The Cognitive Neuroscience of Risk and Gambling Behaviour

A multidimensional approach to understanding Gambling Harms

Christopher J Wilson

Aims of this talk

• To outline a developing research programme on the cognitive neuroscience of gambling harms

• To explore a currently active project on the role of social identity and the normalisation of gambling in sports groups

• To discuss some planned research and future directions

I was originally going to talk about a single project which is currently ongoing.

While I will still talk about this, I thought it might be more suitable for this seminar series to outline the programme of work that is currently taking place in our lab, involving funded research projects with Research Associates, Doctoral Students, MSc students and UG projects.

Background and Context

The multi-dimensional nature of gambling harms

Measuring gambling-related harms (Wardle et al., 2018)

The regulatory context

• The failure of “soft friction”

• Cognitive knowledge is used for exploitative purposes - could be used positively

• “Self-exclusion” failure and cue reactivity

• Need for behavioural measures of harm that assess risk-taking behaviour

• Example A: The Failure of “Soft Friction” (The “Pop-Up” Problem)

  • The Evidence: Use the Gamesys and Petfre (Betfred) enforcement cases from the UKGC bulletins. These operators used “soft” interactions (like emails or pop-ups) which players simply ignored while continuing to lose thousands of pounds .

  • The Rationale Point: “Policy currently relies on ‘soft friction’—asking people to stop. The regulatory data proves this fails because the ‘hot’ cognitive state (the urge) overrides the intervention. We need neuroscience to design ‘hard friction’ that actually engages the prefrontal cortex.”

  Example B: “Losses Disguised as Wins” (The Cognitive Exploit)

  • The Evidence: The UKGC “Safer by Design” mandate banned features where a player loses money (e.g., 50p return on a £1 bet) but the machine plays celebratory music .

  • The Rationale Point: “Gambling products are engineered to exploit specific neural errors. ‘Losses Disguised as Wins’ trick the striatum into releasing dopamine during a financial loss. My programme investigates how to reverse-engineer these exploits.”

  Example C: The “Self-Exclusion” Failure (Cue-Reactivity)

  • The Evidence: Operators have been fined for sending marketing emails to self-excluded players. This acts as a “hot cue” that triggers immediate craving and relapse, bypassing the player’s “cool” pre-commitment .

  • The Rationale Point: “This isn’t just a marketing error; it’s a ‘cue-reactivity’ failure. We are using fNIRS to map exactly how these digital triggers hijack the brain’s control systems.”

The social context

• Increasing prevalence of gambling advertisement

• Normalisation (Norm-congruence) of gambling as a part of sports engagement (Duggan and Mohan 2022; Jetten et al. 2017)

• The symbolic construction of sports betting (Lopez-Gonzalez, Griffiths, and Jimenez-Murcia 2021)

gambling has started to become norm-congruent behaviour within these social groups, which in-turn makes it an acceptable, or even expected, behaviour for those who want to see themselves as a prototypical group member (Jetten et al., 2017).

The research silos

• Recent review of interventions for treatment of harmful gambling found 8 studies, all of which were retrospective - no experimental work (Seel et al. 2024)

• We can identify neural deficits linked to gambling disorder (prefrontal-stratial dysregulation) but there is a call for “new interventions” which incorporate this knowledge (Raimo et al. 2021)

• Behavioural intervention research calls for further understanding of the neurobiological changes that take place with interventions (Schwebel, Korecki, and Witkiewitz 2020)

One of the things you see in reviewing the literature on this topic is that their is a lot of research.

However the research is spread across disciplines and different areas of focus: policy and legislation, the public health agenda, clinical treatment, psychological processes…

There’s a bifurcation (although in multiple directions) in the research.

Our research programme is designed to try to connect some of those strands.

The Research Programme

The work seeks to integrate four strands:

1. Social Context (The Environment)

2. Clinical Vulnerability (The Individual)

3. Cognitive Moderators (The Tools)

4. Neural Mechanisms (The Underlying Biology)

Our focus on the neural mechanisms, while also taking into account clinical vulnerabilities, and social factors gives us the potential to conduct really impactful work.

Clinical Vulnerabilities

• Doctoral Work: Cognitive Inhibition and Cognitive Flexibility as moderators of Depression and Problem Gambling. Ema Abir (DClin)

• Doctoral Work: How risk imperception and reward magnitude moderate the relationship between subclinical hypomania and decision making. David Minchella (DClin)

• Doctoral Work: The role of impulsivity and working memory in the the relationship between subclinical hypomania and decision making. Alana Gadsby (DClin)

• Completed Study Wilson, C.J., Medimorec, S., Naganathan, J et al. (in prep) Risk Imperception, Not Reward Focus Underlies Poor Gambling Decisions in Subclinical Hypomania.

• Study: Anxiety & Decision-Making. Investigating how anxiety specifically impacts decision quality vs. risk-taking. Summer Hall

In terms of the clinical vulnerabilties, we have several DClin projects which look at how depression and hypomania interact with other cognitive processes to affect risky decision-making.

