Do gamblers have a general bias in perceiving control?
Pathological gamblers show a stronger illusion of control than healthy individuals even in non-gambling situations.
Source
Pathological gamblers are more vulnerable to the illusion of control in a standard associative learning task
Study at a glance
- Design
- Case-control — Standard associative-learning / contingency task with no true control over outcomes
- N
- N=100 · 49 FEJAR-diagnosed pathological gamblers (42 men) and 51 comparison participants
- Population
- Spanish adults with diagnosed pathological gambling and non-gambling comparison adults
- Outcome
- Illusion-of-control ratings in a non-gambling associative-learning task
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Inspect source passages
Do gamblers have a general bias in perceiving control?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
49 participants in the pathological gambling group
It consisted of 49 participants (42 men and 7 women, mean age = 40.4, SD = 11.31) who had been diagnosed of pathological gambling using the South Oak Gambling Screen Questionnaire (i.e., SOGS, see Leiseur and Blume, , Spanish adaptation by Echeburua et al., ).
The experiment was available online for 6 months
The experiment was available during 6 months at our online laboratory, http://www.labpsico.deusto.es , so that participants in both groups could access the experiment at their convenience.
What they did
Researchers recruited 49 individuals undergoing rehabilitation for pathological gambling and 51 control participants. Over a 6-month period, participants completed an online associative learning task where they played the role of a doctor deciding whether to administer a fictitious medicine across 100 trials. In reality, the patient healed independently of their actions with a 0.80 probability, and participants afterwards rated how effective they believed the treatment was.
What they found
Both groups fell victim to the illusion of control, but the gambler group rated the treatment's effectiveness significantly higher than the control group did, with a mean score of 70.61 compared to 57.20. This difference was not caused by gamblers choosing to give the drug more often, as both groups administered the medicine at similar rates. Instead, the higher rating points to a cognitive or perceptual overestimation of cause-and-effect relationships.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study's gambler group was predominantly male, meaning the findings cannot be easily generalized to female gamblers. Because the task simulated a highly successful treatment where the patient recovered with a 0.80 probability, the results do not explain how gamblers act under low-probability outcomes typical of actual gambling. Lastly, the cross-sectional design cannot prove whether a baseline cognitive bias makes people vulnerable to gambling, or if gambling itself alters how a person perceives control.
Key terms
- illusion of control
- The cognitive bias where people believe their actions influence random or independent outcomes.
- contingency learning
- The process of tracking and detecting the actual statistical relationship between a specific behavior and its consequences.
- null contingency
- A situation where an outcome occurs with the exact same probability regardless of whether a specific action is taken.
- pathological gambling
- A psychological disorder characterized by a persistent and maladaptive inability to resist impulses to gamble.
Flashcards
0 of 33 answers reviewed
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
How is the illusion of control defined in psychological research?
Common questions
Why did the researchers use a medical scenario instead of a gambling task?
Using a medical task helped researchers see if gamblers have a general cognitive bias in everyday life, rather than one limited only to gambling. It also minimized self-reporting biases and social desirability effects often triggered by gambling-related questions.
How did both groups end up with an illusion of control if the drug did nothing?
The simulation was designed so patients recovered with a 0.80 probability regardless of the drug. Because this recovery rate was so high, participants frequently observed patients get better right after administering the drug, leading them to assume their action caused the recovery.
Did the gamblers just click the button more often?
No, both groups chose to administer the medicine at similar rates. The stronger illusion of control in the gambler group was due to how they processed the relationship between their actions and the outcomes, rather than how often they clicked.
More on Cognitive bias