I am interested in what makes it difficult for individuals to exercise self-control in buying and gambling situations. This will help us devise ways of helping them buy and play within reasonable limits.
Playing within your limits… When do gamblers fail to do so?
In a recently published paper, I collaborated with Dr. Abby Goldstein, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, to investigate this issue in the gambling context. We asked regular gamblers to fill out a short survey for 21 days and report on their daily hassles and the degree of having resisted temptation to drink, smoke and use substance as well as their gambling activities on the previous evening (i.e., whether they gambled, whether they set up gambling limits, whether they exceeded their gambling limits). We also obtained their personal characteristics, such as individual difference in trait self-control, from the base-line survey.
We found a significant interaction effect between trait self-control and the degree of having resisted non-gambling temptations. As sown in the bottom figure, on days non-gambling temptations were not resisted, participants with low trait self-control were more likely to exceed gambling limits than those with high trait self-control. However, on days non-gambling temptations were resisted, participants with high trait self-control were equally likely to exceed gambling limits compared with those with low trait self-control. This means that even people who are generally good at exercising self-control are likely to fail in self-control when they have already tried to refuse other temptations (presumably because they felt frustrated while doing so and implicitly would like to feel better this time).
Yi, S., Goldstein, A., Luo, H., & Haefner, S. A. (2023). A daily diary investigation of self-regulation in gambling. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 37(3), 533–544. https://doi.org/10.1037/adb0000884
We are conducting additional research to explore self-control issues in excessive buying and specific types of gambling, such as sports gambling. Please refer to the Current Projects tab.
