Expertise and the Illusion of Expertise in Gambling

Running head: ILLUSION OF EXPERTISE 1

Expertise and the Illusion of Expertise in Gambling

Guillermo Campitelli

Craig Speelman

Edith Cowan University

Author Note

We are thankful to the School of Psychology and Social Science, Edith Cowan University, for the

funding provided to participate in the 2011 London Problem Gambling Workshop.

Guillermo Campitelli. School of Psychology and Social Science, Edith Cowan University, 270

Joondalup Drive, Joondalup, 6027, Western Australia. Tel: 00 61 8 6304 5736. Email:

[email protected]

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Abstract

This chapter presents the concept of the illusion of expertise - the belief that one possesses a

higher level of specific knowledge or skill than objectively justified, in a domain in which one

has prolonged experience, and possesses other knowledge or skills. This chapter integrates

research in the psychology of expertise with the problem gambling literature. We use expertise

theories - chunking theory (Chase & Simon, 1973) and template theory (Gobet & Simon, 1996) -

to propose explanations of the mechanisms underlying gambling expertise, cognitive biases in

gambling, and the illusion of expertise in gambling. We suggest that the concept of the illusion of

expertise could be useful to understanding problem gambling and to implementing problem

gambling interventions.

Keywords: gambling, expertise, illusion of expertise, problem gambling

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Expertise and the Illusion of Expertise in Gambling

Research on the phenomenon of problem gambling could be characterised as the

investigation of factors involved in the acquisition, development and maintenance of gambling

behaviour. In this chapter we aim at integrating the problem gambling research field with the

psychology of expertise research field in two ways. First, we address the issue of acquisition of

expertise in gambling using theories of expertise. Second, we introduce the concept of the

illusion of expertise, as one of the possible causes of the maintenance of problem gambling.

The reader may have already identified that research on expertise could be useful to

understanding games such as poker in which chance and skill are involved. On the other hand,

expertise studies are not useful for investigating games such as a lottery, in which skill cannot

change the probability of success. The interesting twist in this story is that research on “expert

judgment” has identified that in some fields experts make biased judgments, or are overconfident

in their judgements. Since overconfidence is a phenomenon typically found in problem gambling

(Goodie, 2005), research on expertise and expert judgment not only could be relevant to the

investigation of the skillful components of gambling, but also could shed light on the

investigation of factors involved in problem gambling.

This chapter has the following structure. The first section discusses gambling as expert

behaviour; the second section tackles the issue of problem gambling. The third section introduces

the concept of the illusion of expertise; the fourth section proposes an explanation of problem

gambling using a theory of expertise. Finally, we discuss these issues and draw some

conclusions.

Given that expertise has been investigated independently in the field of cognition and the

field of judgment and decision making, and that the results found in these literatures are very

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different –(i.e., experts are better than novices in cognitive studies (e.g., Campitelli & Gobet,

2004, 2005), experts are poor at making judgments in the judgment and decision-making

literature (Shanteau, 1988, 1992; Oskamp, 1965)–, we introduce the cognitive studies of

expertise in the section of gambling as expert behavior, and the judgment and decision-making

studies of expertise in the problem gambling section. The sections on the illusion of expertise

and the explanation of problem gambling using a theory of expertise represent a unique

combination of the domains of gambling studies and expertise.

Before we present the sections indicated above, and given its importance in the whole

chapter, we anticipate here the definition of illusion of expertise, and we discuss it in the

corresponding section. We define the illusion of expertise as the belief that one possesses a

higher level of specific knowledge or skill than objectively justified, in a domain in which one

has prolonged experience, and possesses other knowledge or skills.

Gambling as expert behaviour

In this section we propose that some gambling games are games of skill, and thus could

be investigated under the framework of expertise. We first describe the field of expertise as

investigated in cognitive psychology, then we briefly review a few studies in which a gambling

game (i.e., poker) was investigated using the expertise approach, and finally we apply a theory of

expertise developed in the context of chess to poker expertise.

Expertise in cognitive psychology

The study of expert cognitive processing has been strongly influenced by Chase and

Simon’s (1973) chunking theory. This theory states that the key to understanding the acquisition,

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development and maintenance of expertise is that, in the course of acquiring their skill, experts

learn domain-specific patterns (i.e., chunks) that get stored in long-term memory (LTM).

