Thursday, October 14, 2010
Gambling Truths Found in a Pigeon Peck
The human logic behind gambling is quite complex, according to many psychologists.
Some say that the concept of odds is too great for many human minds to comprehend. There’s also availability heuristics such as media coverage, which only add to general bias with extensive coverage of unusual events, like winning the lottery. Not to mention social reinforcement and gambling for pleasure.
University of Kentucky psychology professor Thomas Zentall takes the feather-covered approach in his latest study, titled “Maladaptive choice behaviour by pigeons: an animal analogue and possible mechanism for gambling (sub-optimal human decision-making behaviour)” released in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences today.
What would a pigeon say to all of this?
“It looks like none of these factors are important, because pigeons gamble in the absence of these factors,” Zentall explained. “This suggests that there’s a basic behavioral/ biological mechanism that seems to be true of a variety of species.”
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