Prelude to Post of Dr. William G. McCown Q&A
or
Why Should I Care?
If you are unfamiliar with Dr. William G. McCown, he is one of the foremost authorities on problem gambling in America, and author of several books on the subject. His book Best Possible Odds, published in 2002, was a call to arms for the entire psychological community to give problem gambling more attention. The call was heard. In the decade since, more research and advance in the field has occurred than in the century before.
But why should you care?
If you are a frequent follower of Video Poker related forums, the odds are you don't currently have a gambling problem. But could you ever, and do you perhaps know someone that might? The intention of the interview, which I will be posting soon, was not to help people who already have gambling problems. Its primary intent is to outline and highlight risk factors for developing problems and to detail some basic good practices to avoid issues. What this means to you:
If you are new to gambling and want it to always remain fun and guilt free, the information in this article may be able to help improve your gambling experience and your enjoyment...and...
Turns out, many of the things that have the potential to make us better gamblers help us in all aspects of life; quantifying risk, making good decisions, not judging decisions by their outcomes, being free from biases, etc... The current and amazingly successful new treatment strategy for problem gambling involves something called cognitive behavioral therapy, which has grown out of psychology's new understanding of heuristics. If you haven't heard of heuristics before, here's something to whet your appetite.
Heuristics: How it got started.
The Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman had just finished doing a great deal of research into positive and negative reinforcement and had concluded that in all cases he had looked at, rewarding good behavior worked better than punishing negative behavior. He took his research on the road and found himself on an Israeli Air Force base explaining to flight instructors about his findings to help them improve military training. The reception he got was not as expected. Just short of calling him a complete idiot, the consensus between all the instructors was as follows:
1.You may have done all this research in your lab, but that's not how it works in the real world. (Sound familiar?)
2.If someone does great and you compliment them they always get worse.
3.If someone screws up and you scream and chastise them they always get better.
Proving his strength as a scientist, he did not ignore this real world information in lieu of his laboratory results. He asked the Air Force if he could conduct a study into what the instructors were telling him and they consented. Three and a half years later, here's what he found.
1.The instructors were absolutely right about what they had noticed. People did get worse after being complimented and they did indeed get better after being screamed at.
2.The instructors were completely wrong as to the source and causation of the facts.
3.The reason people tended to get worse after being complimented was because the instructors were only complimenting them after exceptionally good performances. Did you catch the word, "exceptionally" in that last sentence? By definition, exceptional things are rare and uncommon. Simple regression to mean indicates that it was highly unlikely that the student pilots would do as well after having done exceptionally well.
4.The exact same dynamic was true for the people being screamed at. Though a strong talking to might be in order after flying a plane into the base commissary, it's just not that likely that the same pilot would do it two days in a row.
He proved unequivocally that positive reinforcement was indeed better for training military pilots, though not by much. The study concluded that nothing the instructors did had much effect on the pilots at all. Their innate ability had more to do with their performance than anything else. That ability was simply being obfuscated by random factors, like the weather or equipment failure, over which neither the instructor nor the pilots had any control.
Dr. Kahneman's final conclusions were that people can grossly misinterpret information and come to not only wrong conclusions, but in some cases answers that are diametrically opposed to reality—all thanks to the normal common ways our brains process information. Did you catch the words "normal" and "common" there? This was a case of sane normal healthy people being 100% totally wrong, due to nothing other than normal thought. He found this very interesting.
He teamed up with Doctor Amos Tversky and now, after nearly half a century of research, the human race finally possesses the knowledge of why intelligent healthy people don't always make the best decisions, and why people come to different conclusions with identical information.
That information, combined with other research, has given us cognitive behavioral therapy, and it's useful information to ALL...not just problem gamblers...not just would-be gamblers...not just gamblers...
Gambling helps us in the identification of cognitive biases. They are very hard to detect in everyday life, but they become obvious if not omnipresent inside casinos. Find a person making a bad decision in a casino, and the smart money says you have found someone employing an error prone heuristic, with at least mild cognitive distortion. Identification, of course, is only the first step because the very self-same heuristics that gave rise to the bad decision often make it hard or impossible for people to understand what they've done wrong, even if it is explained to them...as was the case with the flight instructors in the story above. As always, the first step to solving any problem is knowing you have one. And if you do manage to beat the odds and identify a thought process that is less than optimal in a casino, the odds are very good that the information will help you for the rest of your life and the lives of your children as well.
Heuristics is a new science and its application in cognitive behavioral therapy has the potential to be one of the greatest turning points in the history of mankind. Turns out the very same things that are being used so successfully to treat gambling problems also work to prevent them, and could help us all think better.
If there is any aspect of life that wouldn't be improved by thinking better, I can't think of it.
I'll post the interview in one week. ~FK
