On Monday, May 14th, 2018 the US Supreme Court effectively legalized sports gambling. Of course, prior to that ruling, sports gambling had been possible in the US, in various forms, online (one-day fantasy sports contests, like DraftKings) and through offshore betting venues. While fans had ample opportunity to wager on the performances of individual players or on the outcomes of contests, the Supreme Court ruling will make gambling much more widespread very soon.

While some worry about ruining the integrity of the sports contests themselves, others have pointed out that problem-gambling may surge due to the increased availability of sports betting. Gambling addiction is not new and many states (including my own, Pennsylvania) offer treatment through hotlines and therapy, similar to drug and alcohol addiction).

A new study in the Psychonomic Society’s journal Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neurosciences by Damien Brevers and colleagues is relevant to this concern. The study reports that thinking about a sporting event with the intention of gambling on the outcome, compared to thinking about it with the intention of watching it, changes people’s neural response. Your brain fires differently when gambling is on the horizon.

In their study, Brevers and colleagues recruited 42 soccer (football) fans who were sufficiently knowledgeable about the sport to be familiar with the main soccer leagues around Europe. The soccer fans then completed two tasks while their brains were being scanned using fMRI. In both tasks, the fans viewed blocks of ten matchups one at a time (in the form of the logos and names of the two teams). These matchups would actually occur later the day of the scan.

There were two types of blocks. In betting blocks, after viewing all ten matchups, fans would have to determine which of the matchups they wanted to bet on, and which team they bet would win. (After the outcome, fans would actually receive €4 for each matchup they chose correctly, €2 for a draw, and €0 for an incorrect choice).

In watching blocks, by contrast, fans would merely determine which of the ten matchups they would most want to watch, without actually betting on any outcome. The figure below explains the procedure for both types of block.

After scanning, the fans were asked to choose which teams they thought would win all matchups (and how confident they were in this choice on scale of -3 to 3), as well as which games they most wanted to watch (and how much they wanted to watch on a scale of -3 to 3).

To analyze the data, the researchers contrasted neural activity during the betting blocks with neural activity during the watching blocks. This analysis revealed greater activation during betting in regions of the brain that are associated with emotion regulation and inhibition (medial frontal cortex and middle frontal gyrus), reward processing (caudate nucleus and anterior insula), and gambling, specifically (anterior insula).

By contrast, the supramarginal gyrus and lateral occipital cortex were more active during watching compared to betting. Those are brain regions known to be associated with visual processing and object recognition.

The figure below shows the contrast in activation: The top part, labeled (A), shows areas of greater neural activation during betting trials compared to watching trials. The bottom part (B), shows watching trials compared to betting trials.

In addition, the researchers correlated brain activity with the confidence judgments (for betting) and the desire-to-watch judgments. The researchers found that neural activity in prefrontal cortex correlated with confidence judgments, whereas neural activity in the lateral occipital complex correlated with desire-to-watch judgments.

Taken together, these findings reveal that the brain processes information about sporting events differently, depending on whether the viewer intends to gamble or has a monetary stake in the outcome of the game. In general, regions of the brains that are implicated in emotion, decision-making, and reward become more active when a sports fan thinks about gambling.

As a sports fan myself, the sports world is already inundated with gambling cues. I conducted a non-scientific search of upcoming baseball scores (baseball because the season is ongoing) for several sports websites, which revealed that four (ESPN, theScore, Yahoo, and 538) report odds or probability of victory directly next to the game preview (one other, the New York Times did not).

As an aside, in addition to the minute-by-minute odds that 538 publishes during March Madness—a college basketball tournament—it also published an ‘excitement index,’ with higher ratings signifying games that are more fun to watch for various reasons. It would be interesting to see the difference in neural responses to an explicit cue for gambling (odds) compared to an explicit cue for desire to watch (excitement index).

An explicit gambling cue is thus already directly associated with sporting events, and the US stands to see a drastic increase in sports gambling.

Although the study by Brevers and colleagues did not focus on problem gambling or gambling addictions (no correlations were found between any reported neural measures and a self-report measure of problem), such studies will be critical in ensuring that gambling addiction does not worsen.

Particularly since the regions that were active in the Brevers and colleagues study are some of the same brain regions that have previously been implicated in problem gambling.

Of course, the incentives line up on the side of sports gambling. States can tax gambling revenue; media outlets can count on larger audiences as even meaningless games become worthy of attention; not to mention the benefit to gambling outfits themselves. Demonstrating differences in the neural response to gambling cues versus enjoying competitive sport may provide rhetorical ammunition to those who seek to limit gambling and, in particular, to contain problem gambling.

Reference for the Psychonomic article discussed in this post:
Brevers, D, et al. (2018). Facing temptation: The neural correlates of gambling availability during sports picture exposure. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. DOI:10.3758/s13415-018-0599-z.