I have been reading, with depressing regularity, news of restrictions being imposed on gambling in different countries throughout the world, whether they be sponsorship bans and advertising restrictions, maximum bets, limited deposits, and even different domains for sports betting and casino games and separate accounts for each activity.
The debate, and I am being generous here, is fuelled by wild statements about the harmful impact of gambling on the general population from one side and from the other, a somewhat arrogant response that everything has improved dramatically during the last few years and couldn’t be better.
Meanwhile, regulators hand out fines or similar for lapses in duty of care and anti-money-laundering offences as if they were confetti.
The challenge the industry faces is how to get out a message that gambling is not as harmful to most of the people who gamble as the naysayers portray.
Anti-gambling interests, and I include those in the public-health industry, are guilty of moral bias. Moral bias is an inclination to make decisions or take positions influenced by one’s own personal moral beliefs or values, rather than by an objective review of the evidence.
This bias can be seen in the flawed research or interpretation of data that appears in quite a few of the research reports that have been released in the past few years, purporting to demonstrate or measure “gambling harm”.
Whilst moral bias can subconsciously influence the way a report is written, I think the much disparaged and disowned (by the Gambling Commission) meta study conducted by the now-defunct Public Health England (PHE) was a conscious decision by the report writers to misrepresent what the data demonstrated. Either that, or they are just not very good at their jobs.
“Could” or “might” became “will” or “has”. And links between gambling and some form of harm, including suicide, were made when no causality had been or could be shown due to the poor quality of the research.
The purpose of research should be to get to the truth of the matter being researched and not some postmodern “alternative truth”. Where gambling is concerned, researchers appear to have already come to a conclusion that it is bad and have designed studies and/or have gone straight to write reports to support that conclusion.
We are all, to some extent, “guilty” of moral bias. To minimise the impact of moral bias, it is important to understand your own beliefs and biases and how these impact your outlook, then work to make decisions based on objective criteria and evidence, rather than your own convictions.
The news media has their own moral bias and panders to the anti-gambling lobby. Many journalists are also lazy; they pick up a press release and unquestioningly write a story regurgitating the contents without taking a sceptical view and inquiring as to the truth of it.
Sometimes, journalists do not have the skills or time to read the original report and are happy to plagiarise the press release almost word for word, whether or not the conclusions in the report are supported by the evidence.
Sub-editors try to find a headline, something that will stand out, and over-exaggerate what is written in the press release.
Activists understand that if they take an extreme position, it will get noticed and be picked up in the media, retweeted, and shared on other social media. They have to keep pouring out the bad news in order to maintain a sense of urgency and staying front of mind with the public.
It is not a “good” story to tell the world that a small percentage of the population are potentially problem gamblers, of which addicts are a smaller subset. The larger cohort of “at-risk” gamblers is often misquoted as those who have an addiction problem.
Unsurprisingly, as things improve, the anti-gamblers do not revise their opinions to reflect the changing circumstances. They want to keep the pressure on and it is not in their interest to paint anything other than doom and gloom.
Once the “biased” information is public, it is impossible to remove it or change public opinion based on it. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard or read the conclusions of PHE’s report repeated almost verbatim as fact.
We all suffer from confirmation bias, the tendency to interpret and remember information in a way that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. We look for information that supports our currently held beliefs and dismiss or ignore anything that goes against them.
This is problematic, to say the least. It prevents us from considering new information and entertaining new ideas that challenge our beliefs. When we read or hear something that supports our view, even if it is glaringly wrong, we assume it to be correct and it reinforces that view.
We need to be sceptical of new information that contradicts our world view, but we should be just as sceptical about information that supports it. Our analysis of information tends to be asymmetric; we dig into reports that contradict our beliefs and try to tear them apart (or at least, I do!). What is the source of this information? Is the sample size sufficient? Is the methodology defendable, etc.? But we really should do exactly the same to any report that doesn’t challenge our beliefs.
The Betting and Gaming Council, commenting on a recent quarterly survey of gambling behaviour commissioned by the Gambling Commission, trumpeted the “fact” that problem-gambling rates were continuing to fall. This “news” was only picked up by gambling news media and reported as fact. But looking into the data, the results did show a smaller percentage of those that took the survey being classified as “problem gamblers”. However, because of the small sample size, the change was statistically insignificant.
The industry should not complain if the anti-gambling lobby are prepared to distort facts to meet their own aims if those representing the industry are prepared to do the same.
We need serious and well-informed debate about the position of organised gambling in our society. This is not going to happen when both those for and against gambling are prepared to distort the evidence. And as long as this goes on, I can tell you which side will win, and it will not be the gambling industry.
