The gambling metaphor is the idea that life itself can be conceived of as a gamble. The metaphor has been central to the history of the study of judgment and decision making, and in particular to the study of decisions under risk and uncertainty. A simple dice gambling game played a central role in the development of probability theory and the construct of expected valueExpected value or EV is the average return one can expect to get from a repeated decision, such as from a gamble, if it is... in the 18th century, and later to the development of expected utilityIn decision science, "utility" refers to a quantitative measure representing an individual's preference or satisfaction with respect to a particular outcome. In this framework, utility... and the idea of marginal utility that are central to normative modelsDecision scientists often distinguish between normative and descriptive models of decision making, and less often add the additional distinction between normative and prescriptive models. Normative... of rational choiceLink to Wikipedia entry More. In turn, simple gambles have been used as primary tool for experimental stimuli designed to evaluate whether people in fact make choices in line with normative expectations. Tversky and KahnemanDaniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are pioneering Israeli psychologists whose collaboration profoundly impacted the the science of judgment and decision making and behavioral economics. Their... give an eloquent justification of this approach:
Risky choices, such as whether or not to take an umbrella and whether or not to go to war, are made without advance knowledge of their consequences. Because the consequences of such actions depend on uncertain events such as the weather or the opponent’s resolve, the choice of an act may be construed as the acceptance of a gamble that can yield various outcomes with different probabilities. It is therefore natural that the study of decision making under riskDecisions can be categorized based on the amount and nature of information available and decision scientists have developed somewhat standard definitions of the terms "risk",... has focused on choices between simple gambles with monetary outcomes and specified probabilities, in the hope that these simple problems will reveal basic attitudes toward risk and value.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1984). Choices, values, and frames. American Psychologist, 39(4), 341-350, p. 341.
At the same time, there is some concern that the widespread use of the gambling metaphor in the study of decisions under risk and uncertainty may rest on an underappreciation of the importance of context and content (including culture, experience, and environmental design) in understanding such decisions. As William Goldstein and Elke Weber write in criticizing the content-impoverished norms associated with the gambling metaphor:
The point is not merely that the experimental practice of using content-impoverished stimuli would have failed to discover a number of interesting phenomena, but that the particular phenomena that would have been overlooked are those that conflict with the overarching theoretical framework.
Goldstein, W. M., & Weber, E. U. (1995). . In J. R. Busemeyer, R. Hastie & D. L. Medin (Eds.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation (Vol. 32, pp. 83-136), p. 92, San Diego: Academic Press.
A central theme of this website and of the Substack it has been created for is that, indeed, the gambling metaphor is not even appropriate for understanding gambling decision making: there is much, much more to understanding how and why gamblers make the decisions they do than can be understood by breaking gambles down into choices, outcomes, probabilities, and values.