Why is gambling so addicting? In part because of a psychological bias remarkably described by the Russian writer, himself an avid gamer.
Place your bets, no more bets ! Without going so far as to lean on a roulette table, many have already tried their luck at a game of chance. In fact, this market has never known the crisis and flourishes today on the Internet. The taste for gambling is such that it sometimes turns into addiction, and it is considered problematic for 1 to 2% of the French population. Why is it consuming so many people? Psychologists and neuroscientists are now looking at what it reveals about the functioning of the human mind — and its dysfunctions!
They are not the first to take an interest in it. Already in the nineteenth century, the subject had attracted the attention of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The latter was also directly concerned, since his irresistible attraction for roulette caused him many financial and sentimental setbacks. Published in 1866, The Player is drawn largely from personal experience and observations of other die-hard players.
In Roulettenbourg
The novel recounts the misadventures of Alexis Ivanovich, a young and fiery tutor accompanying a disparate group in the imaginary town of Roulettenbourg. It is inspired by the new resorts with casinos that flourished in Western Europe from the mid-19th century. There, social statuses and fortunes come and go, while love and play mingle, in an atmosphere loaded with erotic emotions and intense pleasure.
Dostoyevsky understood that gambling is far from being a simple question of money. Losing or winning becomes above all a matter of thrill, guaranteed by uncertainty. But above all, his story-testimony puts his finger on the psychological mechanisms that turn the taste for gambling towards pathology.
In particular, it perfectly exposes what will be described much later as the error or the illusion of the bettor, a cognitive bias better known by its English name of gambler’s fallacy. It is the illusory belief that chance, or luck, inevitably turns out to be. Roulette players imagine that it would be “logical that, if red comes out sixteen times in a row, black comes out the seventeenth”; or that after losing a certain number of times, they have a better chance of winning.
Strictly speaking, of course, this is a decoy: the ball has no memory and has an equal chance of hitting each of the roulette numbers, regardless of all previous and future draws. Surprisingly, Alexis Ivanovich seems to be aware of this, but that does not prevent him from falling victim to this powerful illusion, since he feels like he is taking an “insane risk” by continuing to bet on red while he has already been released seven times.
A need for meaning
The illusion of the bettor has been observed many times in the laboratory and during field studies in casinos. It also affects financial markets and our daily lives. It seems that we have a hard time conceiving of a chain of events as independent of each other. As a result, we attribute meaning, pattern, logic to things that don’t have any. Where does this illusion come from?
In a game of chance, the causal structure that determines the outcome is repeated identically on each spin: if the “26” is rolled in roulette, it is not subsequently removed and the board remains the same. As if there was always a “replacement” of the forces present. However, this is not what we observe in real life. After an event occurs, the resources and circumstances that triggered it are virtually exhausted, and it is never exactly the same that happens afterwards. Slipping on a banana peel, for example, sends it far away, so that we won’t fall over the next time we pass the same spot! By bypassing this natural constraint, games of chance challenge our very experience of reality. Consequence: Our predictions are flawed and we have the impression that a bad streak cannot continue indefinitely.
The taste for risk, the illusion of control
If the illusion of the bettor partly explains the infernal spiral which loses some players, convinced that they will end up “remaking themselves”, it is not the only one involved. Dostoevsky draws up a complex profile of the compulsive gambler, evoking for example “a terrible thirst for risk” or an illusion of control (Alexis is convinced that he can influence chance and maximize his chances by playing his own money rather than placing bets for someone else). He thus anticipates the observations of modern psychologists, as well as a number of contemporary questions on this type of behavior. Is it really an individual pathology, or a broader social problem? Is it the equivalent of an addiction, or just a lifestyle choice deviating from the norm? And if gambling is a disease, does that mean the player has no responsibility?
The various names of the disorder clearly indicate the current difficulties of classification: we speak of pathological, excessive, problematic, compulsive, impulsive gambling… However, the most popular qualification among psychiatrists is that of addiction. Indeed, playing and using drugs involve similar behaviors and sensations, as well as common targets and brain networks.
The drugged brain
This is particularly the case with the famous reward circuit, which includes in particular the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area, structures collectively called the mesolimbic dopaminergic system. Activation of this circuit produces subjective feelings of pleasure and desire — originally intended to indicate that something is beneficial to the body — and the mere sight of a cigarette, a slot machine. or a syringe makes it roar among addicts. Gambling is therefore a kind of natural drug, just like sex or food.
If the idea of playing exacerbates the desire in pathological gamblers, their reward circuit, on the other hand, reacts less and less at the end of the game. As in all drugs, it is then necessary to increase the dose to find the same pleasure. . This reduced sensitivity to rewards and defeats further blurs the ability to anticipate the consequences of actions and leads to seeking short-term gains, without worrying about long-term losses.
Other peculiarities complete the cerebral profile of pathological gamblers. Their impulsiveness and difficulty leaving the game indicate that the frontal lobe is no longer inhibiting impulses enough. In addition, a recent study suggests that hyperactivity of the insula, a region of the brain involved in detecting prediction errors, is to blame in their distorted perception of their chances of winning.
While the exact mechanisms of gambling addiction are not fully understood, some people seem to be way ahead of researchers. These are of course the designers of gambling games, and more generally the industry behind these games. Anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, from the mit, has conducted extensive fieldwork on Las Vegas and its casinos. She thus detailed how everything, in this city, is designed to the millimeter to promote addiction: the games, the settings, the atmospheres … Slot machines, for example, are programmed to quickly chain the games, locking the player in. a bewitching rhythm, and to save it from time to time, to encourage it to continue.
This refinement in the engineering of addiction is certainly out of all proportion to what Dostoyevsky knew. But his story proves that it didn’t take that much to push fragile individuals into poverty. In the end, Alexis lost everything and remains completely addicted to the game, relapsing at the slightest chance.
Chance or fate?
In describing the illusion of the gambler, Dostoevsky clearly perceived that casinos did not simply offer the hope of changing his life, but literally relied on the belief that life must change, that it is not a matter of chance. , but of personal destiny. If he was not fooled, his lucidity did not prevent him from regularly playing everything for everything, and not just gambling. He thus concluded a contract with his publisher obliging him to write Le Joueur en 26 jours. . The challenge ? The abandonment of the rights of all his work if he did not respect the deadlines. A victim of seizures that could strike at any time, perhaps he knew that he could never control everything anyway. And this is undoubtedly what led him to make a real “Russian roulette” all his life!
