The Psychology of Slot Machines

[Music] hello and welcome though that was a cut wasn't it usually i fade in sorry about that welcome to this edition of dr k psychobabble uh we have a interesting conditions upon which i'm recording right now it is pouring rain on my metal roof so you're probably hearing some sort of hum going along with that i apologize with that but i'm trying to stick to my schedule and i wear hearing aids so i just turned it down and i can't hear it so a little selfless approach there but today we have an interesting topic that we're going to explore and that is gambling now not just any sort of gambling but slot machines and slot machines in casinos and why those are so lucrative for casino owners and the owners of slot machines we're going to look at the little bit of the psychology that goes into again not only the slot machine like the title but also the context in which we find those that leads us to engage in behavior that for some lead down a not so bright path people can become very addicted to gambling and very addicted to gambling in slot machines so while part of this is really recognizing the science that goes on behind the scenes in a casino it is also a dire sort of explanation as to how these mechanisms come together and for some people may not be a very good path so i have for you here a picture let's say here's our casino and you can see that there are banks of slot machines and you see the colored lights and the kind of almost mirrored ceiling the repetitive patterns on the carpet and i want to take this time to highlight some of the actual components here and we're going to go through each one of these individually as to the aspects of this environment that encourage you to keep sitting at that slot machine and keep putting money in the first one of course is lighting we're going to be looking at that particular area we're going to be looking at a sense of timelessness and how this environment creates a sense that no time is passing we're going to look at socializing and what that means in a casino stimulation obviously we're going to be looking at some of these things this is a static image if this is a movie it'd be drowning out the rain on my roof lots of noise going on inside of the casino we're going to look at the music specifically in the music selection within a casino and how that contributes to what we see and we're going to talk about flow the actual sense of being in the moment we're going to borrow a little bit about there there's a very positive component to flow but in this particular context it's not really the best expression of flow and then finally the reward mechanisms that are built into casinos and how they work so let's move those over and get ready to discuss each one of these now for this particular dr k psychobabble i'm going to go through each one of these and in the square i'm just going to go through each one of them you're not going to see me for a little bit little graphic intensive here going through each one of these but we'll have sort of a summative discussion at the end so we're going to start off by taking a look at lighting now here are some things that we know about lighting and its impact upon the human brain and human behavior now for one it is high contrast bright and dark if you look at that original picture there is very bright colors and very dark colors that really and the bright colors are deeply saturated i mean there's a lot of color there it's very yellow it's not just a you know sort of tame yellow it's very yellow very red very green neon type colors really bright contrasting against dark backgrounds so they really stand out the colors are action oriented colors you don't see browns light blues you don't see greens you know like grass greens or forest green these are not colors that you would see in a casino they're more of the bright colors almost like racing colors increasing that level of energy the lights are often moving particularly in the uh in the actual machines themselves will have moving lights moving images now with the with animations and all that that's certainly a huge part of the brand new slot machines that are out there and the lights are blinking i mean and of course some of the movement is because of that blinking and they're uh but the blinking lights are you know just like the reason why we might have a blinker you know on our car we put our blinker on and it grabs somebody's attention now what this all actually does is there's a part of the brain that called the suprachiasmatic nucleus which to me is the coolest sounding part of the brain i love saying supra above chiasmatic a chiasm nucleus it rests right up above the part of the brain in the middle brain where the left and right eye neurons come together and then go to the opposite ends of the brain it's that that chiasm there and that right above that reacting very close to the visual signals is the suprachiasmatic nucleus which turns on and turns off the release of melatonin now in our regular cycles of the day in our in our regular um circadian rhythms there pull that one out uh that's a actually a future uh dr k psychable a psychobible is uh circadian rhythms and our regular circadian rhythms our body starts to excrete melatonin right around 7 p.m on the regular this is for this is biological this is for everybody starts releasing that and melatonin as you know helps us our brain to relax and helps us to fall asleep now what happens with all of these high contrast lights and whatnot the input into the eyes which is sending signals to the suprachiasmatic nucleus as to the daylight cycle is getting very mixed messages as we move around the room we're moving from dark areas to bright areas to dark areas to bright areas and the suprachiasmatic nucleus really doesn't know what to do so melatonin is not readily available there still are internal clocks but the suprachiasmatic nucleus is confused and it is not going to be sending as readily signals to release melatonin and therefore in this kind of scenario we are more awake we are more alert because we don't have as much melatonin running through our system so that talks about the effect just of the lighting now let's take a look as why do we get this sense