Abstract
Examples from real-world gambling behavior have been a frequent source of inspiration to the fields of behavioral economics and decision neuroscience, but it is surprising how little is known about decisional processes in regular gamblers and especially individuals with gambling disorder. This chapter presents a conceptualization of disordered gambling as a behavioral addiction driven by an exaggeration of multiple psychological distortions that are characteristic of human decision-making and underpinned by neural circuitry subserving appetitive behavior, reinforcement learning, and choice selection. Focusing on examples of loss aversion, probability weighting, perceptions of randomness, and the illusion of control, I consider the evidence that these phenomena are related to actual gambling behavior, their relevance to gambling disorder, and insights from neuroscience experiments as to their brain basis.
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