The Social Impacts of Gambling
Gambling involves putting money into games of chance, such as slot games, lottery tickets, scratch-offs, video poker and sports betting. You can bet with your own money or with the money of other people. If you win, you get the money you have gambled, but if you lose, you’ll forfeit the amount that you put into the game.
Regardless of the outcome, gambling is fun because it makes your brain release dopamine, which can reduce your levels of stress and worries. This is why thousands of people make a living from gambling. But you should only gamble with disposable income and not money that you need to pay bills or rent.
In addition to monetary impacts, gambling has other negative effects on the health and well-being of individuals and society as a whole. These impacts have been observed at the individual, interpersonal, and community/society level, with each level resulting in different types of harms.
The main methodological challenge for analyzing these impacts is that they are often non-monetary in nature and therefore difficult to quantify, thereby leaving them under-reported in studies of gambling. To overcome this, we propose a conceptual model that incorporates both economic costs and benefits. It identifies key impact dimensions, and provides a framework for studying the social impacts of gambling. These dimensions include financial, labor, and health and well-being impacts at the personal, interpersonal, and community/societal levels. Each dimension can have direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts.
