Impulsive Gamblers Are More Superstitious

University of Cambridge investigators determined in a new study that gamblers who display the highest levels of impulsivity are also the ones who are most likely to exhibit severe lapses and errors in their line of reasoning.

The team says that these people are very likely to engage in superstitious behavior, such as for example carrying a lucky charm in hope that this would affect the outcome of whatever game they are playing.

Interestingly, this also leads this group of people to blame losses on bad luck or “cold” machines, negating that they have any sort of responsibility for ruining themselves. This is obviously delusional.

Working together with colleagues at the Imperial College London (ICL), the Cambridge experts studied the cases of 30 gamblers, and compared the data with an analysis of 30 non-gamblers, who had been selected to represent the general population.

All test participants were recruited from patients at the National Problem Gambling Clinic. During the research, all subjects were asked a variety of questions, all of which were meant to assess impulsivity.

The questionnaire included a question about whether participants would rather receive smaller sums of money immediately, or wait for larger sums to become available in the future. This is one of the key tenants of gambling, experts say.

“The link between impulsivity and gambling beliefs suggests to us that high impulsivity can predispose a range of more complex distortions – such as superstitions – that gamblers often experience,” explains Luke Clark, PhD, a researcher with the study team.

“Our research helps fuse these two likely underlying causes of problem gambling, shedding light on why some people are prone to becoming pathological gamblers,” he adds, quoted by PsychCentral.

“There are promising developments in treatments for problem gambling such as psychological therapies and drug medications. We hope that our research will provide additional insight into the problem and inform future treatments,” Clark adds.

Details of the new study appear in the latest issue of the medical journal Psychological Medicine. The work was supported with funds from the Medical Research Council, in the United Kingdom.