‘Behaviourism is deeply misunderstood, misrepresented’

Do you feel at home in Swansea?

Yes. One thing about Swansea, and I think Wales in general, is that there's some interesting psychology history right here. I'm from Ireland originally, from University College Cork, and I went over to Bangor for my postdoc. Fergus Lowe was there, big in the behavioural world, and B.F.

Skinner used to come over to North Wales regularly. There had been an established animal lab, and really seminal work around the extension to human behaviour of performance on reinforcement schedules. So people have been forging a unique research path in Wales in general.

In Swansea, you'll see that Skinner box on the shelf, and we've got a room downstairs full of them. We used to have a behavioural pharmacology lab here – led by the late Paul Willner and other world-leading contributors. I'm an old-school behaviour analyst, and there has always been a Celtic fringe.

We used to talk about it in Northern Ireland, in Ulster, some areas of Galway and Dublin, Cork, then North Wales, patches in Scotland… the centres of behavioural psychology. You don't really see as much of that now, in terms of radical behavioural operant-Skinnerian psychology. Perhaps the wild elements attract them, I don't know.

So could you personally, and your work, just move somewhere else? You've been here 18 years now?

We keep an eye on options, don't we? But also, the grass is not always greener. There's an awful lot of under-utilised potential in so many ways, both at the university level and the city and county. We're in an area of outstanding natural beauty. It's an inexpensive place to live. You've got the beach on your doorstep.

You're three hours from London. Could I relocate? Probably, but I just wouldn't want to. There's not so much for pressure here; it's not cutthroat, it's very collegial. It's a pace that you set yourself. Those conditions allow people to grow.

The flip side is that there's maybe a tendency for 'the Swansea way'. Nothing gets done on Friday afternoons! I'm getting more grants, getting busier doing admin, and then you suddenly spend your life doing admin. You realise you don't need a PhD for it, you don't need a Chair, you just spend your life chasing other people to do admin. I get the impression those kinds of challenges might be slightly worse here than elsewhere.

Do you feel you're still involved enough in the things you love?

Yes. But I don't think we're necessarily prepared for what happens in academia, nowadays. I got my PhD in 1996, I was young, 23. I had my 'Road to Damascus' experience in my second year during the psychology of learning lectures. That was it, I wanted to be a behaviour analyst.

My undergrad thesis led to my PhD and so on, always a stepping stone. So I've been self-motivated and lucky to work with some really good people. And you keep going, you keep going, you keep going. And you get the positive reinforcement, the successes, the awards and the grants and the papers. But yes, you do end up becoming an administrator!

If I stand back and look at youngsters nowadays, there's a tendency to overemphasise the next stage, the next career hurdle. Everyone wants to get promoted, to get to next stage, box-ticking, tick, tick, tick, as opposed to just getting good at your craft, getting good at your publications.

It's a fortunate position to be able to write papers. I see that changing an awful lot nowadays, the pressure on ECRs. I wouldn't get my own lectureship job again if I was interviewed for it. The skill sets they have to have nowadays are just incredible. Open Science, EDI, teaching, the REF…

It's interesting that you in some ways see your academic career in terms of the topic you're studying: positive reinforcement etc.

Yes. Academia can tend to be predominantly controlled through negative reinforcement. You spend your day clearing the inbox because those red lines are so aversive. You spend your day avoiding or escaping something. The opportunities to approach and to contact positive reinforcement are few and far between. But I still to this day get a little frisson of excitement when a paper is accepted, when I see the page proofs.

You've got to hold on to that. That's why we're here. We're not necessarily saving lives but we're doing something where we're getting better at helping or understanding basic processes every day. I continue to learn, to get better: at writing that lay summary abstract, that pathways to impact paper, at supervising and mentoring, at standing outside yourself and seeing it from the perspective of the ECRs.

Can you give me an example of that perspective-taking?

Well, I'm learning about those potentially awkward conversations… not everyone sees their role in the research process in the way that I see it. I've been very motivated right from the start – to get to university, and when I found my area, my discipline, my field. Not everyone has that. Sometimes you have to pare back your expectations.

Again, as a behaviour analyst, you pare it back, but you shape them up, you apply differential reinforcement: 'I want you to get to this level, but to get to this level we're going to set bite-size, easy, achievable chunks', as opposed to 'send me a full draft ready for Nature Neuroscience'. You've just got to cultivate, but that takes time.

And within the culture nowadays in academia, there just isn't the time. I'm protective of the time outside of work, and I don't think people should allow that to leak in. I don't work weekends. 

But I recognise how terribly lucky I am to do what I've always wanted to do, to follow my nose. I couldn't do anything else. During lockdown we all thought about what else we could do: I have no idea. There is probably nothing else I could do! 

