% of the RG verbalisations were irrational comments compared to 2.5% of the NRG e.g. some recorded Flexible attributions were: “I’m not doing to well here”, “It must have paid out”, “This fruity is not in a good mood”, “someone’s obviously won out of this before”.
COGNITIVE EXPLANATION OF GAMBLING - Alternative explanations?
For example, Blum and Comings (1996) have identified that gamblers are far more likely to possess the A1DRD2 genetic variant predisposing them to gambling.
COGNITIVE EXPLANATION OF GAMBLING - Individual differences?
Burger and Norris (1985) gambling addiction in some is linked to the extent to which certain gamblers believe they can control the events in their lives (locus of control). Those who believe they have a high degree of control may displace those feelings onto truly random events, such as the lottery, in an attempt to prove that they can still maintain this degree of control so they continue to partake in gambling behaviours, which eventually leads to an addiction but those who do not have these beliefs about themselves will not become addicted to gambling.
COGNITIVE EXPLANATION OF GAMBLING - Cause and effect?
This is because cause and effect between distorted cognitive biases and gambling problems cannot be established due to the problems of having no before addiction measurements to compare to so we cannot be sure if distorted cognitive biases that existed beforehand leads to gambling addiction or of gambling addiction leads to having more distorted cognitive biases in thinking.
COGNITIVE EXPLANATION OF GAMBLING - Scientific?
Reliance of methodology that is not scientific
It is found that a lot of the cognitive biases are difficult to falsify ( i.e logical possibility that a theory can be shown to be false ) and really personal to the individuals so it is difficult to gather objective data.
