Behavioural Research Centre, Huddersfield Business School, The University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield HD1 3DH, UK.
Department of Psychology, Babeş-Bolyai University, 400015 Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Aug 14;18(16):8607. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18168607.
Problem gambling is a gambling disorder often described as continued gambling in the face of increasing losses. In this article, we explored problem gambling behaviour and its psychological determinants. We considered the assumption of stability in risky preferences, anticipated by both normative and descriptive theories of decision making, as well as recent evidence that risk preferences are in fact 'constructed on the fly' during risk elicitation. Accordingly, we argue that problem gambling is a multifaceted disorder, which is 'fueled on the fly' by a wide range of contextual and non-contextual influences, including individual differences in personality traits, hormonal and emotional activations. We have proposed that the experience of gambling behaviour in itself is a dynamic experience of events in time series, where gamblers anchor on the most recent event-typically a small loss or rare win. This is a highly adaptive, but erroneous, decision-making mechanism, where anchoring on the most recent event alters the psychological representations of substantial and accumulated loss in the past to a representation of negligible loss. In other words, people feel better while they gamble. We conclude that problem gambling researchers and policy makers will need to employ multifaceted and holistic approaches to understand problem gambling.
问题赌博是一种赌博障碍，通常被描述为在不断增加的损失面前继续赌博。在本文中，我们探讨了问题赌博行为及其心理决定因素。我们考虑了风险偏好稳定性的假设，这是规范性和描述性决策理论都假设的，以及最近的证据表明，风险偏好实际上是在风险诱发过程中“实时构建”的。因此，我们认为问题赌博是一种多方面的障碍，它受到广泛的情境和非情境影响的“实时推动”，包括人格特质、荷尔蒙和情绪激活等个体差异。我们提出，赌博行为本身就是时间序列中事件的动态体验，赌徒会关注最近的事件——通常是小损失或罕见的胜利。这是一种高度适应但错误的决策机制，即最近事件的锚定会将过去大量累积的损失的心理表示改变为微不足道的损失的表示。换句话说，人们在赌博时感觉更好。我们得出结论，问题赌博研究人员和政策制定者将需要采用多方面和整体的方法来理解问题赌博。
