By Edoardo Tozzi
My PhD research delves into the world of gambling advertising – specifically, how it entices adolescents and young adults. But tackling this topic wasn’t a straightforward path. A major challenge emerged when I needed a reliable way to measure the impact these ads have on my target audience. That’s when I stumbled across a peculiar piece of research… the kind that would be right at home with the Ig Nobel Prizes.
The Ig Nobel Prize is a satirical award that is given annually to ten unusual or (apparently) trivial achievements in scientific research that “first make people laugh, and then make people think”. This peculiar award was first established by the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), a scientific humor magazine founded in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, and the award ceremony used to take place at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre until Covid – now it’s online. Some notable examples? In 2006, Bart Knols and colleagues received the Ig Nobel Prize for their study on the attraction of mosquitoes to human feet. The researchers found that female Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, which are known to transmit malaria, were attracted to both human feet and – Limburger cheese. Not surprisingly, the research has implications for understanding the behavior of mosquitoes and for developing new methods of mosquito control – as you may or may not know, mosquitoes are the deadliest animals in the world. In 2000, Andre Geim, a Russian-born Dutch–British physicist, won the Ig Nobel prize for… levitating a live frog with magnets. A few years later, the Chinese government took inspiration to build the lunar gravity research facility while Geim won the Nobel prize for his work on graphene.
One of most notable winners of this prestigious award, though, is a study that took place at the Koorana Saltwater Crocodile Farm in Queensland, Australia. Imagine stepping into the world of gambling research, where the thrill of the game meets the cold-blooded gaze of a crocodile. This is not a scene from a bizarre movie, but the setting of real research conducted by Matthew J. Rockloff and Nancy Greer, aptly titled ‘Never Smile at a Crocodile: Betting on Electronic Gaming Machines is Intensified by Reptile-Induced Arousal’. The experiment involved 103 participants randomly assigned to gamble on a simulated Electronic Gaming Machine (EGM) before or after handling a 1-meter saltwater crocodile. The primary aim was to investigate how this emotional arousal influenced various aspects of gambling behavior, such as bet size, speed of betting, final payouts, and the number of trials played, with a particular focus on how these effects varied among at-risk gamblers and based on the gamblers’ affective state.
The findings revealed that at-risk gamblers who reported fewer negative emotions placed higher average bets after interacting with the crocodile compared to those in the control condition. This suggests that high arousal can exacerbate gambling behaviors in individuals at risk of gambling problems, but only when the arousal is not interpreted as a negative emotion. In contrast, at-risk gamblers with a high level of self-reported negative emotions demonstrated more conservative gambling behaviors under the same conditions. The study builds on existing research by offering a novel approach to understanding the complex relationship between emotion, physiological arousal, and gambling. Methodologically, the study involved measuring participants’ gambling behavior on an EGM simulated on a laptop, with the EGM’s outcomes predetermined to ensure consistent conditions. The results underscore the significant role of arousal in gambling behavior, particularly among at-risk individuals. The study demonstrates that arousal, when not perceived as negative, can lead to more aggressive gambling, likely due to a misattribution of the source of arousal to the gambling experience itself. This finding is crucial for developing strategies to mitigate gambling harm, as it highlights the need to understand the underlying emotional and physiological drivers of gambling behavior.
How has this affected my own PhD research you may wonder. Well, in the study just discussed, galvanic skin response (GSR) was employed to evaluate arousal differences stemming from exposure to a crocodile scenario versus a control situation. GSR, an index of the skin’s electrical conductance, fluctuates with its moisture levels, reflecting sweat gland activity governed by the sympathetic nervous system. This component of the autonomic nervous system orchestrates the body’s fight-or-flight response, making GSR a reliable indicator of emotional arousal. As I set out to investigate how gambling ads affect young people, I investigated this measure further.
Indeed, I found that GSR’s application extends into consumer neuroscience, or neuromarketing, to gauge consumer arousal in response to stimuli, such as advertisements. While GSR sheds light on physiological arousal, it falls short in differentiating between similar arousal levels triggered by distinct emotions, like fear and excitement. Moreover, it does not tell us much in terms of cognitive processes. The latter limitation led to the integration of GSR with electroencephalography (EEG) in my research, “Mind games: deciphering the youth’s neurophysiological responses to (e)sports gambling ads on social media.” EEG tracks brain wave pattern changes across various frequencies, correlating to different brain states and processes, including attention, emotional valence, memory, and semantic processing. This combination of techniques aims to provide objective, unbiased insights into consumer preferences, focusing on how (e)sports gambling advertisements on social media trigger cognitive and affective processes. Overall, I hope that my research will open a window into the mind of adolescents and young adults, providing some potentially novel insights to fight what initiates gambling harm. And maybe, just maybe, I too will win the (Ig) Nobel prize.
