A STUDY OF PRINCIPLES OF AN OPTIMAL MATHEMATICAL INTERVENTION FOR RESPONSIBLE GAMBLING

ABSTRACT

The near-miss has long been recognised as an important reinforcing component in gambling behaviour, and earlier study has concentrated on its industry-related causes and effects rather than on the gaming phenomena itself. Due to the particular characteristics of these games, which include the possibility of pre-manipulation of award symbols to increase the frequency of these "manufactured" near-misses, the near-miss has historically been linked with slot and scratch card games. We argue in this paper that we can more accurately describe the fallacious elements of near-miss cognitive effects and the insufficient interpretation and representation of the elementary mathematical definition of the classical (by pure chance) near-miss, generalizable to any game, by focusing on both the epistemology and mathematical description of its constitutive concepts. This study examines how probabilistic reasoning happens under exploratory learning situations that are random in character. The emphasis is particularly on what learners with little knowledge of formal probability theories do and can do when confronted with compound random situations in which opponents are invited to implement multiple probabilistic lines of reasoning. Thus, our research demonstrates that probabilistic reasoning is shaped by a contextualization mechanism, i.e., by a compound process in which cognitive behaviour oscillates between contextual perceptions and reflections, the focal event, and newly acquired knowledge. This study demonstrates that students can generate concepts of an underlying probability distribution in the case of compound random occurrences prior to instruction.

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