Chunks are described as “a collection of elements having strong associations with one another,

but weak associations with elements within other chunks” (Gobet, Lane, Croker, Cheng, Jones,

Oliver, et al., 2001, p. 236). When experts make a decision (e.g., a chess grandmaster has to

decide which move to play in a specific position) they engage in “search behaviour”, which

consists of generating possible courses of action (e.g., a move in chess), and its consequences

(e.g., the possible responses of the opponent). Since the human cognitive system has limitations,

it is impossible to search all the possibilities exhaustively. In order to search for possibilities

efficiently skilled players use heuristics, or rules of thumb that afford them the possibility to

eliminate irrelevant possibilities from the analysis, thus limiting the necessary search. These

strategies and heuristics rest upon the recognition of chunks. When a situation (or part of it) in a

game matches one or more chunks stored in LTM, the expert player has quick access to

information associated with these chunks. For example, a typical configuration of chess pieces

may be associated with an advantageous move or a typical strategy.

Gobet and Simon (1996) acknowledged some anomalies of the chunking theory and

developed the template theory. This theory maintains the core of chunking theory, and

incorporates the concept of a template. Templates are also domain-specific configurations of

items that appear more or less frequently in situations of the domain. Besides being larger than

chunks (indeed, chunks could evolve into templates when they appear frequently in the

environment and a connection is formed between them), templates contain slots in which

additional information can be placed. Also individual items or chunks could be placed into the

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slots. The templates are implicitly acquired by experts in the course of their exposure to the

domain-specific environment.

Some aspects of chunking theory and template theory have been implemented in a

computational model called CHREST (Gobet et al., 2001; Gobet & Simon, 2000; see also an

application of CHREST to problem gambling in Gobet & Schiller, 2011; Gobet & Schiller, this

book). Here we only present a very general explanation, focusing on the issues that are relevant

for this chapter. In order to simulate human learning, CHREST is trained by being presented a

large number of domain-specific situations (e.g., chess positions in the case of chess). When

items appear together in several situations chunks are formed by establishing connections

between individual items. With extended exposure to situations chunks may evolve into

templates by establishing connections among them. For example, a chess player observes that

grandmasters always play the same move in a specific position. Therefore, a possible course of

action (i.e., that move) is associated with the representation of the situation stored in LTM (i.e.,

the template that corresponds to that specific position). Also, the chess player may observe that

the white side always wins when that move is played by grandmasters. This information (i.e.,

“this position is advantageous for white”) is added to one of the slots of the template. Hence,

every time that the player encounters the same position in the future he/she will quickly

recognise the situation (because the template stored in LTM gets activated), and will have

immediate access to the associated information, and the best course of action.

Experimental research has shown that performance in domain-specific memory tasks is a

function of the level of expertise, and computational simulations with CHREST suggest that this

phenomenon is well accounted for by the number of templates and chunks stored in LTM (e.g.,

Gobet & Simon, 2000). Research also shows that experts of higher levels outperform novices (or

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experts of lower levels) in domain-specific problem-solving tasks (e.g., Campitelli & Gobet,

2004; Connors, Burns, & Campitelli, 2011), domain-specific imagery tasks (Campitelli & Gobet,

2005), and that the former search for possible options more selectively than the latter, when they

are solving problems (e.g., DeGroot, 1978). Finally, brain imaging evidence is starting to identify

the localization of the domain-specific LTM network (e.g., Campitelli et al., 2007; Bilalic,

Turella, Campitelli, Erb, & Grodd, 2012).

Another important issue introduced in Chase and Simon's (1973) seminal article is their

proposal that the attainment of high levels of expert performance requires acquiring a large

number of domain-specific patterns (i.e., 50,000 chunks). Therefore, this is a process that

develops over a long period of time (i.e., about 10 years of intense dedication). This proposal

was adopted by Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer (1993) who developed the “deliberate

practice” (DP) framework. This framework proposes that expert performance is a monotonic

function of the amount of DP. DP consists of training activities that are aimed at correcting

mistakes, and are characterised by optimal feedback (e.g., provided by a coach, published

material or software). There is evidence that a large amount of DP is a necessary condition to

achieve high levels of expert performance in several domains such as music (Ericsson et al.,

1993), chess (Gobet & Campitelli, 2007; Charness, Tuffiash, Krampe, Reingold, & Vasyukova,

2005), SCRABBLE (Tuffiash, Roring, & Ericsson, 2007), and sports (Helsen, Starkes, &

Hodges, 1998; Starkes, Deakin, Allard, Hodges, & Hayes, 1996); but there is also evidence that

DP is not a sufficient condition to achieve expert performance (Campitelli & Gobet, 2011;

Hambrick, Oswald, Altmann, Meinz, Gobet & Campitelli, in press), and that other factors are

also involved. For example, Gobet and Campitelli (2007) showed that the age at which chess

players start studying seriously is a good predictor of expert performance after controlling for

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hours of practice, and Meinz and Hambrick (2010) showed that working memory capacity is a

significant predictor of music reading, above and beyond hours of practice.

