Why are Australians so addicted to sports betting?

Transcript

Intro: This podcast was made on the lands of the Wurundjeri people, the Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong. We'd like to pay our respects to their elders, past and present, and to emerging leaders. From the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, this is PsychTalks.

Cassie: Welcome back. Today we're talking about something that's become almost impossible to ignore in Australian sport and culture. It's online sports betting. How it works, why it's so engaging, and where the risks really sit. We're joined by Dr Daniel Bennett, a senior lecturer here at the University of Melbourne.

Daniel's research looks at how people learn and make decisions with a focus on modern gambling products like sports betting apps and gaming machines.

Nick: Daniel's work combines psychology with computational modelling to understand how these systems shape behaviour. He's held research fellowships in Australia and the US, including time at Princeton University in beautiful New Jersey, and he currently holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship focused on gambling-related harm.

Today we'll explore how betting apps are designed, why they can be so hard to resist, and what that means for individuals, communities, and policy.

Cassie: Daniel, welcome to PsychTalks.

Daniel: Thank you for having me.

Cassie: Before we get into our very meaty topic of the day, could you start by telling us a bit about your background and, and what research you do and what intrigued you about gambling decision making?

Daniel: Yeah, of course. So my background was not originally in studying gambling.

I did a PhD here at the University of Melbourne in psychology, and there my focus was more kind of on decision making in the abstract, kind of theoretical models of how people make decisions under uncertainty. This is kind of a topic that has a long and venerable history of studying, in cognitive psychology, and you know, with respect to my colleagues in that field and my own previous work, it can be kind of dry as dust sometimes. It's mathematical models that are beautiful in their theoretical elegance, but you know, often don't apply that broadly, outside of the lab.

So after doing that for my PhD, I went to the USA. I did a postdoctoral fellowship, at Princeton University, and I was kind of, I was away from Australia from sort of the years 2017 to 2020. And I had this interesting experience when I came back. So I'm quite a big sports fan, and I had sort of been insulated from some of the changes that were happening in the Australian sports ecosystem while I was away.

And what I noticed is when I sat down to watch a watch a game of football when I got back to Melbourne, there was just this incredible profusion of gambling advertising that hadn't been there when I'd gone away. And so, I hadn't had the experience of being the frog in the boiling water and, you know, slowly acclimatising to it. It was sudden and it was, it was shocking.

And it occurred to me that the sorts of theoretical models that I study of decision making are under uncertainty, in theory should relate to gambling decisions, and it's the kind of thing that you might say in a grant application, you know, these are the applications of the work. But I've never really kind of seriously engaged with that – with that application. And so I decided that one thing that I wanted to do when I got back was to try and take seriously how you might take some of those kind of theoretical insights from the long history of study of decision making under uncertainty and, and to apply them to gambling decisions specifically. Maybe with the goal of trying to do some good in the world.

Nick: So, so jumping off from there, I mean, one thing that the average sports fan here in Australia may not be aware of is the scale of gambling and the scale of gambling harm, uh, in the country. So how much do Australians experience harm from gambling, and how does this compare to other countries?

Daniel: Yeah, there, there's a couple of different ways to, to come at that question. Basically because there's a few different ways of thinking about what gambling harm is.

The simplest way of looking at it is just to say, OK, how much money do Australians spend or really lose on gambling compared to other comparable countries. And so there was a good report by the Grattan Institute a couple of years ago that that compiled some of these statistics and if you look at the average amount that an Australian adult loses per year to gambling, it's upwards of $1500 per person per year, which adds up to a huge amount – I think in the billions, when you multiply it out.

But if you kind of compare that to a culturally similar country like New Zealand, that number is down around $500 per person, per adult per year. And so you have to kind of ask yourself, why is it?

Again, with respect to my Kiwi cousins, Australia and New Zealand are not so culturally dissimilar from one another, and so you have to ask yourself, why is it that there's 3 times the scale of gambling harm in Australia compared to New Zealand?

Now that's just on the monetary side, but we also know from sort of studies of the prevalence of problem gambling as a sort of diagnosable syndrome that, depending on how you measure the risk, potentially upwards of 2 or 3 million Australians meet criteria for some degree of risk for gambling harm. So in a country of what, 25 odd million people, that's a really high and quite staggering number.

Nick: So do you think it's a convict background, Daniel, just showing itself centuries later?