of timelessness and we look at this picture again that's sort of in the background you're going to realize there's no windows there's never any windows i've been to las vegas and even there where you kind of walk in off the streets sometime by the time you get to the casino you can't even see the daylight you don't know there's no external cue let's keep that super chismatic nucleus confused there's never a window to look out and say wow it was light a while ago and now it's dark i must have been here for a long time that is not what they want there are no windows so no external cues as to what time it is and certainly no clocks owners of casinos don't want you to know what time it is they want you to be lost in the flow and stay there in this sort of timeless atmosphere this is very interesting too now we're going to talk about music specifically and and the fact that there is a lot of sound going on i said that a while ago if that was a that was a movie you would hear things but the level of the sound is about the same now the carpeting which is very plush usually very plush and padded carpeting and non-reflect non-sound reflective ceilings make for a steady level of sound just very steady and this is part of the not so much the stimulating part the lights taking care of that but it's part of the zoning part the music the conversation which is loud and the machines which are loud but they're somewhat what we recall compressed the sounds are compressed it's not too loud not too soft and all the sounds are within a certain volume okay so it's almost constant wherever you go if you just haven't happened to be in a casino sometime walk around and there's little peaks of sound every once in a while but pretty much there's just this kind of like level of sound that's going on kind of like the rain on my roof it's just this sort of like presence of a sound and that is part of the planning to just sort of have that timelessness you're not having those experiences of conversations ebbing and flowing songs being done songs starting again that sir all those are all indicators of time which the owners of casinos do not want you to have there are no cues for time passes as little cues as possible unless you wear a watch and i know of some people that wear watches and they put set timers on them so they continually be aware of this and this kind as i was putting this together this reminded me of the movie that came out a great set of of young adult uh fiction about percy jackson uh he's a um he's a human half god from the greek uh pantheon of of uh of gods son of poseidon and well in the first movie they end up in las vegas and they end up at the low i think it's the lotus club or the lotus uh casino and the magic that goes on at the lotus is that individuals who are eating the little cakes are being swayed into a sense of timelessness and in the movie they expand this out you know there's a person that's been there since like 1971 you know they just lose track of time and this is sort of really interesting in the movie sort of play on this idea that casinos want you to lose track of time i mean of course it's fictitious and we won't be there for years hopefully but it sort of plays on that notion that we walk in there and then time ceases to exist and in the trap that is represented by the lotus club in this movie um they almost get caught for all time so it's sort of a play on that that sense of timelessness within a casino that they included in that particular movie now when we think of socializing we think about going out with friends and there's no doubt that casinos want people to go out together but there's an interesting collection of factors associated with socializing when it comes to gambling for one it is of course a gathering of people and individuals who like to be around people will find other people at the tables that will find other people sitting next to them at the slot machine and they'll find other people in the bar in the restaurant and all those things and they can be around those people but there is no need to interact you can be right next to someone and there is no pressure to interact so this is inclusive if you think about this is inclusive of both extroverted and introverted people can go extroverted people can be there and they can be talking to everybody doing their thing and introverted people can go in there and be a part of it and it's perfectly okay in that scenario to not say anything so what an ideal situation for let's say an introverted person or someone just just wants to kind of zone out for a bit to go there and be in this socially rich environment things going on they get to enjoy that with absolutely no pressure to participate how compelling that can be very different than going out with the friends to a restaurant where conversation is going to be mandated so a very attractive part of going to casinos is this dichotomy of both social and non-social opportunities it has a definitive party atmosphere like you're going out and you're with it with with the crowd you know dressing up and going out you're isolated while you're surrounded by people again i play on that notion that we can be around people we don't necessarily have to interact with them and finally of course ample opportunities for the consumption of alcohol and alcohol has always been sort of a part of the casino world alcohol is a suppressant drug meaning it the the reason why we act foolish let's say under the influence of our some people act foolish under the influence of alcohols because it suppresses our ability to self-regulate so we are less likely or less quick at realizing that impulse that's coming up to say a funny joke and we say it our our filter is outside in the car and we just say things and some people can get in trouble some people are really funny some people you know are jerks but certainly it is a way for people to relax because of that suppressing uh feeling that comes from the alcohol in your system that enhances our ability to socialize if we're shy it also lowers our inhibitions to spend money to buy food to eat food to consume the the products that are being sold at the casino and it is also uh suppresses our resistance to the lighting and the sound