In summary, the expertise literature in cognitive psychology shows that performance in

domain-specific tasks is a function of the level of expertise, that a plausible explanation of this

phenomenon is the existence of a large network of chunks and templates associated with courses

of action and relevant information stored in LTM, and that differences in the size of that network

are mainly explained by the amount of time dedicated to the field. In the next section we discuss

whether this explanation of expertise could be applied to gambling.

Cognitive psychology of expert gambling

Poker is a gambling game that involves an element of skill. Croson, Fishman and Pope

(2008) investigated the extent to which poker involves skill versus chance by regressing the rank

of players in a current poker tournament over the rank of the same players in previous

tournaments. If poker were a game of chance the rank on previous tournaments should not

significantly predict the rank in a current tournament. They found that rank in previous

tournaments was a significant predictor of the current tournament rank. Although the variance

accounted for by the predictor variable was only 2.8%, this was comparable to a similar analysis

in golf – a sport that is considered a game of skill. Parke, Griffiths and Parke (2005) identified a

number of skills involved in poker: critical-evaluative, numerical, pragmatic, interpersonal,

problem solving, goal orientation, learning, higher-order analytic and strategic, flexibility, face

management/deception, self-awareness, and self-control. They proposed that some of these skills

are transferable to everyday life situations.

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Research on gambling using expertise paradigms has been scarce. Dedonno and

Detterman (2008) trained a group of students in poker strategies and another group received

information in poker history. Both groups played a number of hands before treatment and after

treatment. There was no difference in profits between groups before treatment, but there was a

significant difference between groups after treatment, with the strategy group outperforming the

history group. This result was replicated in a second experiment, in which strategy instruction

also influenced the number of hands played. (Playing a small percentage of hands – less than

15% of hands dealt - is a marker of skilled playing in poker).

St. Germain and Tenenbaum (2012) asked three groups of poker players [experts (13

years, and 39,200 hours of poker-playing experience, on average), intermediate players (7.1

years, and 1,990 hours), and novices (2.4 years, 23.9 hours)] to play 60 hands of a computerised

version of Texas Hold’Em poker, and report out-loud what they were thinking while playing.

They found a skill effect in the average expected value of bets, and in earnings. They also found

that experts generated more verbalizations categorised as “opponent behaviour” and “advanced

poker considerations”, whereas the novices produced more verbalizations categorised as “basic

poker considerations” and “other” (this category includes thoughts such as “feeling lucky”,

“angry with one player”, “scared to raise/bet”). Finally, Meinz, Hambrick, Hawkins, Gillings,

Meyer and Schneider (2012) studied the role of number of hours of dedication, domain-specific

knowledge, and working memory capacity (WMC) on performance in tasks that measure Texas

Hold’Em poker skill. They found that the number of hours of dedication is a strong and

significant predictor of domain-specific knowledge, which in turn is a strong and significant

predictor of poker tasks. They also found that WMC was a significant predictor of performance

in poker tasks.

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Although the literature on expert gambling is scarce it seems that the results are similar to

those in other fields of expertise. High-level players outperform lower-level players in

representative tasks of the field, they make bets that are objectively better, and they earn more

money. Moreover, the skill levels could be differentiated in terms of the numbers of hours of

dedication. In the next section we put forward an explanation of expert gambling using template

theory and CHREST.

Chunks, templates and gambling

The results presented above suggest that, although chance is an important component,

poker is a game of skill. This implies that template theory (Gobet & Simon, 1996) and CHREST

(Gobet et al., 2001) could explain skilled performance in a gambling game such as poker. Indeed,

expertise in poker could be accounted for by, at least in part, a network of chunks that associate a

card configuration with a course of action. For example, the fact that expert players play less

than 15% of the hands dealt, and inexperienced players play too many hands could, in part, be

accounted for by a difference between experts and inexperienced players in the network of

chunks stored in LTM. An expert player that receives the cards 4-8 in Texas Hold’Em poker

recognises a chunk stored in LTM with these numbers that is associated with the actions “pass or

fold, but never bet”. On the other hand, an inexperienced player may not have any course of

action associated with this chunk, so his/her decision to play this hand depends on incidental

factors such as “feeling lucky”.

More complex strategic behaviour in poker requires a more complex explanation. The

concept of a template is useful to provide an account of such behaviour. A template may include

information about the cards one is holding, the communal cards, the number of players playing

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the hand, the position of oneself in the table, the number of chips available, and the betting

behaviour of the participants in the hand. In some cases such a template would be associated

with a clear-cut course of action (e.g., go “all in”), and in other cases with general strategic

concepts (e.g., “the odds are in my favour in this situation, but only slightly”).

