Justice and Addiction
Casinos created a market with $432 billion capacity, and this business is causing court cases like Angie Bachmann’s. Have you ever thought about casinos and their impact in our society? What about the people who go there to gamble? Do you think that casinos are ripping people off by providing a service without a benefit? Every year millions of Americans lose money to these casinos. This is the aftermath of creating a tempting environment and engineering the feelings and environment in way to cause the non problem gamblers to become heavily addicted. The concept and different attributes of addiction is explained in chapter 7 of the book, Opening Skinner’s Box, the author, Lauren Slater talks about Bruce Alexander’s seduction experiment in which he proved the connection of environment with addiction. In chapter 9 the book The power of habit, why we do what we do in life and business, Charles Duhigg tells the story of Angie Bachmann a mother of three school girls and a wife that his husband goes returns home at 6 PM the earliest, who had nothing interesting in her life and during a sequence of events she gets addicted to gambling and lost $900 thousand dollars in her lifetime.
Since Angie Bachmann previously ran out of money, Despite the fact that she was aware of her addiction and she did not fight through the withdrawal, which is possible according to Alexander's withdrawal study, and even though she didn’t try hard to change her habits, based on Duhigg's Golden Rule of habit change ( Which is by keeping the same cue and reward you can change almost any routine); By changing her environment, the casinos set up a tempting environment based on Olds and Milner's theory when they knew Bachmann was lonely and lacked excitement in her life, therefore she is accountable for her mistake but since she had declared bankruptcy, she shouldn’t be held