In a sense, Americans have been training themselves for years to become eager users of gambling tech. Smartphone-app design, as has been amply reported, relies on the “variable reward” method of habit formation to get people hooked—the same mechanism that casinos use to keep people playing games and pulling levers. When Instagram sends notifications about likes or worthwhile posts, people are impelled to open the app and start scrolling; when sports-betting apps send push alerts about fantastic parlays, people are coaxed into placing one more bet.
Smartphones have thus habituated people to an expectation of stimulation—and potential reward—at every moment. “You’re constantly surrounded by the ability to change your neurochemistry by a simple click,” Timothy Fong, a UCLA psychiatry professor and a co-director of the university’s gambling-studies program, told me. “There’s this idea that we have to have excessive dopamine with every experience in our life.”
The frictionless ease of mobile sports betting takes advantage of this. It has become easy, even ordinary, to experience the “excitement” of gambling everywhere.
Not “in a sense,” but actually and in every way training themselves ourselves with the exact same mental practices as those employed in and experienced through gambling addiction, and addiction of kind.