The preceding discussion highlights a number of commonalities between alcohol and substance use disorders on the one hand and pathological gambling on the other hand in relation to impulsivity-related measures. However, the cognitive perspective on gambling and pathological gambling emphasizes the presence of cognitive distortions that do not have an obvious correlate in the substance use disorders (Ladouceur and Walker, 1996). These distortions occur in the processing of probability, randomness and skill during gambling, and cause gamblers to over-estimate their chances of winning. Two of the more widely studied distortions are the illusion of control, where the gambler infers a degree of skill in a game that is determined by chance alone, and the gambler’s fallacy, in which gamblers infer patterns of outcomes in random data, and believe that a win is somehow “due” after a protracted run of losses (Clark, 2009; Ladouceur et al., 1996).
