It's actually not just psychology, it's the way mammalian brains work. Robert Sapolsky explains it really well in his lectures. I'll try to paraphrase:
First we need to look into the role of Dopamine. It's a "feel good" chemical, that plays a vital role in our day-to-day activities. It's what naturally motivates us to do things and rewards for successes.
Anything from having a good lunch, to completing a task, to learning a
good news, to getting a date, and more. Dopamine release incidentally is
also a product of cocaine use. On the flip side, Dopamine can cause a life-threatening condition if its levels get too low (like in the case of a severe depression.) In relation to gambling though, Dopamine is also released when we win in a slot machine, or any similar game.
So Sapolsky did his studies on primates (our closest cousins.) Let's review a simple experiment. We put a monkey in a cage, and after light comes on ("signal") we train it to press a lever ("work") after which it receives a juicy grape ("reward"). Our initial instinctive understanding of how Dopamine would work was what can be illustrated by this diagram, right?
Except that it's wrong! This is not how it works. Experiments showed that the actual diagram of what happens in a monkey's brain is this:
Wow! So what this means, is that the Dopamine is not released after the work is done as a reward, but in anticipation of a reward. And that is the key!
Now let's see what happens when we slightly tweak our experiment and introduce a "maybe" in our reward mechanism (simply by giving a reward at a 50-50 chance.) The Dopamine release in this case shoots through the roof:
Aha, even more exciting!
So by introducing a chance
in our reward system we make participants explode with excitement. How
convenient, isn't it? And that is, my friend, what most casinos and
gambling establishments use to attract people and "make you spend more than you planned."
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