Grifths - Regular Gamblers or Non-Regular Gamblers

Grifiths – Individual Differences

Background:  

What is addiction?

EUPHORIA - a "buzz" or "high"

Withdrawal - Negative side-effects going without - anxiety, nausea, depression

TOLERANCE: Bigger + Bigger for the same "high"- applies to all drugs - but does it apply to gambling?

DO gamblers think differently?

Cognitive bias describes the inherent thinking errors that humans make in processing information.

Aims/Hypothesis:

• There will be no difference in skill of RG's and NRG's
• RG's will have more irrational cognition than the NRG's (using heuristics)
• Players THINKING ALOUD will take longer than the rest

Method:

A quasi - whether participant was a RG's OR NRG's and field experiment - It was conducted in a natural environment- a local arcade.

Type of data collected:

Quantitative data - DV measured total play, total time, play rate, end stake, wins and win rate, if comment was irrational/rational.

Experimental Design:

Independent measures: two participant groups - regular gamblers and non-regular gamblers (both of which are naturally occurring)

IV:

• Whether participant was a RG or NRG
• Whether the participant thought aloud or not

DV:

• Total play, total time, play rate, end stake, wins and win rate 

Sample:

30 regular gamblers and 30 non regular gamblers.

• RG - 29 males + 1 women who played at least once a week
• NRG - 15 males + 15 women who played at least once a month or less

Sampling Method:

Recruited via a POSTER (self-selected and snowball)

Snowball -…