I'm the same.

So in terms of your work with gambling and armed forces veterans… is there a particular scene around that which drew you in?

Not particularly within Swansea itself. The university has just signed up to the Armed Forces Covenant, which is a great marker of the rights and the roles of our Forces community across students and staff. I was always doing gambling-related work, more lab-based with simulated slot machines in particular, looking at different reinforcement schedule interactions, and external cues and stimuli. And I was just doing a literature search one day, and I noticed there was an awful lot of US veterans' work and nothing at all in the UK.

So I managed to get a grant to look at the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, where both veteran status and gambling status was recorded. Secondary analysis and regression models showed veterans were up to eight times more likely to report a problem gambling than matched members of the non-veteran population.

That allowed us to apply for further funding – again, reinforcement, you start off with a bite-sized chunk of 50 grand and then they'll give you 200 – and we did the first UK-wide cross-sectional survey of veterans. It was during Covid, so it was a nightmare recruiting online and having to deal with bots because there's an incentive offered at the end of the survey.

But with that data set, we found that veterans are up to 10 times more likely to report problem gambling, and there was a significant role for escape and avoidance. We used an operant conditioning scale of gambling motivation which split it in terms of the reinforcement functions: do they gamble through positive reinforcement, for example as something sociable, or the stimulation of the buzzing and the lights?

Or is it negative reinforcement, for example, to escape nagging, or to avoid feelings of worthlessness? We found it's primarily negatively reinforced – veterans were gambling mainly to cope with aversive unpleasant situations and emotions.

Are we talking mostly slot machines?

We sampled all forms of gambling. Common forms are the National Lottery, and online gambling such as casino games and sports betting… slot machines were third or fourth most popular, I think. Across the general population, it's the apps, the 'casino in your pocket'. Slot machines are there, they're highly addictive, and highly problematic, particularly online.

One of the changes I may have contributed to was in the stake size in the Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, in the betting shops. Seems like such a long time ago now… the field has moved on. But slot machines are still a problem. Big time.

I always remember that question about why people play slot machines when they're constantly losing; the answer being that they're not, they're always nearly winning.

That's it exactly. We did some really cool neuro work with colleagues at Cardiff a few years ago. We even called the paper 'Almost winning'.

I think those two out of three symbols hold or represent some of the potency of three out of three symbols. It's just like if you change the wavelength of a red dot, you'll get a distribution of behaviour across the continuum of light. So there's stimulus generalisation, a spread of effect. That's a conditioned reinforcement effect. It shows we can explain some of those complex phenomena in terms of more basic learning processes.

I'm having flashbacks to the final year of my PhD, where I was living on my own and I would sometimes go and play the machines on a Saturday… it probably was an avoidance of all sorts.

There's some work with slot machines around what they call the 'machine zone' or 'dark flow': where people are so immersed in gambling, that they have no concept of time. It's one of the reasons why casinos don't have clocks on the wall: they want you to be fully immersed in a habitual, conditioned form of responding. There's little difference with a row of rats in a box. In the casino, you see rows of people, there for hours and hours. It's not necessarily of their own volition, it's purely habit-based, and then gambling may be fulfilling an escape function in their life. 

Is there anything about veterans that makes them particularly vulnerable, such as that escapism side?

Well, so many people can so quickly get into dire straits… financial, physical, and mental harm. It's going on all the time, and all of us, to some extent, are vulnerable. It's about human reward learning, expectation and behaviour – all within an economic and social context that's driven by a motivation to make money.

But at the moment we're trying to identify when gambling starts. For the majority, it's while they're in service. There's a normalised culture: peer issues, alcohol, and so on. There are occupational factors: access to fast, reliable Wi-Fi, intense periods of activity, extended periods of downtime. With professional sports players it's very much the same.

There's single-person living accommodation too. They've got their phone, all of their living expenses are taken care of, and if they're on deployment they can gamble all their money and their partner at home won't have any idea what's going on. So it can grow to a challenge that's maybe finally revealed when they leave the Forces. 

That whole transition from the Forces is challenging as it is.

The loss of structure, and the financial management they have to suddenly engage in, is a huge challenge. Notwithstanding the potentially traumatic experiences, they may have encountered. I think that makes them uniquely vulnerable. So it's good to see in the recent NICE consultation documents, the need for veteran-specific gambling harms treatment services. They are a hard-to-reach group.

And maybe there often isn't the motivation to reach them? It's interesting what you said about the university covenant because my experience of young people is that they generally haven't got very positive views about veterans or the armed forces…

The definition of veterans is so broad – you have to have completed one day of paid service. That's a swathe of people, from a variety of different backgrounds. We're so lucky to have them to rely on, that goes without saying, but they're just members of the general population exposed to occupational or environmental situations that may make it more likely that they might experience harm, or at greater levels than you or I might.

