You say gaming; I say gambling... | Reviewed-Casinos.com

The Journal of Consumer Research has published a study on consumer preferences regarding the semantics of the verb “gaming” as opposed to “gambling”….and it has shown a clear preference for the former.

The study by Ashlee Humphreys of the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and Cornell University’s Kathryn A. LaTour is entitled “Framing the Game: Assessing the Impact of Cultural Representations on Consumer Perceptions of Legitimacy.”

It found that consumers are more likely to participate in online betting if it’s called “gaming” rather than “gambling.”

“Changing an industry label from gambling to gaming affects what consumers, especially non-users, think of betting online,” said the duo. “A label like gaming prompts all sorts of implicit associations like entertainment and fun, while a label like gambling can prompt seedier implicit associations like crime.”

These largely unconscious associations affect what people think of the industry and even their intention to participate, the authors explain. The process of changing perceptions, called framing, has an impact on whether or not people think the industry is socially acceptable. And framing can occur merely by changing a word.

The authors analysed newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for the language used to describe online betting. They studied coverage of “Black Friday,” April 15, 2011, when the US government shut down the three largest online betting sites.

Newspapers shifted the way they described the online activity, framing it more as a crime, which led to a shift in consumer judgments about the legitimacy of online casinos, especially among non-users, the researchers claim.

The authors conducted two experiments to explore what causes consumers to make different judgments about gambling. They found that “rags-to-riches” or “get-rich-quick” narratives prompted a set of favourable or unfavourable implicit associations among participants.

In a stronger test of their hypothesis, the authors changed only one word in the narratives – gambling or gaming – and found that the “gaming” label caused non-users to judge online betting as more legitimate. “This last experiment shows that a name change to ‘gaming’ can even prompt non-users to be more inclined to participate in online betting,” the authors add.

“Industry labeling has important implications not only for whether or not consumers find an industry acceptable,” the authors conclude. “For example, opponents to online gambling may want to be aware of the potential for social media to become a conduit for the expansion of online gambling.”

For more information, contact Ashlee Humphreys (a-humphreys@northwestern.edu) or visit http://ejcr.org/.