How Does Your Brain Affect Your Gambling Choices?

 

Scientists in California believe they may have established which parts of the brain are responsible for the fear of poverty- if they are proved right, these findings could have a significant impact on understandings of gambling behaviours.

 

Their research, documented in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, studied the effects of brain damage located in the amygdala, found deep inside the brain; two participants were involved in the study so generalising results to the general population is tentative.

 

The individuals involved in the study were found to be less worried than the volunteers, to which they were compared, who had normal brain function, regarding financial losses.

 

The scientists who carried out the study claim that the concluding results could be used to understand how people make risk assessments in general and may provide valuable insight into decision making from politics to gambling.

 

They use the term ‘loss aversion’ to describe our natural inclination to make decisions that avoid loss, even when the risk of making that decision could lead to exceptional gain if correctly predicted.

 

With regards to game behaviour, the lead author of the study, Dr. Benedetto De Martino, of University College, London, describes the following scenario in order for us to understand more precisely what the impact of the results of the study may mean:

 

"Imagine you're on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. You've just answered the £500,000 question correctly and have moved on to the final question. You're down to your 50:50 lifeline but don't know the answer. If you get it right, you'll win £1 million; if you get it wrong, you'll drop back to £32,000. The vast majority of people would take the 'loss averse option' and walk away with £500,000."

 

The study, which was undertaken at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, aimed to establish the role of the amygdala with concerning the causes of loss.

 

Two women were studied, both of whom had a rare illness that meant there were lesions on their amygdalae, but that was the extent of their brain damage.

 

These lesions meant that they were unable to perceive, recognise, feel or interpret fear.

 

In addition, six control individuals were used, who were the same sex, of similar age, income and education level.

 

Each participant was offered various gambles in order to test if the chances of losing bore any impact on their willingness to wager.

 

The scientists were testing to see whether the amygdala is responsible for a biological imperative which inhibits the undertaking of risky behaviours when the outcome has a high probability of being detrimental to the individual.

 

The study found that healthy individuals are more likely to opt to gamble only if the chances of winning were at least half to twice the size of the chances of losses.

 

However, those individuals who had damage to the amygdala would gamble regardless of the ration between potential loss and potential game, with one of the women wagering when the odds of losing far exceeded the odds of winning.

 

The authors concluded that when the amygdala is functioning correctly people tend to exhibit more caution behaviours and are more afraid of potential loss.

 

Dr Benedetto De Martino says that: "It may be that the amygdala controls a very general biological mechanism for inhibiting risky behaviour when outcomes are potentially negative, such as the monetary loss aversion which shapes our everyday financial decisions,".

 

He described how loss aversion has been proved in many different settings, from high stakes game shows, politics, financial markets, and even in the behaviour of higher functioning mammals aside from humans, such as monkeys. From this he concludes that loss aversion is "a basic evolutionary defence mechanism”.

 

He further argues that a basic understanding of these biological imperative should be used to inform policymakers who will then be able to design policies that will address certain issues regarding gambling, such as the problem of gambling addictions, said to be on the rise across the globe.

He added that it was helpful to understand its basic biological mechanisms so that policymakers could design policies to address it.

 

Professor of Psychology at Cardiff University, John Aggleton, has said: "This is a novel and exciting study. The authors conducted a very elegant and neat experiment. The amygdala is an area of the brain that is important for normal emotional responses and for how we perceive our environment. It plays a subtle role in helping people to learn the attributes of good things and bad things. Most people have been found to have a bias against losses, but this study shows very clearly that when the amygdala is damaged, this "loss aversion" disappears."

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