This year saw the introduction of my 1994 study on the role of cognitive bias in slot machine gambling (Griffiths 1994) on to the OCR specification. Since then, I have had lots of correspondence from A-level psychology teachers (and a few students too), asking me a number of interesting questions about the study. This article presents a glorified ‘FAQ’ that puts my study into context and, hopefully, answers some of the most commonly asked questions.
I began a PhD on the psychology of slot machines back in 1987 and I spent the first 3 or 4 months reading everything I could about how psychological research methods are used to study this relatively new area of research. As a PhD student, the paper that really inspired me was a pioneering study by Anderson and Brown (1984). Up until the mid-1980s, almost all of the experimental work on the psychology of gambling was done in laboratory settings and the question of ecological validity was something that I had great concerns about. I did not want to study gamblers in a psychology laboratory, I wanted to examine them in actual gambling environments.
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