Daniel: The quip about Australia and gambling is that Australians left alone in a room will bet on two flies crawling up a wall. There may be something to that. I mean gambling is a recreational activity, but Australia is far from the only country that engages in gambling as a recreational activity. Actually if you look back, you know, most societies in human history engage in gambling or games of chance to some degree or another, and so that might be part of it, but it can't be kind of the whole answer.

Nick: Sure, so on a more serious note, I mean, are there particular demographic groups who are more susceptible to gambling harm, whether it's age or gender or socioeconomic status?

Daniel: So there's no one who is immune from gambling harm. It's sort of, it plays out across the demographic spectrum. But what we increasingly see is that the people in whom amounts of gambling harm are rising tend to be younger adults, and they are more likely to be men than women. And that's partly because of increasing rates of gambling harm from sports betting specifically. So that's an activity that young men are more likely to be engaged in.

Cassie: And that $1500 per person per year number that you mentioned, and I think that goes out to $31 billion per year in total. Which as you said, puts Australia at the highest per capita spend. They're kind of mind-blowing numbers, and I think just reflecting on how strongly gambling has hitched itself to the culture of sport, which you mentioned at the start of this episode.

And as you say, it's probably impossible to watch sport in Australia without seeing, gambling or odds integrated into the coverage, but also dominating those ad breaks.

Do you think that constant exposure has changed not only how we consume sport, but also how we view gambling?

Daniel: I think it has, and I think it has in some sort of insidious ways, some ways that kind of are a little bit hard to put your finger on. But one thing that I know some people are very concerned about is just the way in which the sort of infiltration of gambling into sport, normalises gambling as a common cultural practise.

Now I, you know, I don't want to be censorious about it and say that, you know, all gambling is wrong or anything like that, but I think sort of an unquestioning assumption that gambling is part and parcel of being a sports fan is the result of that sort of infiltration of advertising and is something that would be good to resist in some ways if we can.

I think to the other part of your question, I think it's, it has changed how we view sport as well and, and some of the bodies that manage sport are very keen for that to be the case.

So if you're in a footy tipping competition, for instance, as many of us are, the AFL, the Australian Football League, has a platform where you can put your footy tips in, and I noticed a year or two ago that actually they built in this feature where you put in your tips for the week, and if you want, you can automatically turn that into a betting slip.

So I think there are some powerful forces sort of pushing these two things together, and I think one thing we can do is resist the idea that they automatically go hand in hand.

Cassie: And yeah, I think normalising that is a real worry but just coming back to advertising. As you know, I spend a lot of my research time thinking about advertising, I don't want to hijack it too much, but I think it's important to point out that, gambling ads are not allowed to target kids.

But there's this loophole where gambling ads can be aired during sport, and obviously kids watch sport. So I think that my two questions for you are: how that kind of infiltration of the gambling ads into sport, which obviously kids are seeing, how that impacts kids, but also whether it impacts any particular demographics even more so, so young men watching sport. What you think about, about that impact of the advertising loopholes?

Daniel: Yeah, it's, it's a really interesting question. So as someone who recently became a parent myself, I'm maybe more conscious of this than I had been previously because yeah, I, I suspect my, my son will grow up watching, watching sports, and I would like him to be able to do that without assuming that gambling goes hand in hand with that.

I think the negative impact on kids is going to flow through just from the normalisation and from the idea that, especially if you talk to younger people, the idea that what you might do on a Friday night out with friends at the pub is sit at the bar and place bets while you're there.

The idea that that's sort of something that's done automatically and and is completely culturally accepted is something that I worry about. In terms of the demographic of young men and and their high risks of harm, it's quite interesting to notice what the content of the advertising is.

So if you were to, you know, pick a gambling ad at random from, from the TV ecosystem, it would be kind of blokey, it would be sort of cajoling, the general tone would be something like, you know, place a bet, it's good fun, it's what men do, you know, to put a, a gloss on it.

That's not because the bookmakers themselves necessarily, because that that is their culture, it's, if you look in terms of what large corporate bookmakers are, they are in some ways very, very large, sophisticated data analytics, corporations, they have huge amounts of data, they do very sophisticated things with it.

