Upon walking into a casino, your hearing, sight, smell and touch instantly become flooded with bright lights, loud noises and pleasant scents, and suddenly you find it much easier to make impulsive decisions and much more likely to forget your losses.
Casinos use a variety of psychological techniques to keep players gambling, such as loss aversion, positive reinforcement and anchoring. Knowledge of these strategies to stop betting problems could very well be helpful, if you’re planning on gambling in casinos.
They Create the Illusion of Control
Game-play elements that suggest the player controls an outcome, either directly or indirectly, contribute to making games of chance seem less like a game of chance, and more like one where the player’s actions affect her chances of winning – they are a form of subtle feedback that can make one feel more in control – more confident – and thus, more likely to risk it all – especially when paired with variable ratio schedules (such as repeating a series of actions that comes just after repeating three-card Monte actions).
Casino operators try to surround people, in a rather immersive sensory environment, with sounds, light, bright light and flashing lights, screams of winners, laughter, and even free drinks. The reason for providing free drinks is likely that alcohol makes people less inhibited, more likely to keep gambling and engage in other stupidities.
Illusion of control can be an adaptive trait, allowing people to cope with uncertainty and take charge. However, evidence suggests that illusion of control creates vulnerability to magical thinking and superstition, hallmarks of addiction-oriented behaviours such as gambling. Casinos leverage this bias by using different gimmicks such as paying out in chips instead of cold cash, helping players compartmentalise their money, and posting pictures of prior winners to encourage hope that the same might happen to them.
They Encourage You to Stay
Casinos give away free drinks, food or hotels to keep people on the gambling premises but for longer. Players see others playing so it must be a popular thing to do, and surely I will win tomorrow!
In a bog-standard Las Vegas casino, the lighting is dim, clocks are hidden, and the floors are anthropomorphic mazes, engineered to confuse your perception of time and place, thereby enabling you to lose track of how much you’ve already spent.
Negative reinforcement is used by casinos to support gambling. Near-wins and near-victories are provided repeatedly, and they might even be more arousing and rewarding than real wins. Near-wins serve to reinforce resistance to extinction – the longevity of behaviours that are learn through experience.
They Control Your Atmosphere
There is music, flashing lights, screaming and winning players cheering – the cacophony of noises that might make you continue to gamble more than you wanted as a peer effect due to the communal feeling when there’s someone else winning big. Gambling can be a social phenomenon.
Scent can be used to attract people to the venues in the first place and to discourage them from leaving – as can air filtration in gaming areas; the air is artificially refreshed to improve players’ moods – studies have shown smell can have an impact on betting trends.
Without clocks in casinos, it’s hard to know if you are gambling for 30 minutes or 30 hours, so it becomes something you have to stay in control of – ‘You have to discipline yourself to just set a budget and stick to it when you go.’ It’s important to keep it fun What’s surprising is that clinical psychologists and psychiatrists fail to bring a holistic, existential view of gambling to the table. We already know from their research that problem gambling is not about the slippery slope of descending into addiction, or about a compulsive disorder. It’s a search for meaning.
They Control Your Sense of Time
Lights, sounds, smells, colours, sounds again – an incredible symphony of confusion that sets off all five senses. Coin-clinking, buzzers and beep-beep machines – all part of the incoherent noise that blinds you from perceiving if you’re winning or losing.
Clocks and natural sources of light are rarely seen in casinos, which means that patrons can lose track of the time of day and gamble for longer than might otherwise be the case in a more transparent environment. Casinos can often manipulate dy/dt by offering hours of play when it’s naturally dark outside and moulding the environment to artificially mimic daylight – and further disorient the unwary.
Second, chips as a frictionless token of money decouple the spending from gambling, facilitating more frequent and larger bets. Lastly, casinos leverage pressurised tanks filled with extra oxygen to keep players awake and alert so that they may gamble for longer stretches. In concert, resistance to extinction and positive reinforcement strategies make casinos powerfully addictive.
