The allure of gambling

Millions of Americans who gamble in casinos might have something in common with laboratory rats.

B.F. Skinner, the famed psychologist, decades ago studied how rats could be conditioned, or taught, to press bars and levers for food pellets.

Sound familiar? Next time you’re inside a casino, take a look at someone methodically feeding quarters into a slot machine.

Skinner also discovered that rats learn through fixed reinforcement, when the pellet appeared at set intervals, such as after they pressed their levers 10 times. Rats on fixed-reinforcement schedules seemed able to relax, content in knowing that food would appear at predictable intervals.

But variable reinforcement, when pellets would appear at random with no perceptible pattern between behavior and reward, led to a form of rodent obsession, with rats compulsively pressing levers on the chance the next push would yield the desired payout.

Gambling is an example of variable or intermittent reinforcement. A gambler learns that an action, making a bet, can result in a desired outcome, winning. The variable aspect of winning — a gambler might win three bets in a row before losing the next 10 — makes it all the more difficult to get up and walk away.

But David Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, isn’t ready to apply scientific research done by Skinner and others to all aspects of gambling.

“I’ve got some problems with that,” he said. “Because people really aren’t rats.”

Besides, playing poker and picking pro football games requires more thought and focus than pushing a slot machine’s buttons.

“Certainly for a slot machine, you can almost think about that as pressing a lever,” said Clayton Neighbors, a University of Washington psychiatry professor and associate director for the university’s Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors. “But it doesn’t work as well for most interactive forms of gambling.”

Schwartz earned a doctorate in history at UCLA and worked in the surveillance department of an Atlantic City, N.J., casino. Schwartz also studied anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. The allure of gambling, he said, goes back to prehistoric times when humans were eking out an existence as hunters and gatherers.

“Today in life, there is not so much chance and risk,” he said. “I think gambling is a socially acceptable way for people to get that risk in their everyday lives.”

Those who get a charge out of participating in extreme sports, piecing together a speculative business deals or even cheating on their spouses may get a similar jolt from sitting down at the blackjack table.

“People who are thrill seekers and high in sensation seeking are more likely to gamble,” Neighbors said. “But they’re also more likely to do a lot of other things, drink, experiment with drugs, the whole constellation of risk behaviors.”

Gambling has a particular appeal to high-profile athletes, such as Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley, former basketball stars who thrived on the rush of taking that last-second shot.

“They’re used to this adrenalin,” Schwartz said. “They’re used to this excitement. Betting a lot of money on golf or whatever they do when they retire is one way to recapture that.”

But that doesn’t explain why taking a chance is so mesmerizing to some but not to others. People clearly have different risk tolerances.

“No one is really sure why that is,” Schwartz said. “It appears to be something that is innate. Either you’ve got it or you don’t.”

More and more Americans seem to have it. Legal gambling in the U.S. — casinos, racetracks, lotteries and cardrooms — brought in almost $94 billion last year, a 70 percent increase in 10 years.

Some $8 billion will be bet on Super Bowl XLIII, set for Feb. 1 in Tampa, Fla. Only a tiny slice, slightly less than $100 million, will be wagered legally in Nevada sports books.

More than 10 percent of Americans participate in “March Madness” pools for college basketball playoffs, with the amount wagered exceeding $2.5 billion.

They are taking part in an activity that has been around since the birth of civilization itself.

Ty Lostutter, a University of Washington clinical psychology graduate student and research coordinator for the Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors, said Egyptians shaped the first dice and Chinese are credited with inventing playing cards. There is even some indication of gambling during prehistoric times, Lostutter said.

“There is something about the inherent nature of the risk, the excitement we get from not knowing the outcome, that has an appeal to human beings in general,” he said.

The reason why pathological gamblers engage in destructive behavior, for both themselves and their families, can be quite different.

Chris Thompson, a chemical dependency professional, works for Community Services Northwest, the state’s publicly funded gambling treatment provider in Vancouver. Thompson said many of his clients gamble to escape from some problem in their lives, what he called a “life stressor.”

“And it’s not about winning,” he said. “It’s about getting away from pain.”

“I’ve had a few action gamblers,” Thompson said, referring to risk-takers motivated by the thrill. “But the majority that come through our agency tend to be escape gamblers who go over to Jantzen Beach and do the video poker.”

Some of those action gamblers might be prone to mood swings.

“A lot of the people who gamble big that I know,” Schwartz said, “they tend to be kind of hot and cold people, where they are not quite bipolar, where they have periods of excitement and periods of down.”

New imaging research on how gambling affects the brain is finding similarities between those ups and downs and the high experienced by drug users.

“There is some (research) to suggest that there are reward pathways in the brain that seem to light up,” Lostutter said. “There is sort of a reward circuitry in our brain, and gambling taps into that much like drug use.”

Earlier this decade, Lostutter and Neighbors examined why University of Washington students gamble. The No. 1 reason, based on questionnaires filled out by 184 undergraduate students, was to make money.

But for many gamblers, it’s not about making money. It’s not about feeling an adrenalin rush. It’s not about escaping from the pain of a troubled marriage or a dead-end job.

“For most people, it’s just entertainment,” Neighbors said. “They spend a certain amount of money and they expect to lose a certain amount of money.”

“People gamble for more than just the chance to win money,” Schwartz agreed. “Because if it was just the chance to win money, the millions of people who go to these casinos every year would figure out they don’t build casinos just to give away money.”

Jeffrey Mize: 360-735-4542; jeff.mize@columbian.com.