Summing up, some gambling games could be considered games of skill, and the theories

that explain expert behavior could be used to explain expert gambling behaviour. An interesting

issue that is considered later is that a large network of chunks could be associated with chunks

that lead to bad outcomes. The proposal in this chapter is that a large network of chunks that lead

to bad outcomes could be a key factor in the maintenance of problematic gambling behaviour.

Unfortunately, expertise in gambling is not the whole story. Gambling can be a very

damaging activity for some people. A continuous biased assessment of the chances of winning

leads to problem gambling. Interestingly, the literature on expert judgment and decision making

shows examples in which some experts make biased judgements. In the following section we

discuss the relationship between problem gambling and expert judgement.

Problem gambling and its relationship to expert judgement

The picture that we get from the literature on expertise in cognitive psychology is that

experts outperform (or are better than) novices most of the time. The task of expertise

researchers is to explain the nature and development of expert performance. The field of expert

judgment has a different goal: it aims at determining whether experts are rational in their

judgements. The findings in this research field are not encouraging: in some domains experts’

judgements are flawed. We believe that this line of research is relevant for the investigation of

problem gambling. Regular gamblers, as experts, have prolonged experience in their field; thus,

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we propose that some of the irrational thoughts of problem gamblers could be maintained for the

same reason that experts make inconsistent judgements. In the following sub-section we briefly

describe the literature in expert judgement, and in the subsequent sub-section we briefly review

the literature on cognitive biases in problem gambling.

Expert Judgement

Studies with medical doctors, clinical psychologists, and other experts, have shown that

the judgements of experts are frequently invalid and unreliable. For example, Goldberg (1959)

had 4 practicing clinical psychologists, 10 student interns, and 8 naive subjects examine Bender-

Gestalt protocols. The accuracy for all groups fell between 65% and 70% (where 50% is chance).

Oskamp (1965) had clinical psychologists and students study a clinical case and asked questions

about the case in four stages. He also asked the participants to provide a confidence judgement

about their performance. The results show that the participants did not increase their accuracy

from stage 1 (26%) to stage 4 (28%). On the other hand, their confidence increased from stage 1

(33%) to stage 4 (53%). Further, no difference was found between expert clinicians and students.

Einhorn (1974) found that the reliability of judgements of medical pathologists (as measured by

the correlation between two judgements of the same case at different points in time) was only .5.

Moreover, Trumbo, Adams, Milner and Schipper (1962) studied licensed grain judges and found

that experience increased their confidence in judgments, but not necessarily their accuracy. This

indicates that the phenomenon of overconfidence that is found in the general population

(Lichtenstein, Fischhoff, & Phillips, 1982) and in problem gamblers (Goodie, 2005) is also found

in experts.

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Gervais and Odean (2001) proposed a mathematical model to explain why professional

investors are overconfident (e.g., Odean, 1999). In Gervais and Odean's model overconfidence is

learned because investors updated their beliefs on their skill accurately when their investment is

not successful, but with a learning bias when it is successful. This model is interesting since,

unlike most models of overconfidence, it takes into account the learning process. Indeed, our

proposal of the illusion of expertise adopts a learning perspective. However, the model has a

problem in that a learning bias is assumed, but not explained. Explanation of the learning bias is

not the purpose of this financial model, which aims at providing evidence that overconfident

investors could survive in the market for a long while, despite trading more than they should.

However, explaining, rather than assuming, the learning bias is important from a psychological

stand point.

The conclusion from the literature on expert judgment is that experts do not always

outperform novices, their judgments could be unreliable and they could also be overconfident.

The existence of overconfidence in experts is very intriguing. We hypothesise that, indeed, the

sheer fact that someone is considered an expert by peers could lead them to make a biased

evaluation of the likelihood of success. We refer to this phenomenon as the illusion of expertise,

which we discuss later in the chapter.

Note, however, that, as reported by Shanteau (1988), not all the fields of expertise show

biased judgment and/or overconfidence: for example, livestock judges and weather forecasters

were found to be competent decision makers. In an attempt to reconcile these two opposing

findings, Shanteau (1992) proposed that the difference in performance among fields of expertise

is due, in part, to the characteristics of the tasks. One explanation for this difference is that good-

performance domains generally involve decisions about objects or things, (i.e., the stimuli are

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relatively constant), and problems are more predictable, whereas bad-performance domains

involve decisions about behavior, and problems are less predictable (see Shanteau, 1992, Table 2

for a full list of task characteristics). Since predictability in gambling games is low, it is not

surprising that gambling is a field in which biased judgment is apparent. In the next section we

examine the literature on cognitive biases in gambling.

