Abstract
Responsible gambling campaigns are one measure enacted by a number of statutory bodies and gambling operators in response to concerns about gambling marketing and the accessibility of modern gambling products. For example, since 2015 a number of the UK‘s largest gambling operators have attached the following warning label to TV and shop window adverts: “when the FUN stops, stop” (where the word “fun” is printed in noticeably larger font than any other word). Here we present an initial independent test of this warning label‘s effect on contemporaneous gambling behavior.
A short incentivized survey was conducted to mimic the scenario of online gambling advertising, with warning label presence manipulated between-participants. Participants were given a sequence of nine £0.10 bonuses, and on each trial were presented with the possibility to gamble this bonus on a soccer bet, with bet details and payoffs taken from a major gambling operator‘s website. There were 506 unique participants who had all previously indicated that they were Premier League soccer fans and had experience in online sports betting.
Overall, participants decided to bet on 41.3% of trials when a warning label was shown, compared to 37.8% when no warning label shown (i.e., descriptively the label increases the probability of gambling). According to the preregistered analysis plan, this difference was not significant, (χ^2 (1)=2.10, p=.15) The “when the FUN stops, stop” gambling warning label did not achieve its aim of prompting more responsible gambling behavior in the experiment. Article pre-print available online
Citation: Newall, P., Walasek, L., Singmann, H., & Ludvig, E. (2019). Testing a gambling warning label’s effect on behavior. doi: 10.31234/osf.io/dxfkj.