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Home > Psychology > News Articles Lousy Gambler? It May Be In Your Genes, Say Marketing Academics
By News Staff | June 16th 2014 01:18 PM | Print | E-mail | Track Comments 
Marketing academics, the group who brought us the notion that hurricanes with female names are more dangerous because the patriarchy just assumes the little ladies are being hysterical and won't knock down houses, are back with the conjecture that your gambling style is genetic.

It's not as crazy as the stuff years ago that claimed liberals and conservatives were born that way, or that your grandfather's diet changed your genes enough to make you fat, but it isn't good science either. Thus, look for it on the Dr. Oz show by next week.

The UC Berkeley, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) scholars say that betting decisions in a simple competitive game are influenced by the specific variants of dopamine-regulating genes in a person's brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter – a chemical released by brain cells to signal other brain cells – that is commonly accepted by psychologists to be part of the brain's reward and pleasure-seeking system. Dopamine deficiency has also been implicated in Parkinson's disease, while disruption of the dopamine network has been suggested to cause numerous psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, including schizophrenia, depression and dementia.

Dopamine is a common target for studies of social interactions but this is the first study tying these interactions to specific genes that govern dopamine functioning.

"This study shows that genes influence complex social behavior, in this case strategic behavior," said study leader Ming Hsu, an assistant professor of marketing in UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. "We now have some clues about the neural mechanisms through which our genes affect behavior. When people talk about dopamine dysfunction, schizophrenia is one of the first diseases that come to mind.

Like the female hurricanes paper, this was in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lending credence to the belief that PNAS has no one at all running their editorial board. Brain scans are the most abused pretty pictures in all of science. Here they purportedly show high activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (top) and striatum (bottom) while playing a competitive game. The scholars then matchec the pretty picture to genetic variations in dopamine-regulating genes in the prefrontal cortex and striatum associated with differences in belief learning and reinforcement learning, respectively. Credit: Ming Hsu, UC Berkeley

"If you think of the brain as a computing machine, these are areas that take inputs, crank them through an algorithm, and translate them into behavioral outputs," Hsu says. "What is really interesting about these areas is that both are innervated by neurons that use dopamine."

Trial-and-error learning vs belief learning