Cognitive biases in gambling

The previous section described the poor performance of experts’ judgments in some

fields. Paradoxically, the literature on expert judgment has a lot in common with the

literature that studies the underlying mechanisms of problem gambling: they both show

that individuals commit serious cognitive biases when they make judgments and/or

decisions.

Studies that use the think aloud protocol technique have shown that gamblers produce a

great number of irrational statements (e.g., Delfabbro & Winefield, 2000; Griffiths, 1994) such

as attributing personal qualities to gambling machines, the gambler’s fallacy (i.e., the belief that,

for random events, runs of a particular outcome (e.g., heads on the toss of a coin) will be

balanced by a tendency for the opposite outcome (e.g., tails)), attribution of wins to skill and

losses to external factors (Gilovich, 1983).

One of the most investigated biases is the “illusion of control” (Langer, 1975). Langer

defines the illusion of control as ‘‘an expectancy of a personal success probability

inappropriately higher than the objective probability would warrant’’ (p. 313). Langer introduced

aspects of a skill (i.e., choice, stimulus or response familiarity, passive or active involvement and

competition) in a situation in which chance, not skill, determines the outcome. In several

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experiments they found that the participants behaved as if they had control in a situation of

chance. In the first experiment the participants bet more if they were competing against a

confident confederate than if they were competing against a nervous confederate. In the second

experiment a group of participants that had chosen a lottery ticket were willing to sell the ticket

for $8.67 on average, whereas a group of participants who held a lottery ticket chosen by

someone else were willing to sell the ticket for $1.96, on average. In the third experiment they

found that the familiarity of a lottery ticket (i.e., the familiar ticket had letters, the unfamiliar had

symbols) had an impact on the decision to change the ticket for a ticket of another lottery with

higher chances of winning, with the participants having the letter tickets being more willing to

keep the original ticket. In another experiment the confidence to perform a chance task was

influenced by the degree to which the participants were involved with the task, with more

confidence shown by the participants that were more involved. In another experiment Langer

shows that the more people think about a lottery the more confident they are on winning the

lottery.

Langer (1975) proposes that the reason why people approach a chance situation that

resembles a skill situation with a skill orientation is that people are motivated to control their

environment, and people try to avoid the negative consequences that accompany the perception

of having no control. Langer’s findings have been corroborated on many occasions (e.g., Chóliz,

2010; Griffiths, 1990b; Ladoceur & Sevigny, 2005; Langer & Roth, 1975). Ladoceur and

Sevigny (2005) indicated that video lottery machines offer players the possibility of using

numerous unnecessary accessories. The existence of these accessories may create the illusion of

possessing a certain control over the machine, chance, or outcomes. The pseudo reels-stopping

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device allows players to believe that they can stop the spinning of the reels by exerting pressure

on the screen.

Ladoceur and Walker (1996) stated that the cognitive approach to problem gambling

argues that problem gamblers continue playing because they possess distorted beliefs that cause

them to overestimate their chances of winning. Also, Goodie (2005) developed the Georgia

Gambling Task (GGT) to measure overconfidence in gambling. He found that problem gamblers

were more overconfident than non-problem gamblers, which in GGT means that they also lose

more money.

Although the existence of cognitive biases in problem gamblers is apparent, there are

reasons to believe that cognitive biases on their own cannot explain why people continue

gambling despite severe losses. First, although cognitive biases are important in problem

gamblers, these biases are also found in the general population, and even in some experts. Even

though the biases are more prevalent in problem gamblers, this may not mean that problem

gamblers are less rational than the general population. Delfabbro (2004) indicated that the fact

that regular slot-machine players are more likely to have irrational beliefs than non-problem

players (Griffiths, 1994) does not mean that the former are more irrational than the latter, but that

the regular players have a wider repertoire of irrational beliefs due to greater experience (i.e.,

they have had more time to learn new associations and strategies). Moreover, Griffiths described

the paradoxical situation in which gamblers know that they cannot “beat the house”, but they still

believe they can win.

The regular slot-machine player who is aware that “the house always wins” may believe

that he/she will eventually find a trick or system that affords the possibility to exploit some flaw

in the design of the machines. And this belief may be supported by the actual accumulation of

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knowledge about slot-machines due to prolonged gambling experience. As indicated by

Delfabbro (2004), this is not entirely irrational: some slot-machines are arranged to have higher

pay-offs than others, and discovering this requires skilled observationi.

