Maintenance

• Maintenance of gambling

  ·         Cognitive bias/distortions maintain gambling behaviour

  ·         Our expectations are influenced by cognitive processes eg thinking and memories
• Cognitive biases

  addicted gamblers thinking is biased towards perceiving favourable outcomes e.g 'near miss bias'
• A person addicted to gambling is biased towards perceiving favourable outcomes
• Near misses for example, betting on several horses, and they come second or third. The individual will see this as nearly winning rather than constantly losing. This provides rewards like excitement or tension of coming so close to winning. So, the individual continues gambling.
• Irrational thoughts about how probability, luck and chance work- eg: gamblers fallacy
• Gamblers fallacy- mistaken belief that one random outcome can influence another, next random outcome. Eg coin tosses, each coin toss is independent of the previous one , but the gambler thinks heads 3 times means the next has to be tails.
• Illusions of control and exaggeration of skill or ability- addicted gambler may think they can influence outcome.
• They think that have special knowledge which makes them experts in gambling. Superstitious behaviour puts them at odds of winning eg touching objects or rituals before gambling.
• Thinking they have control over something they in reality do not eg fruit machines. Football fan think they have special knowledge which makes them a skilled gambler.