“I was that close”: Investigating Players’ Reactions to Losses, Wins, and Near-Misses on Scratch Cards
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While scratch cards are a popular, accessible, and inexpensive form of gambling, very little is known about how they affect and influence the player. This study sought to understand the physiological and subjective experience of scratch card play, with special emphasis on the effect of near-miss outcomes (i.e. uncovering two out of three "grand prize" symbols needed to win said prize), which are remarkably prevalent in scratch card games. Thirty-eight undergraduate students from the University of Waterloo each played two custom scratch card games and experienced three types of outcomes (losses, wins and near-misses) while their skin conductance levels (SCLs) and post-reinforcement pauses were recorded. Each participant also rated each outcome in terms of its subjective level of arousal, valence, and frustration. Our results indicate that players interpreted near-misses as negatively valenced, highly arousing, frustrating losses, and were faster to move onto the next game following this type of outcome than following winning outcomes. Additionally, near-miss outcomes were associated with the largest amount of change in SCLs as the outcome was revealed. This work has implications for the problem gambling literature as it provides evidence of the frustration hypothesis of near-misses in scratch cards, and is the first study to examine the physiological and psychological experiences of scratch card players.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".