The illusion of expertise in problem gambling

The expert judgment literature shows that in some fields experts believe that they have a

much higher level of skills or knowledge than their objective level of knowledge or skill. This

may be the case because those experts have prolonged experience in the field, peers recognize

them as experts, and indeed they have a great amount of knowledge in the field, which may not

be useful in a specific judgment situation. We call this “the illusion of expertise”ii. We define the

illusion of expertise as the belief that one possesses a higher level of specific knowledge or skill

i An anonymous reviewer indicated that acquiring this expertise is not possible because the

sequences of slot machines are often ten of thousands of plays, thus it would be impossible to

predict results even by systematic observation.

ii The term the “illusion of expertise” has been used by Fellner, Güth and Maciejovsky (2004) in

the context of financial decisions. They defined it as “the tendency to prefer own choices much

more than objectively justifiable…” (p. 358). We believe the phenomenon studied by Fellner and

colleagues is that of the illusion of control, rather than the illusion of expertise. The fact that

people prefer their own portfolios does not occur due to extended experience in the field or the

possession of domain knowledge that is not relevant to this situation.

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than objectively justified, in a domain in which one has prolonged experience, and possesses

other knowledge or skills. Beyond the examples described in the expert judgment literature, other

examples could be put forward: a politician who has excellent skills on how to be elected and

believes that he/she could make sound policy decisions; a football fan who has extended

knowledge about his team and believes that he/she has knowledge about strategies of the game; a

science journalist who has strong skills in interviewing scientists and believes he/she can put

forward a scientific theory.

In this chapter we propose that one of the factors that maintains problematic gambling

behavior is the illusion of expertise. The illusion of expertise is not the same as the illusion of

control. The latter is a short-term effect that, as described above, could be induced by an

experimental manipulation in a non-problem-gambling sample. On the other hand, the illusion of

expertise is a long-term effect and requires extended experience in a field.

The concept of illusion of expertise is similar to that of illusion of skill. We first briefly

describe studies based on the latter concept, and then we explain why we prefer the former

concept. Griffiths (1990a,b, 1994) and Fischer (1993) studied the role of skill and perceived skill

in problem gambling. Slot machine players develop a number of skills that create the illusion that

their chances of winning are higher. For example, some regular gamblers acquire the “knowledge

of the reels” (i.e., knowing the exact sequence of symbols of the reels). They also develop a

number of heuristics and strategies to identify which machine has recently paid off. Moreover,

Griffiths (1993) found that regular gamblers rated themselves more skillful than the average fruit

machine player.

Ladoceur and Sevigny (2005) studied the illusion of skill in video lottery players, taking

advantage of the lottery terminal stopping device (i.e., a device by which gamblers could

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voluntarily stop the spinning of the reels). Since this stopping device does not objectively

improve the probabilities of winning (see Griffiths, 1994), it is interesting to know whether

gamblers believe that “skillfully” using the stopping device improves the probabilities of

winning. They asked participants to answer the following question: “If you were to obtain a

winning combination, would it be due to chance, skill or a combination of the two? Why is that?”

They found that gamblers believe that there is an element of skill in the use of the stopping

device, and that their chances of winning are higher when they can use the device.

Since the concept of the illusion of skill was not very clearly defined in the literature of

problem gambling, we decided to refer to this phenomenon as “the illusion of expertise”. This

choice affords us the possibility of emphasising that, in some respects, problem gamblers behave

as experts. For example, Delfabbro (2004) indicates that even in 100% chance games there is

skill involved in learning rules. Also, even in slot-machines players can select machines that lose

less than others, which involves knowledge or skills. We also want to emphasise the fact that the

extended experience in the field of gambling plays an important role in the maintenance of

irrational beliefs.

The illusion of expertise does not always arise; a number of conditions should be met.

First, the illusion of expertise occurs when a gambler makes clear efforts to acquire knowledge

or skills that he/she believes will help improve the probabilities of winning. For example, the

lottery gambler whose only involvement with gambling is buying the lottery ticket and checking

the results may have cognitive biases, but not the illusion of expertise. On the other hand, if the

lottery gambler reads books or websites that present “systems” on how to earn money playing

lottery, he/she may develop the illusion of expertise. Second, the (irrelevant) knowledge or skills

acquired should be strongly related to the gambling situation. For example, a regular slot-

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machine player will not develop the illusion of expertise in poker playing. This gambler would

know that the “skills” he/she is acquiring in a field are not transferable to another field. Third, the

chances of success do not improve (or slightly improve) in the process of acquiring the irrelevant

skills. For example, the professional poker player does not develop the illusion of expertise,

instead he/she becomes a poker expert.

