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About
This Substack is about casino gamblers’ strategies and beliefs about winning, how those strategies and beliefs inform our understanding of (ir)rationality, and how they inform—and are informed by—behavioral economics and the psychological science of judgment and decision making.
Below is an overview for those who want to know more about the range of essay content, my relevant background, and who this Substack is for.
More on essay content
This Substack focuses on four inter-related themes, each of which is described in more detail in a linked Substack post:
Casino gamblers and their strategies and beliefs about winning;
How research on casino gamblers helps to better understand J/DM more generally;
About me
I am a research psychologist focused on the impact of culture and the built environment on normative judgments (judgments about what is rational, true, or moral).
Before I started graduate school, I spent about 1,000 hours learning how to count cards in blackjack and applying that knowledge in casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada and in Prague, Czech Republic. That experience turned out to be central to my Ph.D. research which involved nearly two years as a participant-observer in casinos in Las Vegas, in northwestern Indiana, and in Prague. I went to dealer school, worked as a blackjack dealer in Nevada, spent nearly 1000 hours playing blackjack, roulette, slot machines, and poker in casinos in all three locations, read extensively about gambling strategies, and interviewed nearly 200 blackjack, roulette, and slot machine players about their strategies for and beliefs about winning. This Substack is about that research, and about its implications both for how we make judgments and decisions and for how we evaluate other people’s judgments and decisions.
After receiving my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin and in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (just outside Chicago). I currently work at the Center for Workplace Research at the Prague University of Economics and Business and in the School of Psychology at the University of New York in Prague.
In addition to research on gambling, I have focused on cross-cultural differences in moral judgments, and on the future of work. Interest in that latter topic was stimulated by a 10-year hiatus from research psychology when I founded and ran a coworking space.
Who is this Substack for?
The essays in this Substack are for…
Behavioral economists and psychological scientists focused on processes in judgment and decision making interested in what we can learn from studying “decision making in the wild”;
Casino gamblers who want help evaluating their strategies and beliefs about winning, or want to learn about other strategies and how they work (or why they don’t work);
Non-gamblers curious about why anyone would gamble in casinos;
Clinical psychologists and family and friends of problem and pathological gamblers who marvel at the irrationality and persistence of what seem to them to be transparently false beliefs and maladaptive strategies;
Problem gamblers who want their family, friends, or counsellors to have a more nuanced and respectful understanding about their strategies and beliefs about winning;
Decision makers in other risky or uncertain domains who want to make better decisions;
Scientists and lay people interested in group polarization as it is related to subjective judgments about what is true or false, rational or irrational;
Policy makers trying to better understand the role of casino and game design in the development of gamblers’ harmful strategies and false beliefs about winning;
Me! One of the main purposes of this substack is to help me organize my own research and ideas about rationality, epistemology, decision making, and culture. I hope you’ll help me correct my own poor strategies and false beliefs about the themes in this Substack.