and all that stuff and ultimately it's kind of again pushing you to that zone that the the establishment wants you to be in so that you stay and keep spending money so that's their goal so sir we've had lighting timelessness and socialization so far finally of course very obvious when stimulation so while we want individuals to get into the zone we also they walk away from the table we want them greatly stimulated keep them awake slots are very visually stimulating they are also very orally stimulating this moving pictures and nowadays aside from the you know used to be just the wheels turning for the different options that would come up on the slot machines now they're digitals you have movies you have animations the actual slot things are animations and maybe when the sevens come up the seven is dancing i mean it's all of these things just that much more stimulating visually and auditorily so that we are continually being attracted to this particular image in front of us hence the slot machine how long we can sit there in front of them there's like this is in great contrast this visual stimulation and oral stimulation are in great contrast to the softness of the rest of the room these chairs are really comfortable they are very comfortable the floor is like walking on cushion the bars have nice you know any table many of them will have those cushions that you can lean against particularly the gambling tables you can put your elb this is the place they want you to put your elbows on the table right right on those cushions everything is comfortable while the thing while the information that's going directly to your brain is ultra stimulating so again that contrast which leads to more alertness focuses your eyes where you want them to be you're not feeling that chair it's not like that uncomfortable chair that says you know my back is starting to hurt nope nice comfortable chairs i want your body nice and relaxed but i want your mind totally enveloped in the visual and auditory stimulus that we've surrounded you with the themes themselves movies popular movies popular music popular artists pop stars because you'll have you know jennifer lopez will be up there you know those those kinds of just to name one you know and you'll have um themes across the slot machines that also are very stimulating and to enjoy these i mean think about you're seated at the table or you're seated in front of the the slot machine you don't have to move to see this you look around just look at that that picture that you just look around and you are full of stimulation almost like those you know those very wide screen movie theaters those max theaters that you're just surrounded by sounds surrounded by vision it is coming in peripherally as coming you don't have to go you don't have to move very much and all that stimulation is right there so there's again this contrast of color sound movement of and stimulation into your brain while your body is relaxed with the alcohol prepping you for the act of gambling let's look specifically at the music some things about the music that's happening it's usually very upbeat like fast food restaurants versus you know casual you know very very casual dining or a very uh the kind of dining that would come with a very fancy restaurant or something they might have some very slow music because they want you to take your time eating because the more you eat the more they make in a casino in the restaurants and what you'll have upbeat music because they want you out of there they're not making a lot of money on their food they might not even be making any money on the food they want you back at the table as soon as you can upbeat music continuing out as you walk around to different areas of the casino usually it's the soundtrack with no lyrics now there's not a hundred percent i've heard the lyrics i've heard pop songs like a you'd hear on the radio but usually no lyrics but you can definitely hear and recognize what the sound what the music is you might you'd recognize the song but you're not singing along they don't want your focus on the music they want the music to go into the background but they want your foot tapping so you can tap it all the way over to a slot machine it's a usually a very steady beat these are usually pre-recorded sequences hours and hours long and the beats are matched so just like that pattern in the carpet that was in that original image it's just a wavy pattern that repeats itself you can almost think that that's the beats the beats of the sound just the same beats everything's the same everything's within that volume everything that's all there while the lights are moving and they're doing all this and that's extremely stimulating but at the same time steady they seem to contrast each other but the lights are keeping lights and sounds are keeping you so awake that that just becomes the hum the hum becomes those music and the carpet and all that that they're going to perform their magic with you to get you to gamble the music will fade into the background and just become part of everything else that's there and they actually match music to different areas in in the places where they want you to stay for different amounts of time or it's a different kind of game the music that's piped into the the poker area is going to be different than the music piped into the the slots area to bring about different kinds of behavior this is science to this you know so they might in let's say in the um in the poker area they might want people a little little bit more not as not as gunned because usually there might be even more stakes but more high stakes if you've ever sat at a high stakes table and not i don't mean i went to a high stakes table once i didn't i don't gamble but watch people you know with two thousand dollar chips throwing them in and you want people to be somewhat you don't want them to be right up here you want them to be here but you want them to stay you want them to be comfortable and the music was decidedly different a little bit closer to those fancy restaurant type places it wasn't quite as upbeat a little bit more serious game different kind of attitude and they're knowledgeable about that about how they uh pipe music into