Study by university in Holland reveals a difference in the levels of desire that are displayed by men in response to gambling or sexual stimuli under experimental conditions.

The Dutch, famous for sensible drug laws, a red light district without equal (outside the far east) and living somewhere so flat you could play strip blackjack on it, have recently concluded a study that men’s brains are built in such a manner that they are more apt to chase after easy money than they are to chase easy women. This study from the Radboud University in Nijmegen perhaps ignoring the fact that if one has the easy money the easy women will be even easier to get.

Are Gambling And Sex Competitors?

• Study shows men might prefer gambling to sex

• Will the internet adopt the findings in development of games?

• 4% faster reactions to money compared with sex

Titled “Pathological choice: the neuroscience of gambling and gambling addiction” the study measured the brain activity of two groups of subjects. One group comprised entirely of pathological gambler and the other of complete non-gamblers (although where you find people who never gamble is not something they answer) and both were asked to respond with alacrity to a task with fiscal or sexual rewards.

All subjects had to do was press a button as fast as they could in order to either win some cash or see a picture of a scantily clad young lady. Perhaps unsurprisingly the gamblers responded 4% faster to the win-some-money option. Now 4% might not seem a lot but in terms of a study carried out under these conditions that’s quite a large margin of difference. Apparently the sexual imagery didn’t excite the gamblers as much as the possibility of winning money did.

That gamblers like winning money isn’t casino gambling news, it’s not even regular news, in fact, it’s plain not news. That an addict will respond quicker than a non-addict to a circumstance in which their addiction can be (at least temporarily) satisfied is again hardly earth shattering revelation. However the degree to which these small percentage deviations in behavior demonstrate the disorder of addiction is unquestionable.

Dutch Study Into Sex And Gambling

“I’m a cognitive neuroscientist interested in reward processing and risky decision-making,” Dr. Sescousse, lead author, says. “I’m particularly interested in how those processes are disrupted in various psychiatric disorders, including pathological gambling and anorexia nervosa. I use a combination of neuroimaging techniques, pharmacological manipulations, and behavioral approaches derived from experimental economics.”

The results of which speak for themselves. The more rapid acquisition of the fiscal rewards over the sexual ones a direct indication that there are disorders of addiction that can override the preeminent natural urges. This applies in nearly all forms of addiction and in many other psychological disorders, but to be able to prove that men will react faster to money than women under any circumstances at all is quite the finding.

Gambling laws in America are becoming more liberalized and as states open up land-based casinos and hand out licenses for internet entities to provide online blackjack and the like, it is thought that there will be a rise in the visible signs of gambling addiction in that accessibility will increase to a point where such things are seen more often. In terms of the sex vs gambling debate we really need look no further than the quantities of people visiting gambling and pornography sites.

No one in their right mind would attempt to argue that gambling sites get more visitors but that is a false comparison since gambling doesn’t have the social acceptability that pornography has developed over the last few decades. People are far more likely to admit looking at porn than they are to gambling, or playing online gambling sex games, so the pure numbers are irrelevant, it’s merely a question of how we’re programmed.

Internet Provides Options And Access

The ubiquity of the internet has long since been bemoaned as a harbinger of a dystopian future but scientists aren’t as worried about the rise of big brother and the all-seeing state as perhaps the rest of us are. They see the rise of accessibility via omnipresent devices, smartphones, tablets, notebooks, etc, as something likely to perpetuate addictive behavior amongst those already showing a predilection toward that behavior.

When the satisfaction one seeks for thrills and pleasure can be achieved at the click of a button or the tap of a screen, there is likely to be far more people doing so. Gambling addiction might be more famous than sex addiction, and sex might be more popular than gambling, but the drive behind both is entirely similar in that both do provide those thrills and that pleasure to those participating in either one.

The mixture of both, in say sexy online casinos like casino Casinorgy where sexual and fiscal rewards sit side by side are the holy grail of the modern internet, and the tricky balance between those two elements that sites are attempting to achieve might well depend on studies like this. The basics of gameplay and presentation most likely to be slanted in such a way as to mimic the findings of this study. The sex can’t outweight the gambling because the gambling is why they’re there and is the bigger attraction.

Many pro-blackjack players use various methods of small percentage advantage over the course of a game in order to optimize their chances of winning. This study might only have shown a scant 4% difference between men’s desire for sex and their want for gambling, but on an internet of millions of clicks per minute 4% is all the difference between success and failure for online sex gambling.

Read more about sex and gambling.