Cooling off and the effects of mandatory breaks in online gambling: a large-scale real-world study

Hopfgartner, N, Auer, M, Santos, T, Helic, D and Griffiths, MD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-6524, 2024. Cooling off and the effects of mandatory breaks in online gambling: a large-scale real-world study. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 22 (4), pp. 2438-2455. ISSN 1557-1874

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Abstract

The prevention of problematic online gambling behavior is a topic of major interest for regulators, the gambling industry, and researchers. Many gambling operators approach this issue by using responsible gambling tools. Among such tools, mandatory play breaks are used to interrupt long online gambling sessions, providing “cooling off” periods for players to take a reflective “time out”. The present study investigated the effects of mandatory play breaks in a large-scale experiment with 23,234 online gamblers engaging in more than 870,000,000 gambling transactions on Norsk Tipping’s gambling platform over a 1-month period. The gamblers were randomly assigned to several intervention groups with varying duration of mandatory play breaks and one control group with Norsk Tipping’s standard play break duration. More specifically, the study analyzed the relationship between the mandatory break received and the gambler’s acceptance of this tool, the interaction patterns with the tool, and how quickly they started to gamble again, as well as post-intervention effects on gambling behavior. Results showed that gamblers who were treated with longer mandatory breaks (i) tended to take longer voluntary breaks, and (ii) interacted more frequently with the tool (for instance, by clicking the “logout” button). Furthermore, gamblers appeared to accept longer mandatory play breaks. However, only a fraction of post-intervention effects remained, and mainly only for gamblers who received a substantial number of long mandatory play breaks. Overall, the present study provides actionable insights for both researchers and the gambling industry to improve the effectiveness of mandatory play breaks as a responsible gambling tool.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction
Creators:	Hopfgartner, N., Auer, M., Santos, T., Helic, D. and Griffiths, M.D.
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date:	August 2024
Volume:	22
Number:	4
ISSN:	1557-1874
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1007/s11469-022-00996-7 DOI 1636728 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Laura Ward
Date Added:	20 Jan 2023 15:55
Last Modified:	09 Sep 2024 14:30
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/48023

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