You wouldn't necessarily know that from looking at the sort of blokey tone of the, of the advertisements, and so what that, I think tells us is that part of what's going on there is a very, intentional and tailored effort to increase the palatability of gambling for, a demographic like young men who, who they have clearly determined is going to be where a lot of their profits are.

Nick: So you don't just talk about this, you do research on it, and you have a 2026 published study which talks about how powerful the environmental cues are in gambling, things like match deposits which maybe you can define for us in your answer. So given the total saturation of betting ads um throughout sports broadcasts and social media and the like, is it becoming impossible for a person at risk to simply avoid temptation?

Daniel: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question to define the product that you mentioned there of matched deposits. This would be something like a really common promotion, sometimes called bonus bets or things like that where a bookmaker will tell a prospective consumer that if you deposit $100 into your account, we will match that with $100 in, in bonus bets. And there's often various fine print about the, the ways in which you, you can spend that money and how soon you can take it out, etc.

But what that does is it provides powerful incentives to kind of re-engage, even for people who might not otherwise be inclined to do that. So somebody who might have a sense that they are gambling more than they would like to be. If you're told, you know, we can effectively double your money, it's a powerful incentive to kind of re-engage with the system.

More broadly, I think the saturation, if we think of theoretical models of addiction more broadly, like the kinds of theories that psychologists and others propose, one phenomenon that crops up in those theories is something called cue-induced craving. Which is just this idea that if you are the regular user – I mean, the theories are especially of substances – if you're a regular user of an addictive substance, the sorts of cues that are surround the substance, whether it's the room that you use the substance, in the people you use the substance with, tend to, if you just see them in isolation, tend to evoke feelings of craving.

And there's been some work thinking about the ways in which those models might apply to gambling as well, and, and when you have a broadcast ecosystem that's saturated with cues that remind people of gambling, it is the kind of thing that could potentially induce this kind of this craving that that makes people really motivated to continue gambling.

Nick: I mean, I think this whole idea is so interesting because at some level one could be moralistic and say, why can't people just control themselves and just stop. You know, I think Paul Kelly had this song, you know, if drinking is a problem then drink a little less, like it's just an easy decision to make.

And I was thinking about this new book by a philosopher called Hannah Pickard, and I'm going to get the title wrong, but it's something like, What Would You Do Alone in a Cage With Nothing But Cocaine. And it's this idea that if this is all it is, this is surrounding you, it's extraordinarily hard not to do it. I mean, can you reflect on that?

Daniel: It's funny you mention that book, Nick, that, that book is in my bag at the moment. I'm currently reading it. I believe it refers to you as a sociologist rather than a psychologist.

Nick: Yes, unforgivable.

Daniel: This idea is, is really interesting, that part of the context for something like gambling is, the environment within which people choose to gamble, and as you say, it could be easy to be moralistic and to say well if people gamble harmfully, that's because they've made poor choices.

But I think it's important to recognise that gambling is not... In some ways it's different from substances because the thing to which people who experience gambling addiction are addicted to, is not a psychoactive substance, it is a game of chance that is manufactured for profit by people.

And anytime that's the case, it's reasonable to ask the question of, given that this potentially addictive experience is manufactured for profit by people, are there things that we could do without taking away people's freedom and their self-determinism and their ability to choose? Are there ways in which we could reduce the sorts of risks that people are likely to be exposing themselves to?

And I think finding that balance is – I'm not going to pretend it's an easy problem and reasonable people can disagree about exactly where you should, where you should land on, that spectrum. But I think that's the kind of the fundamental tension that that is interesting to think about. If you want to take the kind of work that I do, you know, studying gambling in the lab and say what insights should we draw from this, what ways can we shape people's behaviour without taking away their agency in ways that lead them to experience less harm?

Cassie: But talking about the cues that people receive, you could think about a gambler who has a problem with casino games. That's a very different cue to kind of take away than someone who's addicted to gambling on their phone, 24 hours a day, being inundated with advertising, luring them to that.

So you know, I think it's important to reflect on the differences in how hard it must be to avoid the temptation if we're talking about that kind of cue removal idea, to someone who, you know, might be able to stop themselves going to play a game at a casino or even a poker machine in a venue, to someone who has that, that availability 24/7 in their hand.

Daniel: And I think many of us who have smartphones have this experience of, of picking up your smartphone and opening an app, and you know, doom scrolling for 15 minutes on whatever your social media platform of choice is.

