Academics, gambling regulators, and the gambling industry increasingly espouse a shared responsibility view of preventing gambling harm. This view considers individual gamblers and external stakeholders, such as casino employees, to be jointly responsible for minimizing gambling harm. But do individual gamblers share this view?

This presentation will review three years of cross-sectional surveys with participants sampled from the (MGM) MLife customer loyalty program database. In the most recent survey, fielded in January 2020 with 4,336 MLife subscribers, we observed that most participants only held individual gamblers responsible for helping prevent gambling harm. Put another way, most participants held a purely internal responsibility viewpoint. However, those who screened positive on the Brief Biosocial Gambling Screen (BBGS) were more likely than those who screened negative to hold a shared responsibility viewpoint and holding a diffuse sense of responsibility for minimizing gambling harm predicted BBGS status over and above traditional individual-level risk factors. These findings echo the previous two years of survey findings with largely non-overlapping samples. Additionally, for the first time, we observed that those who screened positive on the BBGS were more likely than their counterparts to deny personal responsibility for minimizing gambling harm to individual gamblers; that is, they were more likely to hold a purely external responsibility viewpoint.

This webinar will discuss the implications of these findings for health promotion and best practices for message design in responsible gambling programs.