cognitive biases

• people may often argue that addiction itself is irrational, as addicts engage in behaviours that have clear negative outcomes, but they do it anyway.

  this suggests that there may be some problems in the way that addicts think about their behaviour.
• one key cognitive bias that may explain addiction is the effect of heuristics.
• heuristics

  heuristics allow us to make mental shortcuts in order to make decisions quickly and with little effort.

  while heuristics are undoubtedly vital for humans to function, they can lead to errors.
• availability heuristic - events that are more easily recalled from memory may bias our assessment of how likely an outcome is.

  it may cause gamblers to overestimate their likelihood of winning the jackpot.
• availability heuristic

  the gambler will easily be able to remember the times when they won big, and it will be harder to remember the times when they lost - the memories of winning are more 'available.'
• availability heuristic

  companies that make gambling machines are aware of availability heuristic.

  when the jackpot on a fruit machine or other betting machine is won, there is usually a lot of noise and fanfare... when the gambler loses the machine is silent.
• representativeness heuristic - is the belief that random events have a pattern, and in particular that a series of events drawn from a small sample should represent what would be found in a larger sample.
• representativeness heuristic

  this cognitive bias is called the gambler's fallacy, and Keren and Lewis (1994) argue that there are two types:

  1. gamblers may feel that after a run of losing bets, for example, they are 'due' a win, and so may persist in gambling behaviour.
  2. gamblers will underestimate the number of observations needed for a reliable detection of biased numbers, and believe that they have spotted patterns where there are none.
• sunk-cost fallacy - is the belief that if an individual has already invested heavily in something, they are more likely to carry on investing in it.
• sunk-cost fallacy

  they feel that they have 'invested' in this gamble, and to walk away would be to lose this money forever - even though logically they should stop playing in order to avoid losing even more money.