We are all aware of this ability for those ecosystems to sort of, not to remove our agency but to make it easy to forget that we're doing things that we might not necessarily want to be doing.

The difference between doing that on Facebook and doing that on a gambling app is that if you're doom scrolling, effectively on a gambling app, you're not just losing time, you're losing money as well.

Cassie: And on those apps, I think some of the fascinating research you looked at, was looking at how features in some of those apps that sound like they're pro user, so I think you talk about the cash out feature, we talked about the match deposits, they kind of sound like they're there to help the user.

You can cash out when you want, if you're in a live bet, or we're going to match your deposit. But is it that you found that that actually made people bet more than not having those features?

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. So just to define the cash out feature for those who might not be familiar with it, this is a feature of, I would say most uh betting apps now.

Where if you've placed a bet on some sporting match or some race, you can cash out of that bet while it's still running and receive kind of an instant payout. So let's say I bet on one football team to beat another on the weekend, and I'm sitting there watching the game, and my football team is getting beaten, it doesn't look like I've made a very good bet. Well, potentially rather than waiting around and, and losing my money, I can cash out and take some portion of the amount I bet back.

And in theory, I can take it home with me, but in practise I can take that money and plough it into another bet if I would like to do that. And people tend to like the availability of a feature like this cos it gives them a greater sense of control over what's happening with their with their betting. What we did was to try to use what I, what I mentioned, the methods of cognitive psychology, experimental psychology to say, OK, if we can construct a controlled environment in which people are placing bets on, on random events.

And in some conditions they know they can cash out of those bets while they're running, and in other conditions they know they can't cash out of their bets while they're running. What are the differences in the ways that they, they bet in those two conditions? And what we found was really quite striking, which is just looking at the amount that people choose to bet on exactly the same event.

And we know it's exactly the same event because we, we experimentally control it. If we look at the amount that people bet when cash out is available, it's estimates vary, but between 25 and 35% more than they're betting on the same thing when cash out is not available. And so this is an interesting finding because what it says is that the presence of, as you say, these, these features in the apps that might be perceived to be pro user, might actually be nudging people towards patterns of behaviour that are not in their best interests in the abstract.

Nick: So is it that sense of increased perceived control that's driving the taking of bigger risks, do you think?

Daniel: We're doing some work at the moment to, to test that hypothesis. We certainly think that's plausible, and so, one finding from the study I mentioned was if we ask people how they felt during the bets that they were placing, people did report feeling more of a sense of control when they could cash out than when they couldn't. And some folks I'm working with including a PhD student, Andrew Kumara, are currently doing some work to kind of experimentally manipulate this.

So, if we, you know, sometimes cash out is available, but it's automatic, so you don't get to make the decision yourself, how does that change things? And so what that does is that it retains the presence of that feature but it takes away people's control over it. And what we've done, what we've seen is that when that happens, that effect that I talked about, the inflation of bet amount, seems to be at least partially abolished.

And so that effect tells us that, the sense of control, the ability to determine what's going on, seems to be explaining a big part of what, uh, of what we're seeing in these studies. That's kind of preliminary work, but yeah, it certainly suggests there's something to it.

Cassie: Another term you use a lot is the online sports betting loop. Could you just tell us a bit about that and the, the features and, and components of sports betting that, that keep people trapped in that loop?

Daniel: Yeah, I think it's worth saying I didn't invent this, it comes from a study by Park and Park. But basically the idea is that it's about thinking about the ways in which placing a bet on sports using an app might be different from placing a bet on sports in the physical world. So just to sort of expand on that and think that through a little bit, if you were to place a bet on the races 50 years ago, what you would do is you would line up at a racetrack, you would maybe check the odds on a blackboard, you would physically hand over your cash, and then if you won, you would line up again to collect the cash.

And, you had to be physically present for this to happen. The whole thing at its quickest would take what, 10 to 15 minutes. And so something like the online sports betting loop is about thinking about how does that change when we go onto an app. So the insight of the folks who came up with this idea is that there are many, many features of sports betting apps that effectively just remove a lot of the friction that is in the, the physical setting that I was describing.

So, in a sports betting app, you can place bets on many events all at the same time, with no delay in how long it takes to place the bet, and potentially sometimes with very short delays in how long it takes to know the outcome of the bet. So some of the features I'm talking about are something like in-play betting, so if you're watching a, let's say you're an NBA fan and you're watching a basketball game, you can bet in that game on who will score the 31st point of the game, and the 32nd point, and the 33rd point and the 34th point.