There's a great opportunity for psychologists to do more for them. That's something we're very proud to be able to do, and we'll be launching the first Centre for Military Gambling Research in the world to do just that. 

You mentioned sports players. Again, any unique factors from a behaviour-analyst perspective?

Well, the extent to which you are involved in live odds, in-play betting, is a significant predictor of harm.

You can bet on anything these days, and for longer now that more extra time is being added to football matches. It's difficult to study because the data is all gathered by industry, and they don't demarcate it by event. And that's if you can ever get access to it… most people can't. But it would be interesting to consider it as a reinforcement schedule effect across a fixed interval of time… do you get riskier bets as the end of the match approaches?

Again, in terms of risk factors, they're young, male, often lower educational levels, intense activity followed by long downtime, travelling, time on their own, access to money beyond their wildest dreams, peers around them… And if you're a sports player, you assume you have some kind of expert knowledge about what you're betting on. That's aside from the opportunity to influence the outcome, where you get into match-fixing, so topical at the moment.

I have given presentations to sports teams where a worrying number report harm from their gambling, and more than half of them have sports betting apps installed on their phone. 

The companies do have the ability to make the situation much better. It's interesting what you say about access to data. With social media research and psychology, there has been a slight shift in terms of the major players giving that. So if gambling companies don't generally give psychologists full access to the data, perhaps that suggests an unwillingness to genuinely make a change.

Yes, and if they do engage with you, it's on their terms. That's where the politics come in: if the gambling industry funds you directly, your research is immediately seen as biased and under direct industry influence.

They are sitting on swathes of data. I keep pointing to the Skinner box: it's every single response on the lever, every single press of the spin button, the 'Bet' button, across vast quantities of time, under different conditions. Manna from heaven for researchers. Some people do have access: there's a new research centre established at the University of Sydney in collaboration with some gambling operators, which has caused some sort of consternation to some, but those gambling operators have agreed to provide de-identified datasets for the analysis of gambling patterns.

But we can see the indicators of harm quite readily… banks can see the indicators within the transactions. A fascinating paper came out a couple years ago by Naomi Muggleton and colleagues, looking at 6.5 million Lloyds Bank customer accounts. As the proportion of monthly spend increased on gambling, the amount of credit card use increased, the amount of payments on social events decreased, mortgage payment defaults increased, gym payments decreased, more nights spent awake, because the banks record when the transactions occurred. So banks have all of this information. The gambling industry has all this information. They need to more transparently implement and share the algorithms they should be using, but aren't, in terms of debt cycles.

In terms of the algorithms, I think the Euromillions have got wind of the fact that an ad telling me the jackpot is over £100 million has a pretty much 100 per cent success rate on me. I'm the stupidest gambler ever… as if a million wouldn't be enough.

There's a whole fascinating world around targeted advertising, specific offers to pull people in, social media, the use of 'affiliates' who come across as on your side trying to beat the system, even though they're commissioned by the gambling operators themselves. For people who are trying to stop and to remain stopped, it's so difficult to avoid it.

To undermine the pervasiveness of negative reinforcement, you need to stand back and just let it go, be more mindful, more accepting. There are forms of psychotherapy for treating that craving, that seeming inability to escape the marketing. And there's an awful lot of research we need to do on how you can get those ads on your phone and let the feelings wash over you. 

It's so hard isn't it, when our phones are literally designed to pull us in, to get us to engage. We're looking at your Skinner box, and in some ways, it feels like a relic from Psychology's past. You described yourself as an old-school behaviourist, but the more we talk about these major societal issues the less 'old school' it seems.

Behaviourism is deeply misunderstood, and misrepresented, from undergraduate textbooks and right the way on. But one of the things that has always struck me is its parsimony. It adopts the simplest level of explanation for the most complex of phenomena, without the need to get caught up in intervening variables and hypothetical constructs. And we still have this tendency now to create something in the middle and give that the explanatory power. 

Maybe because we want to think we're more complicated than we are.

Totally. We want to put ourselves at that centre of a sense of agency. It's solipsistic of us to some extent. So there are a lot of limitations around what Skinner did, especially his analysis of language… but that general view is so important, and I don't know if undergraduates are getting that enough days. Even within the BPS requirements, it's 'you can teach that under cognitive psychology'… kind of defeats the purpose!

Skinner was on campus here actually, he gave a keynote address to the BPS conference in, I think, 1985?

We tracked the video down to the archives of the BPS in Leicester. We were going to travel on the train with a GoPro, make it a documentary! Digitise the VHS of his talk, make it available. As I get older, I just want to mark those little moments of history.