Bingo has long been considered an innocuous form of gambling; however, this protective status is slowly being diminished by commercialization, technological developments and deregulation.
This paper’s central message is that harms experienced by bingo players are compounded by factors outside of the game itself, including pricing, proximity to EGMs and regulatory shortcomings. Addressing these concerns must be at the core of any strategy to mitigate gambling harms among bingo players.
Social Influence on Decision-Making
Social influence is a critical element in human decision-making and has been demonstrated to play an integral part in various behaviors such as risk taking and vaccination, yet its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This thesis investigates these mechanisms’ roles for word-of-mouth influence formation and spread.
Through various studies, we discovered that when exposed to other people’s decisions, people tend to adapt their beliefs and make new choices in accordance with them. This finding is central to behavioral economics as it also provides an explanation for why groups such as gangs, factions, subcultures or cults can maintain their identity while continuing to influence those around them.
FMRI experiments demonstrated that participants incorporated information about decisions made by peers into their belief systems, consistent with a rational Bayesian model of influence, which demonstrated how people’s conformity behavior depends on the relative weighting between public and private information. We further found that people tend to take more seriously information from higher-ranking individuals while underweighting private information.
Social Influence on Gambling
The present study seeks to understand how social/peer influences on gambling influence egos’ gambling behavior. Egos were asked to identify up to 20 adults they associate with who may exert significant influence over them; additionally they were required to indicate if any alters gambled and whether any harm resulted from gambling-related activity.
Cross-sectional research results from a cross-sectional study reveal that individuals with higher risk egos tend to surround themselves with more gamblers than lower risk egos – potentially normalizing gambling behaviour as some of these gamblers experience gambling-related harm themselves.
Practice theory provides an effective framework for exploring the impact of sociocultural factors on gambling behaviour, by emphasizing how various forces such as affect, general understandings and ideology can suffuse practices nexuses. Targeting such forces through policies which limit where gambling can take place as well as public discourses and media campaigns designed to reduce gambling appeal can be effective ways of combatting them.
Social Influence on Problem Gambling
Problem gambling can have devastating repercussions for our health, relationships, work performance and community participation. Research indicates that people engaging in risky forms of gambling are more likely to experience its detrimental effects than those who do not engage. Unfortunately, treating and preventing problem gambling among young people may prove challenging.
Researchers have developed theoretical frameworks for better analyzing gambling-related harms, including social influences. One such theory is social practice theory, which highlights the significance of considering context when it comes to practices like eating, drinking alcohol consumption, sports viewing and gambling. Activities may occur together into bundles in specific social environments or at certain times of day/week – for instance gambling might occur at a casino during a family outing – this perspective can have a tremendous effect on decisions people make regarding how they spend their money.
Social Influence on Addiction
Research demonstrates that group participation increases the primary reinforcing effects of drugs and drug-related stimuli, increasing their primary reinforcing properties. Group membership brings people in contact with locations where drug use is likely and reinforcers within the group can strengthen such actions further.
Studies using the conditioned place preference procedure and drug self-administration procedures demonstrate that proximal social factors, or those present at the time of drug exposure, influence both drug-seeking and taking behaviors among laboratory animals. While most of these studies utilize same-sex couples for testing purposes, one which used opposite-sex relationships revealed that social contact could facilitate intake by differentiating depending on sex of social partner.
Preclinical models indicate that social influence can have a tremendous effect on addiction. Unfortunately, their prevalence makes it unclear how to mitigate them to decrease drug abuse among individuals at risk; nonetheless, their density offers opportunities for harm-minimization strategies that have proven successful elsewhere, such as smoking (Christakis and Fowler 2008) and exercise (Lichtenstein et al. 2014).