And so what that means is that because you can place all of these in-play bets, in theory, you can sit there watching the NBA game, placing bet after bet after bet, and they don't have to be large bets, for it to create an experience where a person becomes completely immersed in that, in that ecosystem.

And some, some of the theory in this space suggests that, leaving aside the question of how much are people losing on how much money are people losing on betting apps, the tendency of apps to capture people's attention is driving harm just by by making them immersed in this environment.

And so, the idea of the online sports betting loop is it's creating features whereby, rather than placing a bet and leaving the environment, you place a bet and enter a loop where you place further bets, etc.

Nick: So, having live streaming inside betting apps might seem like it's a really good feature, but it could actually be, um, adding risk for the user?

Daniel: Exactly, yeah, so this is another one of those features that users really like, I was floored when I heard about it, but you know, if you have money sitting in your betting account with certain bookmakers, I won't name them, but a number of them have this feature. You don't have to have placed a bet on a particular match, but again to use the example of basketball.

If I want to watch a basketball game live, I could pay $150 a year to, to get NBA League Pass, or I could just have $2 sitting in my account and watch the basketball game directly within the app. So that's the kind of thing that seems like it's very good for the user, seems like it's very attractive to the user because they, they get to stream sports for free, but it's crucial that it's happening within the gambling app itself.

And so what that does is it, it adds to this sense of immersion and it makes it easy, given, you know, if you're sitting there in the, with the app open watching the basketball game anyway, well then maybe it just makes it a little more interesting to bet on the 33rd point or the 34th point while you're, while you're doing it.

And so it creates an environment where people are incentivised to, to open the app and they're incentivised to keep it open, and the more time that people are spending in that environment, the more likely they are to, to be betting and to potentially be experiencing gambling harm.

Cassie: I think the design of the apps is so important when you talk about the wanting to stay within that, that ecosystem. But another thing you talked about in your 2024 research was how betting app design was kind of converging with financial apps or stock trading apps, which you mentioned almost makes financial risk feel like a game as well.

But do you see these same psychological hooks and mechanics appearing in games aimed at kids? Like we've  talked earlier um about loot boxes, is that a similar idea of a hook aimed at at maintaining kids' interest in a game? So maybe if you can tell us a bit about loot boxes, but how these mechanics might be tricking our kids as well.

Daniel: Yeah, of course, so this idea of, you know, the gamification of gambling and and financial trading apps, it very strongly parallels changes that are happening in many very popular video games aimed not only at kids, but you know, kids are a large part of the users user base for a lot of these. So, what a loot box is, and this is not research that I've done, but I have colleagues who do work in this space, what a loot box is, is basically a feature of a video game where you can pay in order to, effectively get a, a black box with some item in it.

And you don't know what's in the black box when you pay for it, maybe, you know, maybe it's a role-playing game and it's a sword or a set of armour or you know, a nice costume for your character or something like that, things that have value within the game, and what a loot box basically does is it adds randomness into that purchasing transaction.

So you don't buy, a sword or a set of armour or or a costume for your character, you buy a random drawer from a black box and that's what's called a loot box, and, a lot of the interest in this space has been that basically this has the characteristic of gambling in some interesting ways. It involves, it's a game of chance, you might get a very valuable item, you might not get a valuable item at all, and you are purchasing it.

So different regulators argue about whether this technically meets the definition of gambling, but for somebody who studies gambling from an academic perspective, it certainly has these qualities, and a lot of the concern is about the ways in which this, socialises kids playing video games uh to see, you know, paying money to engage in games of chances basically being an enjoyable recreational activity without necessarily thinking about the consequences of that.

So the idea is that, you know, it might prime kids or it might socialise them to gambling-like behaviours in a way that makes it easier for them to move from loot boxes towards kind of actual sports betting.

Cassie: So would your research suggest that kids playing those games shouldn't have access to things like loot boxes that that veer into this kind of random reward?

Daniel: Yeah, I don't know if my research specifically suggests that, but certainly, you know, anytime you have kind of a random reinforcement process to introduce some of that jargon, or you know, a random reinforcement schedule, you are expending effort or expending money to receive reinforcement that may happen or may not, that, that's kind of in the abstract.

