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• Slot Machine Effect Psychology Theory
• Slot Machine Effect Psychology 14th Edition
• Slot Machine Effect Psychology 14th Edition

I spent part of last week on vacation from science in Las Vegas, where I thankfully avoided financial ruin due to some fortunate combination of genes, math awareness and a wife that has no interest in gambling. Sure, I dabbled a bit in games of chance, but as soon as I got a little bit ahead on the blackjack tables I ran for my life, knowing that the probability would even out hard in the long run. For those concerned about the financial well-being of Sin City, they still managed to turn a profit on us, thanks to the low-return temptations of fine dining and French circus acts set to Beatles megamixes. But most of our time was spent on the free entertainment of people-watching and stuff-watching, observing row after row of people almost hypnotically at work on loud, noisy slot machines amid fake New York, Paris and Venice scenery.

It doesn’t take a PhD in neurobiology to conclude that slot machines are designed to lure people into a money-draining repetition, just as it doesn’t take expertise in the casino business to realize slots are absurdly profitable – there’s a reason why they outnumber table games 100-to-1. But I wanted to go back to the scientific literature to confirm a faint glimmer of information I retained from graduate school, specifically that slot machines are masterful manipulators of our brain’s natural reward system. Every feature – the incessant noise, the flashing lights, the position of the rolls and the sound of the coins hitting the dish – is designed to hijack the parts of our brain designed for the pursuit of food and sex and turn it into a river of quarters. Or so I remember.

Fortunately, there is a robust amount of research into why slot machines are so addictive, despite paying out only about 75% of what people put in. They are, some scientists have concluded, the most addictive of all the ways humans have designed to gamble, because pathological gambling appears faster in slots players and more money is spent on the machines than other forms of gambling. In Spain, where gambling is legal and slot machines can be found in most bars, more than 20.3 billion dollars was spent on slots in 2008 – 44% of the total money spent by Spaniards on gambling last year.

That data was published earlier this month by a psychologist from the Universidad de Valencia named Mariano Choliz in the Journal of Gambling Studies. Yes, such a publication exists! In the background of the paper, Choliz outlines the tricks that slot machines use to keep people feeding them:

• Operating on a random payout schedule, but appearing to be a variable payout; i.e. fooling the player into thinking that the more money they play, the more likely they are to win.
• “The illusion of control” in pressing buttons or pulling a lever to produce the outcome.
• The “near-miss” factor (more on this below)
• Increased arousal (where the sounds and flashing lights come in)
• Able to be played with very little money; the allure of “penny” slots.
• And perhaps most importantly, immediate gratification.

This last point is the subject of Choliz’s experiment, which puts a group of ten pathological gamblers in front of two different slot machines. One machine produces a result (win or lose) 2 seconds after the coin was virtually dropped (it was computer program), the other delayed the result until 10 seconds after the gambler hit play. In support of the immediate gratification theory, gamblers played almost twice as long on the 2-second machines than they did on the 10-second machines…even though the 10-second machines paid out more money on average!

Choliz concluded that the immediacy of the reward was part of what kept people at slot machines, making them so addictive. The quick turnaround between action and reward also allows people to get into a repetitious, uninterrupted behavior, which Choliz compares to the “Skinner boxes” of operant conditioning – the specialized cages where rats hit a lever for food or some other reward. It seems like a cruel comparison, but after my three days walking through the casinos, not an inaccurate one.

Another trick up the slot machine’s sleeve was profiled earlier this year by a group of scientists from the University of Cambridge. In the journal Neuron, Luke Clark and colleagues examined the “near-miss” effect, the observation that barely missing a big payout (i.e. two cherries on the payline while the third cherry is just off) is a powerful stimulator of gambling behavior.

The Cambridge researchers put their subjects in an fMRI machine to take images of their brains while they played a two-roll slot machine game. When the players hit a match and won money, the reward systems of the brain predictably got excited – the activation of areas classically associated to respond to food or sex I mentioned earlier. When players got a “near-miss,” they reported it as a negative experience, but also reported an increased desire to play! That feeling matched up with activation of two brain areas commonly associated with drug addiction: the ventral striatum and the insula (smokers who suffer insular damage suddenly lose the desire to smoke).

Clark and co. conclude that near-misses produce an “illusion of control” in gamblers, exploiting the credo of “practice makes perfect.” If you were learning a normal task such as hitting a baseball, a “near-miss” foul ball would suggest that you’re getting closer – it’s better than a complete whiff, after all. But for a slot machine, where pulling the lever has no impact on the rolls other than to start them moving and start the internal computer calculating, a “near-miss” is as meaningless as any miss.

Nevertheless, it’s this type of “cognitive distortion,” as Clark and colleagues name it, that makes slot machines such effective manipulators of our brains. Those massive, gaudy casino-hotels that I wore out a pair of shoes strolling through last week weren’t just built on a crafty use of probability, they were built on a exploitation of brain functions we are only just beginning to understand.

When you think about the relatively modest amount of money players risk on a spin-to-spin basis, it might come as a surprise that slot machines are, by far, the biggest money-maker for the house.

In fact, with the exception of Las Vegas Strip casinos (which often draw extremely high rollers to table games), slot machines are responsible for between 65% and 80% of your local casino’s gambling revenue. How have they managed to turn such a simple game into such a moneymaker?

