Decreasing influence of arbitrarily applicable verbal relations of recreational gamblers: A randomized controlled trial

The team invited adults into a lab gambling game. First, everyone learned matching tasks that linked nonsense words to slot-machine pictures.

Next, half the group spent five minutes in a defusion exercise. They repeated each word out loud while watching it drift across a screen. The rest got no extra step.

Then all players picked which machine to bet on. Researchers counted who showed a clear bias toward the trained machine.

Without defusion, most adults favored the machine that shared words from the training.

With the short defusion drill, only about half as many players showed the same bias.

A five-minute verbal exercise nearly cut gambling bias in half.

Giallo et al. (2006) tried to fix bias by giving new rules. Correct rules helped, but most players still bet above baseline. The 2019 study moves past rules and targets the verbal relation itself.

Belisle et al. (2017) showed that embedded bonus rounds can swing choice even when payout rates stay flat. The new paper adds defusion as another lever for shifting preference without touching the pay table.

Craig et al. (2017) found that old reinforcer cues can soften resurgence. Likewise, the 2019 study shows that brief post-training cues can stop a newly formed bias before it takes hold.

You can weaken risky verbal biases fast. After teaching new stimulus relations, add a quick defusion task: have the client say the words while watching them move on a tablet. In gambling or shopping contexts, this tiny step may halve the pull of branded cues. Try it during conditional-discrimination drills or before community outings where ads trigger problem choices.