An ongoing series of research presented to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission annually has tracked a notable shift in public perception of gambling as an activity.
Public sentiment shifts against gambling and its mass legalization
According to the research conducted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specifically by the Social and Economic Impacts of Gambling in Massachusetts (SEIGMA), more people are beginning to view the activity negatively and argue that there may be more harm coming out of it than there is good.
According to Rachel Volberg, an epidemiology researcher and principal investigator for SEIGMA, the shift in public opinion has been coming for several years now, with data compared from previous years, 2022, and 2023. Commenting on the findings and presenting the data to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission on July 31, Volberg had this to say:
"Between 2022 and 2023, we saw a decline in the proportion of monthly gamblers who believed that all types of gambling should be legal and a small increase in the proportion who believed that all types of gambling should be illegal."
In other words, more people are now beginning to question the merits of legalizing gambling, and especially legalizing gambling in a way that does not ask deeper questions about the potential impact.
For example, in 2022, 48% of those people interviewed, who were described as gamblers, argued that the harm of the activity outweighed the benefits. Fast-forward to 2023, and those numbers had hit 53%, reaching an all-time high of 56% in Q3 2024.
People who experience gambling-related harm in Massachusetts are on the up
Gambling companies may have shot themselves in the foot, deploying more aggressive marketing strategies that have rubbed consumers the wrong way, leading perhaps to a shifting sentiment, from neutrality to more pronouncedly against.
The bigger issue, though, appears to be the people who experience gambling-related harm. In 2022, the research indicates that 20.9% of those people who gambled experienced some gambling-related problem, but the number has reached 28% by Q3 2024.
"These indicators from the monthly gamblers in the online panels are not going in the right direction, which is definitely a concern when considering the impacts of legalized sports betting on the population at large," Volberg said, urging the state to correct this worrying trend.