In the next section we propose how the illusion of expertise and cognitive biases could be

explained using the expertise theories presented above (i.e., chunking and template theories).

Chunks and templates in problem gambling

Our claim in this chapter is that problem gamblers behave as experts in some fields. The

challenge in this section is to entertain the possibility that the theories that explain expert

performance - template theory (Gobet & Simon, 1996) and/or CHREST (Gobet et al., 2001) -

could also be applied to account for irrational gambling behavior. Here we present a general

explanation; please refer to Gobet and Schiller (this book) for a detailed implementation of

problem gambling behavior in CHREST.

Template theory (Gobet & Simon, 1996) and CHREST (Gobet et al., 2001) explain

expertise mainly as an accumulation of chunks and templates in LTM associated with courses of

action or information. The accumulation of chunks and templates does not guarantee expert

performance. Expert performance occurs if the courses of action or information associated with

the chunks lead to an advantageous situation.

For example, in the course of his/her chess career, a club chess player accumulates

chunks and templates related to his/her favourite opening. These chunks and templates associate

with typical courses of action and other types of information. All these pieces of knowledge

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allow the club player to play his/her favorite opening with confidence. However, this opening

leads to inferior positions if the opponent plays well. Hence, even though the chess player is

learning chunks and templates, his probability of winning does not increase, or increases very

slightly but remains very low. Similarly, regular gamblers store domain-specific chunks and

templates associated with courses of action and information in their LTM. For example, the

gambler’s fallacy in a roulette player could be accounted for by the existence in LTM of a chunk

of four consecutive blacks, associated with the information “it is highly likely that next ball will

be a red” and the course of action “bet red”. Likewise, the chunk of four consecutive odd

numbers may be associated with the information “it is highly likely that the next ball will be

even”, and the course of action “bet even”. Of course, in both cases the associated information is

not learned by experience, because repeated experience shows that after four consecutive blacks

or odds the chances of red and even are equal to that of black or odds, respectively. Rather, this

information is typically learned from other gamblers or other unreliable sources.

The regular gambler, in comparison to a non-gambler may develop a larger repertoire of

chunks related to 4 consecutive outcomes. For example, the outcomes 22-16-31-7 may not have

a meaning to the novice player; on the other hand, the regular roulette gambler may quickly

identify this sequence as 4 consecutive 1st

column outcomes due to the existence of the chunk

22-16-31-7 associated with the pieces of information “four consecutive 1st

column outcomes”,

and “it is highly likely that the next would be 2nd

or 3rd

column numbers”, and the course of

action “bet 2nd

or 3rd

column numbers”. The fact that the regular gambler is much more skillful

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than a novice player in recognizing patterns contributes to the illusion of expertise. The regular

gambler rightfully perceives him/herself as more skilful than other players, and thus he/she

believes that his/her chances of winning are higher, when in fact they are not.

A similar explanation could be proposed in relation to regular slot-machine gamblers. As

explained in detail by Griffiths (1994), regular players possess a number of skills. For example,

“knowing the reels” (i.e., knowing the exact sequence of symbols in the reels) is a skill that is

acquired by accumulation of chunks (a sequence of 3 or 4 symbols) that evolve into a template

(i.e., the whole sequence of symbols in the reel) by the combination of chunks. Also, the regular

player knows all the functions of the available buttons: this skill is acquired by learning the

association between a chunk (e.g., a specific button) and the action associated with it. The

accurate perception of the regular gambler that he/she is more skillful than other players in this

aspect of the game may lead to the illusion of expertise.

Discussion

There are two important problems in the phenomenon of problem/pathological gambling:

the easy one – why do people gamble? - and the difficult one – why do people continue gambling

despite severe monetary losses that impact their financial and personal well-being and that of

their families? People gamble because gambling can be a rewarding activity in many ways. For a

small minority (i.e., professional gamblers) gambling is financially rewarding, and it becomes a

profession. For the majority gambling is entertaining, an intellectual challenge, and/or an

interesting social activity. The losses incurred in gambling could be considered fees paid to have

a good time. However, for an important minority, the maintenance of gambling behavior signifies

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significant financial losses, destruction of families, etc. In this chapter we propose the concept of

the illusion of expertise as one possible explanation for why people continue gambling.

The innovative approach of this chapter is that we combine gambling with expertise. In

some gambling games (notably poker) acquisition of expertise is possible. By studying and

practicing poker, players become better and better, and they can make a living out of it.

