Bet Ya Ten Bucks...

 I drove past a casino on a Sunday morning some years ago and noted that the parking lot was full of cars. “Why aren’t those people in church?” I wondered for a second, but only for a second because I knew why they were here and not there. The casino promises the chance of a reward for their presence, or at least a greater reward than the church does. We go to places that promise pleasure, avoid places that don’t.  

“Simple as that?” you ask.

          No, not really, but it’s enough of a factor to demand some serious exploration.

 

Dr. Brian Goldman on a podcast called “White coat, Black art” recently explored the implications of relaxed sports betting regulations on, particularly, those vulnerable to gambling addictions. Apparently, it’s not illegal anymore to bet on a specific game, even to bet on its details, like which hockey player will score the winning goal. You may have noticed the increased advertising by betting sites on your smart phone and computer.

 

I took a few Psychology courses at the University of Alberta long ago. The profs were either behaviourists or cognitive theory proponents, and this difference was reflected in how they accounted for influences that led us to behave in one way and not in another. Why did the chicken cross the road? The behaviourist assumed something on the other side promised a reward or that remaining on this side portended a punishment, but this reasoning dropped us right into the bailywick of the cognitive (thinking) theorist who would argue that the chicken weighed her options and chose to cross for whatever logic she was following.

 

Our chickens on the farm had very small heads; they showed no signs of behaving logically.  

A story was told of a behaviourist professor who taught that we humans are conditioned in the same manner as dogs are when being trained to sit. In discussions over beers, the class decided to test the theory by using and withholding the rewards of paying attention and taking notes. The details were that they would pay attention and write notes only when he spoke from the right corner of the classroom. It took only a few days before the goal was achieved; he lectured almost exclusively from the right-hand side of the room, jotted terms only on the extreme right-hand end of the blackboard.

When they divulged what they had done to the professor, he was furious; we want to be thought of as logical, not as unconsciously-trained creatures.  

A parent gets his/her/their son to wash his hands by giving him a jellybean whenever he does so. He washes his hands twenty times a day and his mouth becomes a mess of cavities.  

“Freedom” has become the noise de jour, it seems. “Restricting individual’s freedom to gamble however and wherever they choose is not the business of the government,” is the logic, the reasoning, the cognition. “We want to be free.” This makes perfect sense in a humanity where everyone is cognitively driven, but like the poor professor, we can be conditioned to behave in ways that are decidedly analogical and harmful to us and others, repeatedly betting against the house being one of them.                 

How much cognition does it take to end the behaviour of repeatedly buying lottery tickets where the chances of winning are in the millions to one? How much cognition does it take to figure out that casinos, lotteries, raffles are schemes with but one purpose: to condition as many as possible to cooperate with a plan for moving money from fellow citizens’ pockets into someone else’s.

Liberalizing gambling laws may feel like freedom, and for those who’ve already figured out that casinos’ promise of rewards is illusory, manipulative, the change means little. For those who can’t cognitively figure such things out, it’s an expansion of corporate opportunities to enslave, to advertise and coax as many as possible into habitual behaviour.

An irony: a woman* spends hours several times a week putting loonies into the one-armed bandit in the bar down the street. Occasionally, the machine coughs up a handful of coins and in her mind, she’s a winner. She doesn’t know that this payout is the jellybean that will rot her wallet; the occasional dopamine rush is enough to keep her dropping in the loonies and pulling the handle. If for every loonie she dropped in, the machine would spit out a loonie and a dime, it would become a job and she’d quit.

“Sit, Lassie, sit! Good girl.” 

I’ve been in a casino once. In Moose Jaw. I ate a meal there and left. I’ve been to church about 2,712 times or more. I’ve also eaten many a potluck meal there. I don’t remember conditioning or cognitive processing ever being discussed when “Why are our numbers falling?” comes up. Perhaps it’s time.

 

* If you prefer, read the rest in the masculine. If there’s a gender difference, I’d suggest that men are at least as “trainable” as women, maybe more.