different places to get a different effect now look at some of the deeper psychology here the concept of flow comes from the field of positive psychology and in a nutshell what it represents is let's say you're watching a professional basketball game and somebody is taking a foul shot and you watch the individual there's a high pressure shot it's a free shot free points bonus and they're sitting there and usually the fans behind the the the backboard are going bananas they're like waving things trying to distract the individual as they're as they're concentrating but the professional athlete is able to get into a state of mind they often do that through ritual they'll bounce the ball a certain number of times they roll their shoulders do one of these bounce it two more times and they do the same thing every time that ritual gets them into that mode that we call flow and then the body actions that they've practiced thousands of times operate flawlessly and rarely miss the foul shot now flow that being in the sense that is a very cool place to be people desire that when when we're being creative let's say let's say you're a crafting person you're a woodworker or something and you get lost in your work and then the same thing happens that they want you get lost in your crafting and suddenly it's like i must be hungry i missed dinner two hours ago because you've lost all that time now they want the same thing so to get you in that flow it feels good when you're doing creative work you're like wow i was like really in the moment it's very cathartic very good feeling i walk away having really sort of expressed myself they want to capture that same feeling with the way that they organize the stimulation so we feel like we're in the zone and so when we talk about someone being in the zone positively or someone zoning out the the the well it's an escape we experience the flow and focus and i like this term dark flow it's the dark flow we're escaping to that place we're in our own little world we do experience that flow and focus that we would get from creative activities that we've become engaged in but it's a dark flow it's holding us captive to a machine that essentially is designed to take our money it is a sense of mindfulness focus flow but without any of the benefits associated with that because you're simply acting with a machine you're only interacting with a machine that has been pre-programmed to determine when you're going to win and when you're not going to win and that is the last and final part here is the rewards now the fact remains that if you look at the statistics of people who in their winnings in casinos a very large amount of money that they take in actually goes out to winners it's actually remarkably large up into the eighty percent ninety percent i did research on this quite a few years back i didn't do that again for this particular uh presentation but very very high it's interesting that casinos operate on a very narrow margin at the top they give they send out a lot of their earnings actually go back as winnings but they're rare they're big winnings to a few people that keeps people there drinking eating putting money and it creates a very solid and dependable margin of profit and that profit and imagine that profit pays for all of that stuff so the reward mechanisms are really deeply tied to the psychology of behaviorism and we're going to sort of explore some of that right now well for one thing alcohol lowering our inhibitions making things easier to do we were less likely to stop and the sort of happy feeling that we get when we're drinking alcohol and engage in this sort of flow-like behavior nowadays they actually remove the money component you go to a cashier and you buy either tokens or there's a card like it that has value on it and you stick the card in you're not putting money in again research has shown that if you're reaching into the pocket and you're putting more cash to take another 20 you're less likely than if you have that card this is why credit cards work right if we're actually paying that in cash and we had to kind of count it out we would recognize how much money we're spending when we just have to slide or insert the card we're not as aware of the outflow of money so it's certainly taking advantage of that so that they move essentially from the behavioral point of view into a token economy that the money is not really money it represents just value it's it's in fact we might even say how much do you have on your card how many points or how many credits or stuff like that they remove the monetary component even if it's a one-to-one even just like one credit one dollar you're not gonna like you're not gonna look and say at the end of the day you might say oh i have 50 bucks on this journey got 50 credits it's a different language used to draw your attention to that it's not money so we're dealing with something that may not necessarily in the moment be reflected as money but it represents money so a little bit more free form on what we're willing to do with it the winning if you're at a slot machine and you look up at the instructions now i don't spend a lot of time in in casinos at all and i'm not really the gambling type but the different ways that you can win the different combinations can is complex and part of that is that you can enhance the sense of surprise when you win if i knew i just had to get one thing i had to get like sevens all across i would just do that till i got sevens but what if i'm going along and like oh i just won and i look up and it's one of those bizarre combinations of oh i got one of those bizarre combinations i'm on a streak right maybe not it's just simply making winning surprising because of those complex patterns and that's of course makes winning just a little bit of money makes it very exciting because i didn't even know i was going to win i looked at it and i thought this isn't a winning combination but it was how cool is that probably the most powerful component is that the winnings on a slot machine come to us in a variable ratio reinforcement schedule now this just this necessitates a little bit of orientation toward reinforcement schedules now in behaviorism when we get a behavior