They also examine the neurological level indicators to try to build a process-based account of the behaviour - showing us when and were is a neural response occurs.

Finishing data collecton on DM and AG studies

UG is a pilot study

All involve both neural mechanisms and cognitive moderators

Social Context

• Funded Project: “It’s part of the sport”: Exploring how social identification with sports groups predicts gambling behaviour and how people experience the normalisation of gambling with sports groups.

• Study: Sports Engagement & Implicit Associations. Testing if high sports engagement predicts a stronger implicit cognitive association between “Sport” and “Gambling.” Thomas Wilkinson

• Review: Systematic Review on the efficacy of gambling harms policy-related interventions. w/ Dr. Andrew Richardson

There has been a noted lack of work in understanding recreational gambling and the nuances of its development in specific social contexts. Our focus so far has been on sports engagement and the sporting identity. This links back to the symbolic construction of sports betting [lopez-gonzalez].

The project I am going to talk about in more detail today focuses on this.

We also have some pilot projects (UG) looking at the development of implicit associations between sports and gambling

Cognitive Mechanisms

• Published Study: Wilson (2026) demonstrated that cognitive adaptations (construal mindset) can influence neural risk sensitivity in the Lateral Pre-frontal Cortex and affect risk-taking behaviour

  • This is an proof-of concept experimental demonstration of the “hot-to-cool” shift that the gambling commission were advocating

• Study: Short-Form Video Adverts. Testing if exposure to gambling adverts in short-form video content alters risk-taking behaviour. Theia Morgan

All of the clinical projects I talked about earlier included specific cognitive mechanisms such as working memory, attention, impulsivity etc.

We have some non-clinical work which incorporates cognition too.

Focus: “It’s part of the sport” project

Dr Christopher Wilson, Dr Srdan Medimorec, Prof. Judith Eberhardt, Dr. Robert Portman, Hannah Poulter, Lorraine Temple

What the preceding slides show is a body of work that is being conducted within our lab which tackles this problem across the different domains I mentioned earlier.

Of course, the UG work might be considered pilots or proof of concept.

We also have a series of doctoral projects that involve complex cognitive neuroscience experiements, behavioural and cogntive measures of risk-taking

Published work and papers under submission and in perparation

Now, I want to focus on a project in progress…

Project Team

Project Background

• Discourse around reducing harms is still heavily focused on the individual (Marko et al. 2022)

• Failure of research to epistemologically consider the broader context in which gambling takes place, has led to too much focus on individual pathology (Borrell and Boulet 2005)

• “urgent need to identify predictors of disordered gambling in people who gamble recreationally […] particularly across relationship [… ] domains” (Bowden-Jones et al. 2022)

This project looks to address a gap in the literature about the role of socialisation - for example engagement as a fan or a player might influence gambling behaviour.

• Does it just increase exposure?

• Does it link to attitudes?

• Does it relate to frequency of betting or amount bet..

There are lots of questions

Social Identification

• Socialisation through family or peer groups is a common starting point in the initiation of gambling behaviour (Reith and Dobbie 2011)

• Problem gambling has been found to be associated with conformity to group norms (Atte Oksanen et al. 2021)

• It is potentially much more valuable to understand how identification with other social groups could lead to gambling.

  • to engage with them at any level (e.g., amateur players or fan) is to be exposed to gambling (Constandt et al. 2022)

There has been work done before linking sports involvement to gambling behavour…

However, much of the previous work treats the social context of sports engagement as a transient environmental experience. That is to say, an environment you can be in or out of - an external source of influence.

Social identity is not a transient external source of influence, it is a state. It is who the person sees themselves to be. And although that can be context dependent… it is a very different way of looking at this topic.

Research Questions

We theorise that gambling has started to become norm-congruent behaviour within these social groups, which in-turn makes it an acceptable, or even expected, behaviour for those who want to see themselves as a prototypical group member

• Research Question 1: Which aspects of gambling behaviour are linked to social identification with sports groups?

• Research Question 2: Is the relationship between sports engagement and gambling behaviour moderated by social identification with sports groups?

• Research Question 3: How do people experience the normalisation of gambling within sports social groups?

Methodology

• Mixed methods approach

• WP1: a cross-sectional survey-based study

• WP 2: a qualitative study.

• WP 3: a synthesis of these ideas into recommendations for stakeholders

Project Structure

• Exploratory

• Role of EBEs

• Recruitment through sports networks, not gambling networks

Work Package 1

• Survey approach - controlled access

• Sports engagement / fandom / involvement

• Social identity / prototypical group membership

• Gambling measures: PGSI, Follow-back, Attitudes…

This is a diagram showing some of the hypotheses we will be testing

Work Package 2: Interviews

• Focusing on the experience of normalisation of gambling

• Topics covered:

  • Sports engagement

  • Individual level; survey: attitudes, gambling behaviour, problem gambling symptoms

  • Families, peers; survey: conformity, social identity

  • Community/organisational level; survey: sports engagement, group identity

  • Societal/commercial; survey: advertising, outcome expectancies

• Interview data will be analysed using Framework Analysis (Gale et al. 2013)

  In this part of the work we are taking some of the concepts that are explored in the questionnaires and we are interviewing people

  • Exploring normalisation

  • Theory-linked (not as inductive)

Progress and current Status

• Targeted recruitment at sports organisations and fan groups

• Survey data collection (current n = 120)

• Interviews currently being scheduled

Why does this work matter?

