Knowledge Box

Pathological Gambling and Cognitive Biases

HSB 3rd Floor Student Commons

The current psychological literature shows distinct differences between pathological gamblers and non-pathological gamblers. More specifically, decision-making processes of pathological gamblers may be affected by cognitive biases like the gambler’s fallacy (overestimating the probability of a random outcome following a series of the alternative outcome) and the hot hand fallacy (belief that the probability of winning in the next trial is positively affected by the number of wins previously experienced) more so than non-pathological gamblers. We hypothesized and are currently investigating whether pathological gamblers with higher gambling severity scores show more dramatic instances of these cognitive biases. Participants who are frequent gamblers complete a computerized roulette task, which will help assess their decision patterns following various roulette outcomes. Details regarding data analysis and interpretation will be discussed.