when we do something and we get a reward we're we're kind of looking at first one to one every one behavior produces a reward this would be like peace work like i'm creating computer keyboards and i'm going to make a dollar for every one that i do so every time i complete a keyboard i get a dollar because a one-to-one ratio of b every time i do that behavior i'm getting a um a dollar that's not how casinos works casinos want you to repeat the behavior over and over and you'll win every once in a while it's not a pattern it's not a certain number of times because we'd all figure it out right seven times we get one seven more times we get one that would ruin the whole thing we would know when the wins like when they're going to happen however that does work in our workplace we do go to we go to work monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday maybe and then maybe another monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday and then we get paid so and every time it's a fixed ratio every 10 work days we get a check and i know that it's for the previous week but i got regardless of that from a behavioral standpoint standpoint we're able to sustain two weeks of work and then getting a reward and we get it every time every casinos work on a variable ratio we don't know how many times we have to act in order to get that reward we might walk in put put our money in that's going to crank the arm they don't have those anymore press the button and i win right away one behavior one reward that won't always happen sometimes i'm gonna have to do it sometimes i could go all day sometimes i'm getting i do five and then it's 50 before i get another one it's all over the place when b.f skinner was doing his original work and he was scientifically looking at the ways in which we can maintain animal behavior he looked at those different ratios what if i reward every time what if i reward every fifth time what if i what if i reward five eight six one you know and i variable and the variable ratio schedule of reinforcement was the most powerful in terms of maintaining that behavior now we have all kinds of examples of this of course gambling is the best one but variable ratios of behavior will will cause people to repeat behaviors for a very long time let's say okay that there's a light switch in your in your home that's a little faulty loose wire or something probably should get effects but you know and you go up there and you click it doesn't work but you click it like two times and then it comes on oh okay it's all set that behavior i clad to click it three times and let's say the next time you went took a bit a little longer it clicked five times next time you went was one time just because it's a loose wire it's sort of that pattern will lead to you going into that room and just go click click click click click click click click click until it comes on that's been scientifically shown that people under a variable ratio of behavior reinforcement will learn how to do something over and over and over and over until they get the results and that's exactly the kind of addictive behavior that individuals who own slot machines want they don't want you to be aware this just just just keep going just keep going it's gonna happen eventually and it might happen big and oh there's a little one and there's the one free alcohol keep going keep on another alcohol well i think i'm hungry restaurants right over there but i gotta next one might be you see the pattern or behavior that starts to happen because we just do not know when the reward's going to come this is not luck this is science when the machines are designed they're designed to pick those random times the people in the office can look up on the computer and they can tell exactly when machines are going to hit they know exactly when it's going to happen that somebody has to press the button but someone might be going along they walk away and there's somebody in the back room that says wow the person who goes to that machine the next time is going to be in for a surprise because the next button is a big winner they know exactly when those things are going to happen so the amount of money going out is programmed into the environment so the system is fixed it does engage you in behavior it uses all of these things to engage you in this behavior and keep you in that behavior and i don't like casinos i play music in them and i've gambled a little bit and i don't personally find it exciting my wife really likes them we went up to our recent casino we went up sorry recently we went up to the casino in bangor maine and we went there it was pretty quiet day and we we went up to the um i think we to the rule that table and it was just the two of us and the person that was doing them during the roulette and we just didn't we had our drinks and we're just you know playing a little bit here and there and we just had a nice conversation with them and of course the people who work there are very aware that some people lose control here and he was saying he said and he kind of like really put it in in perspective from he says we should approach this as entertainment we pay for our entertainment we pay for a movie we pay for a video we pay for someone to go pay to a concert and stuff like this and this is your entertainment so you would expect that money would go out to be entertained and it's an active ford form of entertainment and he said when it's no longer entertaining when it's no longer an entertainment that's when it's a problem and he was very real about this is a very interesting conversation with that particular employee there and it was really really insightful so we paid for some more entertainment and then we called it a night so this is my video on why slot machines work why casinos work why they make so much money and why we as consumers of that kind of entertainment need to be really careful about how we spend our time there being aware of all that so that gambling remains entertainment and doesn't become a problem so thank you and i'll see you next time

Channel: Dr. K's Psychobabble

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Length: 38min 26sec (2306 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021