And we know that that's the kind of thing that can set up kind of destructive habitual behaviours, you know, ranging from really simple animal studies like if there are, ways in which you can to go back to some really old school psychology, if you put a rat in a cage and give it food on a random reinforcement schedule, you can set up that schedule such that the rat will expend more energy pressing a lever for food than it's actually getting back from the food itself. So we know that these are really, really psychologically potent, and I think a lot of the concern is about, you know, what does it do when we take that, we're not rats in a cage, Hannah Pickard's book not notwithstanding.

We're not rats in a cage, but we are people who who enjoy recreational activities that have this element of randomness to it, and so a lot of the, the conversation is about how can we retain people's ability to, enjoy gambling as a recreational activity while steering the products away from more kind of harmful regions.

Cassie: This random reward is in consumer space as well, there's blindbox toys, Labubus, all these things are, are, the randomness is kind of the appeal, but just where's the line in terms of when it becomes a problem.

Daniel: And you know, it's, I don't want to be moralistic about this either, you know, like it's fun to open your presents on Christmas morning and not know what's inside, and the idea that we're, we're not gonna take randomness away from, from the sorts of things that humans engage in, that's it's just not a realistic prospect.

But the question I think we can ask is, you know, within specific products, are there ways in, are there types of random reinforcement or features that embody these principles that we can, that we can steer away from and reduce the harm as a result.

Nick: I'm glad you get surprises from Christmas presents, for me it's always books or socks, so not much surprise there.

Cassie: But different books.

Nick: Indeed, different books, which can be surprising, even surprising socks sometimes.

So in your studies, Daniel, you use this thing called the PGSI which stands for the Problem Gambling Severity Index to measure gambling risk. So for anyone who's listening who feels their betting might be getting out of hand or becoming a problem, what are some early signs they should look for?

Daniel: Yeah, so the PGSI academically is the standard way of looking at this. It's kind of a nine item questionnaire, that has some standard cut-offs for, you know, low risk of gambling harm, moderate risk, high risk, etc. And it is freely available in various places online and people could take it themselves if they want to.

But there's been a lot of work more broadly looking at, if you want to know whether someone is likely to experience harm from gambling, what are the things you should be looking for.

And one instrument that is quite short and that that seems to be quite useful is something called the Lie-Bet index, and this is as simple as, it's a two question, a simple two question, survey or it's two simple questions that you could ask someone to determine whether they're likely to be at risk of gambling harm.

So Lie-Bet. So the first one is lie. Have you lied to anyone about your gambling behaviour? If yes, that's a, a proximal indicator of gambling harm. And I think bet is, have you bet more than you can afford to lose or more than you intended to do. And so, you know, if you go yes to the question, that suggests two kind of early warning signs that people could look for is if they find themselves trying to deceive others about the extent of their gambling behaviour or if they feel like they're betting more money or more frequently than they wanted to, those would be signs to look out for.

Nick: And if you noticed a friend was constantly on their betting apps um or showing um these sort of red flags, the Lie-Bet um that you mentioned, how should you approach that conversation?

Daniel: I think an important principle to keep in mind here is that in order to know whether someone is experiencing harm from, from any addictive product, but for gambling as well, the most useful thing to do is to ask them, and to ask them in a sort of non-moralistic way about whether they are experiencing costs from their use of something that go beyond the benefits they gain or or or that they thought they would gain.

Because I, again, I don't want to come across as moralistic on this. It, it's possible to spend very large amounts of money on gambling because you have lots of disposable income and you enjoy it, and not to experience harms in the, in the classical sense. And so it's, it's not simply the case that spending money on gambling is a bad thing.

But by the same token, if the money that's being spent is money that could be spent on rent, or if people's relationships are breaking down because of the amount of money they're spending on gambling, those are the sorts of costs that you would kind of want to know about. And so I think having a conversation with people where you, in a non-judgemental way, try to work out where the balance sits for them would be, would be one way to approach this.

Cassie: And the harm is it reminds me of an episode we did with Dr Courtney Walton looking at sports um, performance. He was not talking about betting specifically, but he mentioned the fact that the increase in sports betting increases online abuse of athletes. So once you're betting on a team, you're now not just invested in them winning because you like that team, but if they lose, people take it personally that you lost my money.