In this article, I’ll explain how basic psychology is responsible for the massive profitability of real money slot machines.

Ease of Gambling

If you were dropped into a casino from outer space and sat in front of a slot machine, chances are it wouldn’t take long before you began to understand how slots work. When it comes to having a low barrier to entry, it’s hard to beat a slot machine.

That’s why the “spin” button was added – it removed the need for the laborious task of pulling the lever (don’t worry, the lever is still there, mostly for nostalgic reasons).

The Casino RTP Illusion

When you look at the odds for a given slot machine, you might come across the acronym “RTP.” These initials, meaning “return-to-player,” is shown as a percentage which indicates how much money you’ll get back from your initial bet on average.

For example, you might find a machine with a 90% RTP. The idea of getting back 90% of the money you risk might sound comforting…but like everything else in the casino, it’s not quite as good as it seems.

The average number of spins in an hour for someone playing the slots is typically around 600. This might sound like a huge number, but it takes just seconds to complete the cycle of spin-stop, spin-stop.

For the sake of the example, I’ll assume that each spin is a modest, but realistic, $2 bet. That means over the course of an hour where you spin 500 times, you’ve wagered $1,000. If your RTP is exactly as advertised, you’d wind up losing about $150 over the course of your session.

Of course there’s a chance that you could walk away with a jackpot win, or even just a few extra dollars in your pocket, but it doesn’t happen often. If people won regularly, there wouldn’t be a need for the flashing lights and bells. The only reason for these often-annoying features is to indicate to everyone in the neighborhood that you can, in fact, win a jackpot.

Near Misses

Perhaps no aspect of slot machine psychology is more impactful than the “near miss.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, a near miss is best-described, as you might expect, as a turn that ends in a player falling just short of getting the necessary images to show up on the slot machine. The question is: Why is this so effective in keeping people at the machine hoping for a jackpot?

The answer requires a look back to how the human brain was wired by evolution.

Because your brain acknowledged that you were making progress, it was motivating and often led to eventual success. Unfortunately when it comes to gambling, the once-useful psychological trait has been hacked.

Whether you get four out of five or two out of five on the slot machine, the result is the same. You are no closer to hitting the jackpot, even though it might feel like it. The house relies on your innate sentiment of, “I’m this close, so I can’t stop now. Maybe the next spin will be the winner.”

Notably, a scientific study in 2009 by the journal ‘Neuron’ concluded that the reward center in our brains is triggered by a near miss in the same way that it is by an actual win while gambling. Furthermore, it was explained that the impact of the near miss triggering the reward center was most noticeable when there was less time between placing a bet and playing the actual game.

When you combine these two factors, the near miss and the enhanced reward effect when the pace of play is quicker, it’s easy to see why the slot machine could almost be considered irresistible.

Instant Gratification

Whereas the near miss effect seems to exploit an ancient feature of our brain, this one might be hitting on something. A growing feature in the future of human psychology: the concept of immediacy.

In order to observe this phenomenon, just look at the success of Amazon. Obviously there are other factors at play, but the main reason for their unprecedented growth is the fact that they adopted 2-day shipping. Online shopping was never the same again.

When it comes to getting your result (good or bad) right away, it’s impossible to beat a slot machine. Even the best blackjack dealers can’t keep up at a rate that can be up to 600 spins per hour.

For this reason, new gamblers like slots because they are looking to score a quick, easy, and relatively mindless win. “Just a few spins,” is probably the most common lie heard on a daily basis.

Slot Machines Prey on the Vulnerable

Excuse the dramatic header, but if you objectively look at what goals a slot machine is trying to accomplish (get as many people to spin the wheels as many times as possible), it’s not hard to see why it impacts some people differently.

A study that was conducted by the Centre for Gambling Research at UBC examined why slot machines were both the most popular way to gamble globally, and also the game that was most likely to be associated with addiction.

The experiment took two groups of people – first-time and experienced slot machine players – and examined which was more likely to end up in the “slot machine zone state.” This state, as defined by the researchers, is categorized by losing track of time, not noticing surroundings, and interestingly enough, not picking up on details of the slot machine that exist outside the screen.

The results of the study conclusively showed that those who had prior experience with slot machines fell into a slot machine trance state at a much faster rate than those who had not played before.

Slot Machine Effect Psychology Theory

The main takeaway from this particular experiment, and others like it, is that slot machines both create and then continue to encourage compulsive gambling behavior in some people. The process of playing is in many ways mindless enough that it allows players to keep playing for hours while also letting their mind wander – perhaps this is responsible for the trance-like state so often observed at slot machines.

Conclusion

Slot machines aren’t going anywhere. For decades they’ve maintained their spot as the biggest earner the casino has on the floor. The human psychological component that was undoubtedly taken into account when building these games is largely to thank for the success…success for the house, not the players, that is.

Slot Machine Effect Psychology 14th Edition

Slot Machine Effect Psychology 14th Edition

At the end of the day, as long as players recognize that it’s easy to fall into the slot machine zone state and actively work to avoid letting it happen, slots can be a fun component of any day at the casino. Just remember to get up and walk around every few minutes.