Cognitive dissonance, personalized feedback, and online gambling behavior: an exploratory study using objective tracking data and subjective self-report

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Auer, M and Griffiths, MD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-6524, 2018. Cognitive dissonance, personalized feedback, and online gambling behavior: an exploratory study using objective tracking data and subjective self-report. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 16 (3), pp. 631-641. ISSN 1557-1874

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Official URL: http://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-017-9808-1

Abstract

Providing personalized feedback about the amount of money that gamblers have actually spent may—in some cases—result in cognitive dissonance due to the mismatch between what gamblers actually spent and what they thought they had spent. In the present study, the participant sample (N = 11,829) was drawn from a Norwegian population that had played at least one game for money in the past six months on the Norsk Tipping online gambling website. Players were told that they could retrieve personalized information about the amount of money they had lost over the previous 6-month period. Out of the 11,829 players, 4045 players accessed information about their personal gambling expenditure and were asked whether they thought the amount they lost was (i) more than expected, (ii) about as much as expected, or (iii) less than expected. It was hypothesized that players who claimed that the amount of money lost gambling was more than they had expected were more likely to experience a state of cognitive dissonance and would attempt to reduce their gambling expenditure more than other players who claimed that the amount of money lost was as much as they expected. The overall results contradicted the hypothesis because players without any cognitive dissonance decreased their gambling expenditure more than players experiencing cognitive dissonance. However, a more detailed analysis of the data supported the hypothesis because specific playing patterns of six different types of gambler using a machine-learning tree algorithm explained the paradoxical overall result.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction
Creators:	Auer, M. and Griffiths, M.D.
Publisher:	Springer US
Date:	June 2018
Volume:	16
Number:	3
ISSN:	1557-1874
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1007/s11469-017-9808-1 DOI 9808 Publisher Item Identifier
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Jill Tomkinson
Date Added:	26 Sep 2017 13:17
Last Modified:	01 Aug 2018 14:46
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/31693