The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (41 page)

For Brian Thomas, it also looked like a situation where a sleep disorder, rather than a murderous impulse, was at fault. “I’ll never forgive myself, ever,” he told one of the prosecutors.
“Why did I do it?”
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After Dr. Idzikowski, the sleep specialist, observed Thomas in his laboratory, he submitted his findings: Thomas was asleep when he killed his wife. He hadn’t consciously committed a crime.

As the trial started, prosecutors presented their evidence to the jury. Thomas had admitted to murdering his wife, they told jurors. He knew he had a history of sleepwalking. His failure to take precautions while on vacation, they said, made him responsible for his crime.

But as arguments proceeded, it became clear prosecutors were fighting an uphill battle. Thomas’s lawyer argued that his client hadn’t meant to kill his wife—in fact, he wasn’t even in control of his own actions that night. Instead, he was reacting automatically to a perceived threat. He was following a habit almost as old as our species: the instinct to fight an attacker and protect a loved one. Once the most primitive parts of his brain were exposed to a cue—someone strangling his wife—his habit took over and he fought back, with no chance of his higher cognition interceding. Thomas was guilty of nothing more than being human, the lawyer argued, and reacting in the way his neurology—and most primitive habits—forced him to behave.

Even the prosecution’s own witnesses seemed to bolster the defense. Though Thomas had known he was capable of sleepwalking, the prosecution’s own psychiatrists said, there was nothing to suggest to him that it was therefore foreseeable he might kill. He had never attacked anyone in his sleep before. He had never previously harmed his wife.

When the prosecution’s chief psychiatrist took the stand, Thomas’s lawyer began his cross-examination.

Did it seem fair that Thomas should be found guilty for an act he could not know was going to occur?

In her opinion, said Dr. Caroline Jacob, Thomas could not have reasonably anticipated his crime. And if he was convicted and sentenced to Broadmoor Hospital, where some of Britain’s most dangerous and mentally ill criminals were housed, well, “he does not belong there.”

The next morning, the head prosecutor addressed the jury.

“At the time of the killing the defendant was asleep and
his mind had no control over what his body was doing,” he said.
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“We have reached the conclusion that the public interest would no longer be served by continuing to seek a special verdict from you. We therefore offer no further evidence and invite you to return
a straight not guilty verdict.”
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The jury did so.

Before Thomas was set free, the judge told him, “You are a decent man and a devoted husband. I strongly suspect you may well be feeling a sense of guilt. In the eyes of the law
you bear no responsibility.
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You are discharged.”

It seems like a fair outcome. After all, Thomas was obviously devastated by his crime. He had no idea what he was doing when he acted—he was simply following a habit, and his capacity for decision making was, in effect, incapacitated. Thomas is the most sympathetic murderer conceivable, someone so close to being a victim himself that when the trial ended, the judge tried to console him.

Yet many of those same excuses can be made for Angie Bachmann, the gambler. She was also devastated by her actions. She would later say she carries a deep sense of guilt. And as it turns out, she was also following deeply ingrained habits that made it increasingly difficult for decision making to intervene.

But in the eyes of the law Bachmann is responsible for her habits, and Thomas isn’t. Is it right that Bachmann, a gambler, is guiltier than Thomas, a murderer? What does that tell us about the ethics of habit and choice?

Three years after Angie Bachmann declared bankruptcy, her father passed away. She’d spent the previous half decade flying between her home and her parents’ house, tending to them as they became increasingly ill. His death was a blow. Then, two months later, her mother died.

“My entire world disintegrated,” she said. “I would wake up every morning, and for a second forget they had passed, and then it would rush in that they were gone and I’d feel like someone was standing on my chest. I couldn’t think about anything else. I didn’t know what to do when I got out of bed.”

When their wills were read, Bachmann learned she had inherited almost $1 million.

She used $275,000 to buy her family a new home in Tennessee, near where her mother and father had lived, and spent a bit more to move her grown daughters nearby so everyone was close. Casino gambling wasn’t legal in Tennessee, and “I didn’t want to fall back into bad patterns,” she told me. “I wanted to live away from anything that reminded me of feeling out of control.” She changed her phone numbers and didn’t tell the casinos her new address. It felt safer that way.

Then one night, driving through her old hometown with her husband, picking up the last of their furniture from her previous home, she started thinking about her parents. How would she manage without them? Why hadn’t she been a better daughter? She began hyperventilating. It felt like the beginning of a panic attack. It had been years since she had gambled, but in that moment she felt like she needed to find something to take her mind off the pain. She looked at her husband. She was desperate. This was a one-time thing.

“Let’s go to the casino,” she said.

When they walked in, one of the managers recognized her from when she was a regular and invited them into the players’ lounge. He asked how she had been, and it all came tumbling out: her parents’ passing and how hard it had hit her, how exhausted she was all the time, how she felt like she was on the verge of a breakdown. The manager was a good listener. It felt so good to finally say everything she had been thinking and be told that it was normal to feel this way.

Then she sat down at a blackjack table and played for three hours.
For the first time in months, the anxiety faded into background noise. She knew how to do this. She went blank. She lost a few thousand dollars.