And he talked about these horrific cases of online abuse around, directed at athletes once you've bet on a sport, so I think maybe keeping that in mind as well if you're finding yourself abusing athletes online, probably not a great..

Daniel: I think in the case of sports betting, one thing that people find is that, one reason people start betting on sports is because they're big fans of sports and they know a lot about sports and they, you know, wanna put that expertise to the, to the test.

But I think what people find is that once, if their gambling becomes more than they would like to do it, it changes their relationship with sport and potentially to the extent that this thing that they enjoyed and got a lot of pleasure from becomes, becomes a source of pain and cost in their, in their life.

Cassie: And specifically in that sports betting space, what's one thing you would change from a kind of regulation or policy level, to help people not get into that sports betting loop or to control their, their, their addiction to sports betting or to be aware of some of the tricks that are built into the user experience of these apps.

What's, what's a regulation that you would like to see happen?

Daniel: I think I would answer that at two levels. At the simpler level, I would say anything that adds friction to the interface.  So, anything that makes it a little bit more difficult to, to engage in certain aspects of these in-play betting, that's gonna be useful. So, in theory, this is there in some parts of betting apps in, in Australia, so for some of those in-play bets that I was talking about, you know, betting on the 33rd point, the 34th point, etc.

In theory you can't place those in the app, in theory you have to place those by, by phoning a bookmaker. But the apps have got around that by having a button within the app that says phone to place a bet and automates the entire process. So I think, I think there's natural ways in which you could, you know, without changing the legislation, you could, implement it in a way that's true not just to the letter of the law, but to the, the spirit of the law.

Um, more broadly and sort of at a kind of systems level, one recommendation that's been made by lots of people, including the late Peter Murphy, the MP who led the government's standing commission into gambling harm, is just to have a single national regulator for online gambling, so it's currently regulated by the states, meaning that each state has its own regulations, and meaning that bookmakers naturally just move themselves to whichever state has the laxest regulation.

In Australia, that happens to be the Northern Territory Racing and Wagering Commission, which is where I think 52 of our bookmakers are set up. And there was a really good, ABC Four Corners report about this last year where they looked into the activities of this regulator and found that it had no full-time staff, that it had many commissioners who owned racehorses themselves, and that it hadn't filed an annual report since 1993.

If you have a single online regulator, you get rid of the ability of bookmakers to go state shopping in terms of where they would like to, to set up.

Cassie: But anyone could bet with them?

Daniel: That's right, and so they're incorporated in the Northern Territory, but if you place a bet in Victoria, in Western Australia or anywhere, you're placing a bet with the company that is headquartered in the Northern Territory and is governed by those Northern Territory regulations.

Nick: So that's your suggestion at the systems level. What about at the individual level? So what's a final takeaway or piece of advice you'd give um our listeners?

Daniel: I think one thing that I would say is that what the research tells us is there is, you know, we talk about gambling in the abstract, but there is no one kind of gambling behaviour that, you know, many people buy a lottery ticket every, every week, and you might say that they are, you know, regular users of gambling products, but they're probably at less risk of gambling harm than somebody who goes to the pokies every week.

We haven't talked about the pokies at all in this episode, it's a huge source of, of gambling harm as well. But just, sort of by extension of that logic, being aware that not all gambling behaviours, gambling activities are equal in terms of the amount of risk that they confer on people.

And so that if somebody does find themselves losing track of time in a gambling app or betting while they watch, sports live in a gambling app or any of these activities that seem to remove the friction and kind of keep them immersed in that environment, that those are sort of warning signs that they could keep an eye on in their own behaviour.

Cassie: Oh, fascinating research, Daniel, thank you so much for spending time with us on PsychTalks today. And although we didn't get into all the other types of gambling, I think focusing on the apps is a really important message for people to understand the mechanics of, of those apps and how addictive they can be. So thank you for coming into PsychTalks.

Daniel: Thank you both for your time.

Cassie: That was Dr Daniel Bennett from the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, sharing his research on decision making and gambling in modern betting environments.

Nick: If you'd like to learn more about Daniel's work, including his research on sports betting apps and gambling harm, you can find more details online on the Melbourne School of Psychological Science's website.

Cassie: PsychTalks is produced by Mairead Murray, Gemma Papprill and Celia Harvey, with audio engineering by Phil Shaw and is a production of the University of Melbourne, Australia.

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