Cognitive bias
Do gamblers have a general bias in perceiving control?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Pathological gamblers show a stronger illusion of control than healthy individuals even in non-gambling situations.
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
Role on claims
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Pathological gamblers exhibit a significantly stronger illusion of control than healthy individuals, overestimating their personal causal influence even in non-gambling, abstract associative learning tasks.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
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