Harrah’s Entertainment—the company that owned the casino—was known within the gaming industry for the sophistication of its customer-tracking systems. At the core of that system were computer programs much like those Andrew Pole created at Target, predictive algorithms that studied gamblers’ habits and tried to figure out how to persuade them to spend more. The company assigned players a “predicted lifetime value,” and software built calendars that anticipated how often they would visit and how much they would spend. The company tracked customers through loyalty cards and mailed out coupons for free meals and cash vouchers; telemarketers called people at home to ask where they had been. Casino employees were trained to encourage visitors to discuss their lives, in the hopes they might reveal information that could be used to predict how much they had to gamble with. One Harrah’s executive called this approach “Pavlovian marketing.” The company ran thousands of tests each year
to perfect their methods.
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Customer tracking had increased the company’s profits by billions of dollars, and was so precise they could track a gambler’s spending
to the cent and minute.
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2

Harrah’s, of course, was well aware that Bachmann had declared bankruptcy a few years earlier and had walked away from $20,000 in gambling debts. But soon after her conversation with the casino manager, she began receiving phone calls with offers of free limos that would take her to casinos in Mississippi. They offered to fly her and her husband to Lake Tahoe, put them in a suite, and give them tickets to an Eagles concert. “I said my daughter has to come, and she wants to bring a friend,” Bachmann said. No problem, the company replied. Everyone’s airfare and rooms were free. At the concert,
she sat in the front row.
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Harrah’s gave her $10,000 to play with, compliments of the house.

The offers kept coming. Every week another casino called, asking if she wanted a limo, entry to shows, plane tickets. Bachmann resisted at first, but eventually she started saying yes each time an invitation arrived. When a family friend mentioned that she wanted to get married in Las Vegas, Bachmann made a phone call and the next weekend they were in the Palazzo. “Not that many people even know it exists,” she told me. “I’ve called and asked about it, and the operator said it’s too exclusive to give out information over the phone. The room was like something out of a movie. It had six bedrooms and a deck and private hot tub for each room. I had a butler.”

When she got to the casinos, her gambling habits took over almost as soon as she walked in. She would often play for hours at a stretch. She started small at first, using only the casino’s money. Then the numbers got larger, and she would replenish her chips with withdrawals from the ATM. It didn’t seem to her like there was a problem. Eventually she was playing $200 to $300 per hand, two hands at a time, sometimes for a dozen hours at a time. One night, she won $60,000. Twice she walked away up $40,000. One time she went to Vegas with $100,000 in her bag and came home with nothing. It didn’t really change her lifestyle. Her bank account was still so large that she never had to think about money. That’s why her parents had left her the inheritance in the first place: so she could enjoy herself.

She would try to slow down, but the casino’s appeals became more insistent. “One host told me that he would get fired if I didn’t come in that weekend,” she said. “They would say, ‘We sent you to this concert and we gave you this nice room, and you haven’t been gambling that much lately.’ Well, they
did
do those nice things for me.”

In 2005, her husband’s grandmother died and the family went back to her old hometown for the funeral. She went to the casino the
night before the service to clear her head and get mentally prepared for all the activity the next day. Over a span of twelve hours, she lost $250,000. At the time, it was almost as if the scale of the loss didn’t register. When she thought about it afterward—
a quarter of a million dollars gone—
it didn’t seem real. She had lied to herself about so much already: that her marriage was happy when she and her husband sometimes went days without really speaking; that her friends were close when she knew they appeared for Vegas trips and were gone when it was over; that she was a good mom when she saw her daughters making the same mistakes she had made, getting pregnant too early; that her parents would have been pleased to see their money thrown away this way. It felt like there were only two choices: continue lying to herself or admit that she had dishonored everything her mother and father had worked so hard to earn.

A quarter of a million dollars.
She didn’t tell her husband. “I concentrated on something new whenever that night popped into my mind,” she said.

Soon, though, the losses were too big to ignore. Some nights, after her husband was asleep, Bachmann would crawl out of bed, sit at the kitchen table, and scribble out figures, trying to make sense of how much was gone. The depression that had started after her parents’ death seemed to be getting deeper. She felt so tired all the time.

And Harrah’s kept calling.

“This desperation starts once you realize how much you’ve lost, and then you feel like you can’t stop because you’ve got to win it back,” she said. “Sometimes I’d start feeling jumpy, like I couldn’t think straight, and I’d know that if I pretended I might take another trip soon, it would calm me down. Then they would call and I’d say yes because it was so easy to give in. I really believed I might win it back. I’d won before. If you couldn’t win, then gambling wouldn’t be legal, right?”

In 2010, a cognitive neuroscientist named Reza Habib asked twenty-two people to lie inside an MRI and
watch a slot machine spin around and around.
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Half of the participants were “pathological gamblers”—people who had lied to their families about their gambling, missed work to gamble, or had
bounced checks at a casino—while the other half were people who gambled socially but didn’t exhibit any problematic behaviors.
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Everyone was placed on their backs inside a narrow tube and told to watch wheels of lucky 7s, apples, and gold bars spin across a video screen. The slot machine was programmed to deliver three outcomes: a win, a loss, and a “near miss,” in which the slots almost matched up but, at the last moment, failed to align. None of the participants won or lost any money. All they had to do was watch the screen as the MRI recorded their neurological activity.