Gambling
For those seeking senseless stimulation, gambling readily becomes addictive compulsion. Persistence in this unrewarding enterprise is facilitated by a subtle rewrite of history.
Chronic gamblers do not paint a rosy picture for the future by remembering their successes and forgetting failures. Quite the contrary. Punters spend considerable time scrutinizing their losses. While wins are taken at face value, losses are toted up as flukes: the outcome would have been different if only….
Losses become a close call. An optimistic tweak of technique is the calling card that helps place the next bet after a loss.
Gamblers come to see negative outcomes not as losses that signal the difficulty of ever coming out ahead, but as near-wins that call for just a little strategic fine-tuning. ~ Thomas Gilovich
