Understanding gambling addiction
Odds are that you imagine gamblers as people simply trying to get lucky and win a big payoff. But when Natasha Schull, an associate professor in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), began researching the lives of gamblers in Las Vegas, she found a very different motivation at work.Take, for instance, Mollie, a mother and hotel worker who compulsively played video poker, running through her paychecks in two-day binges, and cashing in her life insurance to get more money to play. “The thing people never understand is that I’m not playing to win,” Mollie told Schull. Instead, Mollie’s goal was to enter a state of total gambling immersion: “to keep playing — to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.” Now, in her new book, Addiction by Design, published this month by Princeton University Press, Schull delves into the lives of such gamblers. In particular, she...