Moreover, as discussed by Parke, Griffiths and Parke (2005), skills developed in the course of

acquiring poker expertise may be transferable to other life situations. The study of cognitive

processes underlying expertise has been dominated by the game of chess. There are no reasons

why expertise in poker should not receive the same attention as chess. Indeed, for the sake of

generalizability, the investigation of poker expertise would be an important endeavour.

On the other hand, gambling is a field in which a huge number of skills that are irrelevant

for the purpose of earning money could be developed. Hence, the illusion of expertise is quite

probable in this field, and the consequences could be catastrophic for the regular gambler. We

defined the illusion of expertise as the belief that one possesses a higher level of specific

knowledge or skill than objectively justified, in a domain in which one has prolonged experience,

and possesses other knowledge or skills. We discussed some conditions that have to occur for the

illusion of expertise to appear, and we finally used theories of expertise to explain the illusion of

expertise and biased thinking.

We believe that our conceptualisation of the illusion of expertise is useful for theoretical

and practical purposes. For example, if a case of problem gambling is related to the illusion of

expertise, interventions that aim at changing cognitive biases would be fruitless. If information is

given to avoid cognitive biases, the problem gambler who is under the illusion of expertise will

change one type of bias for another. This is because the problem gambler still believes s/he is an

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expert in the field. The fact that some of her/his thoughts were not rational indicates that the

strategies were not correct, but it does not stop the problem gambler searching for (or inventing)

new strategies. Hence, in this case the illusion of expertise should be targeted. However, the

intervention should be cautious. Delfabbro (2004) rightfully suggests that in problem gambling

interventions two issues should be kept separate: the belief of the possession of skills (which

could be accurate), and the belief of the chances of winning (which is usually inaccurate in

problem gamblers). We suggest that telling the gambler that s/he is under the illusion of expertise

may infuriate her/him. S/he believes s/he is in the process of acquiring skills that eventually

would lead to success. Since this, in some cases, has a degree of truth, this type of intervention

would fail. An intervention that may have better chances of success in problem gamblers under

the illusion of expertise should make clear to the gambler that s/he is, indeed, an expert in the

field of gambling. Moreover, disputing the belief that the gambler may eventually discover a

method to “beat the house” may not be a good idea either.

Instead, interventions to tackle the illusion of expertise should concentrate on the costs of

acquiring expertise. Experts spent thousands of hours acquiring high-levels of expertise.

Moreover, as shown in Campitelli and Gobet (2011), spending a huge amount of time in

dedication to a field is a necessary condition to achieve high levels of expertise, but is not

sufficient. Some chess players dedicate more than 30,000 hours to chess and do not achieve a

high-level of expertise in chess. Even players that do achieve this level of expertise may not be

able to make a living out of it. The same applies to other fields such as music and sports. Only a

small fraction of the individuals that start a music or sport career reach the levels of expertise

required to make a living. Gambling is a worse career to pursue: the chances of being successful

in games in which skill has a minimum impact (if any) on the outcomes are even slimmer than

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that in the fields mentioned above. Moreover, although there are some financial costs involved in

maintaining a chess, music or sporting career, the financial costs of pursuing a gambling career

in games of chance are extremely high.

In other words, pursuing a gambling career is not a bad prospect because making a living

out of it is impossible, but because it is very improbable given the costs to maintain the gambling

career. The aim of an intervention, then, should be to target beliefs that could be changed, rather

than those that are very difficult to change. This would involve agreeing with the problem

gambler under the illusion of expertise that acquiring gambling expertise is possible, and that he

may well be (or on track to become) a gambling expert. By not disputing this belief, his/her

willingness to change other beliefs may be higher; hence, working on a realistic assessment of

what is the probability of being successful at gambling given the financial and time costs, may be

a better strategy.

Conclusion

We proposed the concept of the illusion of expertise as one of the possible causes of

maintenance of problematic gambling behavior. We considered this concept in the context of

cognitive research on expertise and expert judgment research. We used theories of expertise to

propose an explanation of the underlying mechanisms of three phenomena in gambling: expertise

acquisition, cognitive biases, and the illusion of expertise. It is important to emphasise that we

are not proposing that every problem gambler is under the illusion of expertise. We explicitly

indicated the conditions under which the illusion of expertise may arise. Despite this proviso, we

do claim that the concept of the illusion of expertise may be useful for problem gambling

interventions. We hope that this chapter constitutes an important step towards incorporating the

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knowledge acquired in the field of expertise research into problem gambling research. By doing

that, we feel this is an important contribution to the understanding of the acquisition,

development and maintenance of gambling behavior.

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Documents

Expertise and the Illusion of Expertise in Gambling