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.
How this study connects
Role on claims
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The clinical group was further along a shared distribution, not on a different one.
Biases are graded rather than present or absent. Both pathological gamblers and controls fell for the illusion of control in an associative learning task; the groups differed in degree (mean effectiveness rating 70.61 versus 57.20), and the difference was not explained by gamblers administering the treatment more often.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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