How ‘Dark Patterns’ in Sports Betting Apps Keep Users Gambling

Like addiction to substances such as alcohol or opioids, gambling addiction is considered a mental health disorder. But a gambling problem doesn’t have to reach this level of severity before it can cause harm. Research from the past decade has shown that “the harms are much wider and much more broadly distributed than previously assumed,” Wardle says. Gambling can impact entire families and communities. It increases the risk of suicide and domestic violence. Perhaps most devastatingly, gambling problems are most common among people who have the least money to lose.

Researchers are already observing financial harms as states have legalized online sports betting. In a recent working paper that was posted to the repository SSRN and has not yet been peer-reviewed, researchers found that four years after a state legalizes online sports betting, consumers’ average credit score drops by an average of 1 percent, and the likelihood of filing for bankruptcy increases by 25 to 30 percent.

Dark Patterns

Not all forms of gambling carry the same levels of risk. Engaging in a game of poker with friends, for example, is less dangerous than playing a slot machine. Slots have long been casinos’ greatest moneymaker because of their addictive potential. Jamie Torrance, a psychologist studying gambling at Swansea University in Wales, chalks this up to the machines’ incredible pace—unlike in a game of poker or blackjack, only seconds pass between placing a bet and winning or losing. This makes the experience more immersive, leading some slot players to enter a trancelike state called “dark flow” in which they become completely absorbed by the game, Torrance says. The fast turnarounds can closely link the act of pressing the button with the rush of dopamine of a potential win, conditioning a person to keep pulling the lever.

Sports betting was once a slow form of gambling, with people mainly betting on the outcome of a game or race in person or with a phone call. With digital apps, people can bet 24/7 and are also now putting money on smaller events, such as which team will score first or whether someone will miss a free throw. And they can string these micro bets together into one big bet called a parlay—a popular feature that has big potential winnings but usually doesn’t pay off.

Sports betting is “becoming far more rapid,” Torrance says. “It’s not as harmful as a slot machine, but it’s moving in that direction.”

Still, these apps can do something that slot machines, or even the bookies and casinos of old, can’t: track users’ betting activity in incredible detail. Sports betting outlets, or sportsbooks, are able to use information about how and when someone bets and what that person bets on to determine what offers they send, Wardle says. To her, this consumer profiling is one of the more concerning aspects of these online gambling products.

“Imagine what the tobacco companies would have done if they had known every single time you took a cigarette out of a pack—if they’d have known exactly how much you smoked, when you smoked, how often you smoked, the circumstances around your smoking,” she says.

Wardle recently co-led a commission on gambling’s risks to public health. In their report, published in October in the Lancet, she and her colleagues referred to some of these apps’ features as “dark patterns,” a term used in product design for a user interface that exploits cognitive biases to get people to act outside of their best interest. A 2022 audit of 10 online gambling apps available in the U.K. identified common deceptive marketing and design practices that could cause harm, including:

These kinds of features encourage customers to spend more time and money betting, Torrance says. The gambling companies, he says, “have all of this knowledge about how the human mind works, how human behavior works, and they essentially use that knowledge for profits.”

And some of these features can make it challenging for people with gambling problems to quit in the first place, let alone to stay away. A lapsed customer who receives a push notification, e-mail or text with an enticing “limited time” offer for 10 “free bets” might be someone with a gambling problem who is trying to quit.

Imagine someone with alcohol use disorder who has been sober for two weeks, Torrance says. “They’re on their way to work, and the person who works in their favorite pub or bar comes out and says, ‘I have a free shot of tequila; please have it....’ It’s going to be very hard for that person to deny that.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-sports-betting-apps-use-psychology-to-keep-users-gambling/