This is the end result of all the bright lights, and the comp trips, and all the champagne, and free hotel suites, and all the broads and all the booze. It’s all been arranged, just for us to get your money.
It’s hard to get good payoffs from slot machines, yes. But it’s also hard to get good information from slot-machine gamblers, and that made things awkward for psychologists Mark Griffiths, of Nottingham Trent University, and Jonathan Parke, of Salford University. They explained how, in a monograph called Slot Machine Gamblers – Why Are They So Hard to Study?
Griffiths and Parke published it a few years ago in the Electronic Journal of Gambling Issues. “We have both spent over 10 years playing in and researching this area,” they wrote, “and we can offer some explanations on why it is so hard to gather reliable and valid data.”
Here are three from their long list.
First, gamblers become engrossed in gambling. “We have observed that many gamblers will often miss meals and even utilise devices (such as catheters) so that they do not have to take toilet breaks. Given these observations, there is sometimes little chance that we as researchers can persuade them to participate in research studies.”
Second, gamblers like their privacy. They “may be dishonest about the extent of their gambling activities to researchers as well as to those close to them. This obviously has implications for the reliability and validity of any data collected.”
Third, gamblers sometimes notice when a person is spying on them.
