Altering the near-miss effect in slot machine gamblers

Area of Science:

• Behavioral psychology
• Gambling research
• Cognitive science

Background:

• The near-miss effect describes how slot machine players interpret near-losing outcomes as psychologically close to winning.
• This effect may encourage continued gambling behavior by creating a false sense of proximity to a win.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether recreational gamblers exhibit the near-miss effect.
• To determine if behavioral interventions, specifically conditional discrimination training, can alter this near-miss effect.
• To explore the implications of these findings for understanding gambling behavior through a verbal-behavioral framework.

Main Methods:

• Participants were exposed to conditional discrimination training and testing procedures.
• Performance was assessed based on participants' ability to discriminate between different types of outcomes.
• The study analyzed the impact of training on the participants' responses to near-miss outcomes.

Main Results:

• Conditional discrimination training and testing disrupted the near-miss effect in 10 out of 16 participants.
• These 10 participants showed high performance on discrimination tests, indicating successful learning.
• The remaining 6 participants failed the discrimination tests, suggesting the near-miss effect persisted.

Conclusions:

• Behavioral interventions, like conditional discrimination training, can modify the near-miss effect in recreational gamblers.
• The findings support a verbally based behavioral explanation for gambling behavior, highlighting the role of learned responses.
• Understanding the near-miss effect and its modifiability is crucial for developing targeted interventions for problem gambling.