Neuroscientist Michael Platt discusses the biological basis of gambling as it relates to the over proliferation of gambling-based platforms.
5 min. read
Over the last decade, there’s been an explosion in phone-based gambling platforms owing to the 2018 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a federal sports betting ban. Neuroscientist Michael L. Platt says the gambling boom has as much to do with human biology as it does business.
(Image: Hispanolist)
Key Takeaways
Risk-taking evolved as a survival tool in uncertain environments where bold bets could mean survival.
Modern betting apps are built for speed, limiting reflection and amplifying impulsive decision-making.
Hormones like testosterone and social cues like celebrity endorsements can reduce caution and increase risk appetite.
The business model depends on a narrow equilibrium: enough wins to sustain engagement, not enough losses to end it.
A lightly regulated, rapidly scaling industry is colliding with psychological vulnerabilities tied to loneliness and impulsivity.
Watch any sports game in 2026 and you’ll see them: incessant ads for FanDuel, PrizePicks, DraftKings, Kalshi, and a dozen other platforms—each offering a constant, glittering stream of chances to “win big” by betting on almost anything.
Just last year, Americans wagered more than $160 billion on sports, a 23% jump from the year before and a figure that has ballooned 30-fold since the 2018 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a federal sports betting ban and let the apps flood in.
“It turns out that your susceptibility isn’t a personal failing—it’s deeply baked in; it’s a collection of ancient survival scripts, hormonal floods, and cognitive glitches,” says Platt, which are leveraged by developers.
Risk-taking is a survival feature
What feels like a modern, self-destructive habit has deep, adaptive roots, Platt explains.
“Our brains didn’t evolve in a world of guaranteed paychecks and retirement accounts, but rather in environments where uncertainty was the norm and survival often depended on making a risky bet.”
Platt cites a popular aphorism from ecology: “Birds are tame in winter,” explaining that birds, unable to store much fat due to the weight constraints of flight, might have only enough energy to survive one more night. When the alternative is starvation, taking a massive risk—like eating seeds from a human hand—suddenly becomes the most rational survival strategy.
“You might take a gamble on challenging a dominant individual because if you win, you gain access to resources that were otherwise completely out of reach,” Platt says. “When you’re in trouble, a long shot might be the only shot you have.”
Unfortunately, the same logic is now being expertly co-opted.
Hormones can make people worse at arithmetic
If evolution provides the ancient software for risk, hormones provide a chemical push, Platt says, noting that testosterone, in particular, acts as a biological amplifier for risk-taking, especially in males. “This has measurable cognitive effects,” he says.
Platt cites a study by the Wharton School’s Gideon Nave using the classic “bat and ball” logic problem: “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”
The intuitive answer is 10 cents, but the correct answer is 5 cents. Nave and his collaborators found that men given a dose of testosterone were far more likely to jump to the wrong conclusion and spend less time working out the correct answer. They were less reflective and more impulsive than men not given testosterone.
This hormonal effect “directly influences real-world behavior, making men more likely to desire luxury goods and take ‘wild gambles,’” Platt says.
Thinking fast, sleeping less spells trouble
Testosterone may tilt the brain toward risk, says Platt, but time pressures and exhaustion can push it even further, citing studies that show that subjects choose risky options more often when under greater time pressures.
In Platt’s research, subjects were tasked with choosing between a sure bet and a gamble. The team found that subjects were consistently risk-seeking when forced to make decisions quickly, every three to five seconds.
But when researchers systematically slowed the decision-making process down, they became less and less interested in risk, eventually becoming slightly risk-averse.
This finding is not lost on the gambling industry.
Modern casinos and betting apps are intentionally designed for speed, Platt notes. The constant notifications, the rapid-fire succession of new betting opportunities, the quick deals—it’s all engineered to keep people in that “fast, nonreflective state where your ‘monkey brain’ is in charge,” Platt says.
There is research showing that sleep deprivation has a similar effect, he adds. Staying up all night effectively shuts down the prefrontal cortex—the brain’s impulse-control center—turning subjects into, as Platt describes them, “total gambling addicts.”
Speed and exhaustion are the house’s best friends, he warns.
Celebrity ads sell more than a product
The ubiquity of Kevin Hart or Megan Fox in gambling ads isn’t just about grabbing attention, Platt says. According to Platt’s research, which used eye-tracking and pupillometry to measure emotional arousal, the presence of a celebrity in an advertisement accomplishes two key biological functions: grab your attention, to effectively “turn up the volume for whatever they’re hawking,” and suppress the fear of the unknown.
The brain’s amygdala usually flags a new, risky product as spooky or dangerous, but according to Platt, a famous face acts as a biological green light; they suppress the “fear of the unknown,” lowering the barrier to entry for behavior that the brain would otherwise reject as too risky.
The perfect customer is addicted but not destitute
Casinos face the same cynical business problem as drug dealers: “They lose money if they ‘kill off’ their customers,” Platt says. A player who gets wiped out and quits forever is a lost revenue stream. The ideal customer is one who keeps coming back.
The challenge for casinos is not how to get people to gamble once—it is how to get them to keep gambling. And according to Platt, the answer lies in Skinnerian psychology, which finds that subjects respond most consistently when they receive an “intermediate level of reinforcement.”
Traditional casinos, for all their flaws, evolved under decades of regulation, friction, and physical limits. You had to go somewhere. Stop at some point. Leave.
Modern gambling platforms, however, are in a “Wild West” phase, where they’re growing quickly, unregulated; they’re moving fast, breaking things, and not factoring the human toll just yet, Platt says.
Because the same users most susceptible to these systems—disproportionately young men—are also the ones already drifting toward social isolation.
With more and more people entering states of digital isolation—not meeting people or finding romance—this leads to a broader societal pattern sometimes described as a crisis of despair: rising loneliness, declining social connection, and a growing sense among young people that the future is both uncertain and out of reach.
“What we’re seeing,” Platt says, “is these platforms acting as hyper-stimulating substitutes for healthier, real-world interactions.”
Platt notes the irony of some gaming executives privately accepting high addiction rates as collateral churn, assuming new users will always replace lost ones. But that logic may be unstable in the long term, especially in an era of declining fertility and shrinking youth cohorts.
If companies financially exhaust or alienate clients in their twenties, or worse yet, see them take their own lives, they are eroding the next generation of users entirely.
Michael L. Platt is the James S. Riepe Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor with appointments in the Perelman School of Medicine, School of Arts & Sciences, and Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
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