Why does this work matter?

• UKGC is shifting to “safer by design” requirements for operators. “Soft friction” doesn’t work. Need to establish evidence base for what does.

• Multi-dimensional models of gambling harms call for integration of behavioural, cognitive, neural and social mechanisms. A programme of research is needed to connect these.

• We are working to understand:

  • How cognitive processes affect gambling behaviour specifically

  • What are the specific neural mechanisms involved

  • How trait-level social constructs (e.g., fan identity) moderate the link between community and behaviour

What’s next?

• The Next Challenge: Can we use this understanding of process to engineer better harm-reduction tools?

• The goal: To move beyond describing harm to preventing it, developing neuro-informed frameworks for safer gambling environments.

Thank you, questions?

References

Atte Oksanen, Atte Oksanen, Anu Sirola, Anu Sirola, Ilkka Savolainen, Iina Savolainen, Aki Koivula, et al. 2021. “Social Ecological Model of Problem Gambling: A Cross-National Survey Study of Young People in the United States, South Korea, Spain, and Finland.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18 (6): 3220. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18063220.

Borrell, Jennifer, and Jacques Boulet. 2005. “A Critical Exploration of Objectivity and Bias in Gambling (and Other) Research.” International Journal of Mental Health & Addiction 2.

Bowden-Jones, Henrietta, Roxanne W. Hook, Jon E. Grant, Konstantinos Ioannidis, Ornella Corazza, Naomi A. Fineberg, Bryan F. Singer, et al. 2022. “Gambling Disorder in the UK: Key Research Priorities and the Urgent Need for Independent Research Funding.” The Lancet Psychiatry 9 (4): 321–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(21)00356-4.

Constandt, Bram, Johan Rosiers, Jolien Moernaut, Stef Van Der Hoeven, and Annick Willem. 2022. “Part of the Game? Exploring the Prevalence and Normalization of Gambling in Belgian Sports Clubs.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19 (11): 6527. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19116527.

Duggan, Brendan, and Gretta Mohan. 2022. “A Longitudinal Examination of Young People’s Gambling Behaviours and Participation in Team Sports.” Journal of Gambling Studies 39 (2): 541–57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10899-022-10175-x.

Gale, Nicola K., Gemma Heath, Elaine Cameron, Sabina Rashid, and Sabi Redwood. 2013. “Using the Framework Method for the Analysis of Qualitative Data in Multi-Disciplinary Health Research.” BMC Medical Research Methodology 13 (1): 117. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2288-13-117.

Jetten, Jolanda, S. Alexander Haslam, Tegan Cruwys, Katharine H. Greenaway, Catherine Haslam, and Niklas K. Steffens. 2017. “Advancing the Social Identity Approach to Health and Well-Being: Progressing the Social Cure Research Agenda.” European Journal of Social Psychology 47 (7): 789–802. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2333.

Lopez-Gonzalez, Hibai, Mark D. Griffiths, and Susana Jimenez-Murcia. 2021. “The Symbolic Construction of Sports Betting Products.” International Gambling Studies 21 (3): 498–515. https://doi.org/10.1080/14459795.2021.1937274.

Marko, Sarah, Samantha L. Thomas, Kim Robinson, and Mike Daube. 2022. “Gamblers’ Perceptions of Responsibility for Gambling Harm: A Critical Qualitative Inquiry.” BMC Public Health 22 (1): 725. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-13109-9.

Raimo, Simona, Maria Cropano, Luigi Trojano, and Gabriella Santangelo. 2021. “The neural basis of gambling disorder: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 120 (January): 279–302. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.11.027.

Reith, Gerda, and Fiona Dobbie. 2011. “Beginning Gambling: The Role of Social Networks and Environment.” Addiction Research & Theory 19 (6): 483–93. https://doi.org/10.3109/16066359.2011.558955.

Schwebel, Frank J., J. Richard Korecki, and Katie Witkiewitz. 2020. “Addictive Behavior Change and Mindfulness-Based Interventions: Current Research and Future Directions.” Current Addiction Reports 7 (2): 117–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40429-020-00302-2.

Seel, C. J., M. Jones, D. R. Christensen, R. May, A. E. Hoon, and S. Dymond. 2024. “Treatment of Harmful Gambling: A Scoping Review of United Kingdom-Based Intervention Research.” BMC Psychiatry 24 (1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-024-05843-8.

Wilson, Christopher J. 2026. “Neurological and Behavioural Correlates of Construal in Economic Decision-Making Under Cognitive Load.” Behavioural Brain Research 496 (January): 115829. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2025.115829.