National Post (National Edition)
What happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas
Compulsively checking our smartphones at every ‘ping’ feeds the same payoff centres in our brains that casinos have capitalized on By Joseph Brean
Las Vegas is famous as a proving ground for behavioural psychology. People act differently there, as their impulses are guided and manipulated by the flashing lights, carefully calibrated noises, hyper-oxygenated air and free drinks.
Like rats in a lab, gamblers in Vegas do the same thing over and over again, and are constantly watched, measured, and studied. Millions of dollars depends on it.
Casinos are not the only businesses to take notice and profit from the study and manipulation of human behaviour. Smartphone companies also rely on the same discoveries about human nature. They also seek to promote a style of consumer behaviour that, at its most engaged and profitable, looks a lot like an obsessive compulsive disorder.
They have even come up with a faux-Greek nomenclature for the feeling of withdrawal from a phone — nomophobia, for “fear of no mobile.”
The result is a matrix of similarities between problem gambling and problem smartphone use, which is even evident in the economics, as casinos and many smartphone applications make their greatest profit off a small portion of “big fish” users, who are hooked and pulled from the vastly larger set of casual users.
“I often feel that scientific models are decades behind the casinos,” UBC neuropsychologist Catherine Winstanley said earlier this year, when she published results of a “rat casino” study. “I don’t think it’s an accident that casinos are filled with lights and noise.”
In that experiment, rats who gambled for sugar treats against the risk of being temporarily looking at a smartphone while driving, might have a common chemical cause.
In the science of gambling, psychologists describe the strange resilience of the Gambler’s Fallacy, the false belief that random events can affect each other, as in thinking a tail is likely to follow a series of heads in a coin toss game. They describe the illusion of control fostered by the levers or buttons on slot machines. and that when the “Internet of Things” finally did arrive, it would be tricky to manage. To have dozens of devices competing for your attention would be like running a technological kindergarten.
The solution, he imagined, was eye-contact. With a simple eye-tracker, each device could detect where your attention was on a screen, and only alert you accordingly. You would rouse the machines by looking at them, and their alerts would follow your gaze. Otherwise, they would leave you alone.
He started a company to capitalize on his hunch, but it didn’t take off. “And I wondered why. Then I started using Facebook, and I started realizing that I had it all wrong. It was the opposite. People are dying to get notified,” he said. They want to feel valued, part of a social network. They want attention, and they want it now.
Just as a slot machine scratches that itch, so does the ping of a text message or the discovery of a new Pokemon. But like any compulsion, the rewards diminish with time, creating the highly profitable loop that has been monetized in both gambling and smartphones.
In effect, it is a psychological trap.