Gamblers required earn £10 (and can win £40 additional vouchers)

[pinkyexcel]

I'm not sure where this would fit so I thought I would put it in day to day life. I stumbled on this ad when I was looking for a job:

Marketplace on Facebook | Gamblers Required! Earn £10

Basically you earn £10 for taking part in some gambling tests as part of someone's university research. You can also win up to £40 in vouchers if you do well in the tests (I didn't).

It is quite tedious so I'm sure many of you would feel there's a more profitable way of spending 90mins or so, but thought I would mention it in case anyone else thinks a tenner is a tenner

Here's the brief she sent me by e-mail:

Thank you for contacting me regarding the study I am running at the University of Southampton. I am currently testing people who gamble at least once a month (online, in a casino/gaming venue or with friends), so if you fit into that category, please read on.

The study consists of a short questionnaire followed by 2 computer-based gambling tasks and can be completed completely online. It takes approximately an hour and a half to complete, but I can pay you £10 for your participation, and you have the opportunity to win an additional £40 worth of vouchers of your choice!

To take part, please click on the following link and try your best to gain as many points as you can in each of the gambling tasks. Please turn up your sound on your computer so you can hear audio feedback of your decisions.

Payment can be done by post, PayPal or direct bank transfer.

I have received my tenner by paypal already.

[swanbet]

Someone on here posted a facebook link to a lady doing some research for a PhD study on problem gambling. She paid you £10 if you carried out a couple of tasks for her. I'll do almost anything for £10 so I signed up. The task was a dice gambling game and you had to wager on what number was on a special dice.

She emailed this through after analysing her results, thought it might be interesting to some....

After extensive analyses, the main results of the study demonstrated that in the dice task (probabilitiy-based task), problem gamblers were less accurate than both social gamblers and non-gamblers in terms of their decisions based on probabilities. The problem gamblers also indicated poorer monitoring of their own responses in that they could not discriminate between their correct and incorrect decisions as well as the other two groups (good monitoring would be to assign high confidence ratings to high probability- correct decisions, and low confidence rating to low-probability correct decisions). However, in the general knowledge task (semantic-based task), problem gamblers did not show these same deficits and compared similarly to the social gamblers and non-gamblers. Importantly, however, problem gamblers demonstrated a deficit in knowing when to gamble in both tasks. The other two groups were much better at gambling with high wagers on their correct decisions or high-probability correct decisions, whereas the problem gamblers tended to gamble with high wagers most of the time, irrespective of their chances of winning. Whilst the findings are still being interpreted, we believe this 'deficit' in problem gamblers' willingness to gamble and lack of control shown in both tasks could be related to high impulsivity. Long term, these findings may contribute to further development of evidence-based treatment programs and/or screening for problem gamblers.

[Diamondgeezer]

Thanks - I had a number of long conversations with that woman on Casinomeister about a year ago. It was all quite interesting but she didn't have a great deal of techical knowledge about how online gambling really works.

Hardly a surprising conclusion to that study - problem gamblers are impulsive and make poor decisions.

[LosEndos]

Indeed. I hear her next study is an investigatinon into the Geographic location of digestive tract evacuation of the ursus genus.

[LosEndos]

(if you were wondering, the answer is.... in the woods....)

[munk]

Anyone know where the original thread is for this so I can merge them, I remember reading it but can't find it now, would be useful to have the posts all in one thread.

EDIT: although I must admit I do tend to 'get' what you're saying LosEndos... Same with a lot of these types of studies, there always seems to be some fundamentally flawed problem with the studies (all of which are very well intentioned of course) - either the person conducting the study doesn't have any knowledge of how gambling 'works' in terms of pure mechanics / statistical probability (so it's hard for them to actually create a suitable testing environment) or they target the wrong groups of people completely and come on AP forums asking for people to take part (which only skews the results because the target group generally won't contain a representative proportion of problem gamblers).

Having said that though this particular test does actually sound like it had a good stab at it, or at least a different stab at it given she's using actual tests...

One thing though is how does she 'know' which are the problem gamblers so she can say 'in the general knowledge task (semantic-based task), problem gamblers did not show these same deficits ...'? Was this a survey where you actually had to say straight up whether you had a gambling problem? That in itself is leaving yourself very much into dodgy territory given gambling addiction, as with any addiction, has an element of denial so the problem gamblers won't necessarily admit to it.

[pinkyexcel]

http://www.thegamblingtimes.com/boar...-vouchers.html

[swanbet]

Yes, you had to define yourself as a problem gambler, or a social gambler or non-gambler. I said I was a social gambler, but did wonder whether I should be doing the study at all, not sure where she got all the participants from. There was a questionnaire to complete before the tasks, asking about your habits etc. As you say, there are definitely grey areas.

The task was - 2 regular dice and one dice with 3 sides 0 and 3 sides 3.

They gave you a total for all 3 dice and you had to choose a stake to gamble on whether the special dice had turned up 0 or 3. eg. you could max out if the total was 15 as you would know it had to be a 3, same with the total being 2 as you would know it was 0.

edit: oh and a second test where you had to gamble similarly on general knowledge questions.

[Diamondgeezer]

Munk that was exactly the problem and a fair bit of the CM discussion was about the reliability of evidence. As you hinted at very few problem gamblers are ever going to self declare. The only way of finding these people online is with the help of the online firms themselves and that's very unlikely to happen. I think you could find some possibles in forums though but you would have to have a good understanding of EV to spot the wheat from the chaff as it were. In real life you would be able to see a lot more in terms of clues as to who might and might not be a problem gambler.

I remember she had an unpaid survey and she went on MSE begging people to do it as she didn't have enough gamblers doing it. So it was a case of garbage in garbage out with that one.

Oh and I am talking about the survey not MSE members .

[swanbet]

I think you would be able to find problem gamblers easy enough. Many seek help and admit they have a problem.