Continue reading »]]> I spent most of last week in Helsinki together with gambling scholars. In Finland, social science research on gambling is vigorous and more extensive than in the other Nordic countries. This is to a great extent thanks to the Finnish Foundation for Gaming Research and its director Pauliina Raento. The foundation funds gambling research and through various activities stimulates, facilitates and coordinates such research. Talented researchers are thereby inspired to study gambling.

At my first evening in Helsinki, I attended a reception held by the Foundation. In the premises there was a fascinating collection of gambling machines, historical photos of gaming events, and lottery advertising from the past (as in the picture to the right). Gambling researchers from Finland mingled and tried their luck on a Pajazzo gambling machine.

Next day the University of Helsinki Network for European Studies held a seminar on the theme “Gambling: Global and European Perspectives”. I held a speech about “Global gambling in an anthropological perspective”. Jenny Cisneros Örnberg from SoRAD, University of Stockholm, talked about the political framing of gambling problems in the context of gambling regulation and policy development. Nele Hoekx from the University of Leuven and Natalia Zborowska, from the University of Amsterdam, presented on the regulation of online gambling and emerging transnational self-regulatory networks in the EU, respectively.

I spent part of the evening at the Casino Helsinki (formerly the “Gran Casino Helsinki”, have they cut down on the ambitions?). I had not been there for a while and just wished to take a look (and play some slots). Not much action, but it was a weekday evening.

On Thursday, the Finnish Society of Consumer Research held a seminar. A price was given to this year’s best thesis in consumer studies. I had been invited to speak about “Why people gamble: An anthropological understanding of gambling consumers”. Pauliina Raento, Minna Ruckenstein and Riitta Maitilainen were discussants.

A very nice trip with many interesting discussions!

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My doctoral thesis in social anthropology was published in 1999, with the title Bodies of Vital Matter: Notions of Life Force and Transcendence in Traditional Southern Italy. I have recently prepared a PDF-edition of the book that is freely available on the internet. There is not much about gambling in the thesis, although there is an analysis of the concept of luck (fortuna).

Bodies of Vital Matter presents an innovative study that explores folk beliefs relating to the vital force of the human body and to the transcendence of the corporal. The time frame is the period from the unification of Italy to the Second World War. The study is based on data extracted from a comprehensive body of texts written by South Italian ethnographers and folklorists in the decades around the turn of the century, complemented by my field observations in contemporary Italy. Interpretative social anthropology constitutes the theoretical framework.

The comparison of customs and beliefs from hundreds of South Italian villages and towns reveals patterns of cultural meaning that could hardly be discerned in a study focusing on a single local community. The systemic approach used in the study has a remarkable power of explanation. A wide variety of seemingly unrelated beliefs, practices and myths are shown to be generated by a core set of cultural presuppositions.

In 2001 Bodies of Vital Matter was awarded the Pitrè Prize (Giuseppe Pitrè – Salvatore Salomone Marino International Prize for Demo-ethno-anthropological Studies). It received the prize in the category of Best work on Italian folklore.

Read more about Bodies of Vital Matter
Download the book (or just take a look…)

[Immage: mummified corpses at the old capuchin cemetery in Palermo. Photo by the author.]

Continue reading »]]> The impact of gambling advertising on the extent of problem gambling is often debated in Sweden. There is a lot of gambling advertising in Swedish media and some people demand advertising restrictions of various kinds in order to prevent problem gambling. The question is how effective such measures would be.

I have written two reports in Swedish on gambling adverting, which both are accompanied by articles in English. One is a literature review and general discussion, referring to the example of Sweden (full report, article). The other is an empirical study on how problem gamblers perceive gambling advertising (full report, article). The texts were published in the period 2005-2009.

A few month ago a British report was published that thoroughly discusses the impact of gambling advertising on problem gambling: The Comparative Effectiveness of Regulatory Approaches and The Impact of Advertising on Propensity for Problem Gambling (download PDF).

The report has been commissioned by the Responsible Gambling Fund. As the title suggests, it also covers the topic of the effectiveness of regulatory approaches. The authors are Simon Planzer and Heater Wardle.

The report is comprehensive and well argued. I recommend it to anyone interested in issues relating to gambling advertising. The first part of the discussion relies much on my paper from 2007 and adds some interesting thoughts. Another section deals with advertising as a trigger for disordered gamblers. There is also a section on how advertising may affect perceptions of gambling. The literature review is the most recent available at the moment.

The report concludes that measuring the impact of gambling advertising on problem gambling is a complex task. No such studies have been made. There are some evidence, however, that advertising can influence perceptions of gambling among vulnerable groups, such as adolescents and problem gamblers. Advertising may also give pathological gamblers external impulses to gamble, thereby aggravating their problems.

As to the effectiveness of various regulatory approaches in minimizing harm from problem gambling, the report concludes that there is no research on that specific topic. There is a gap between what researchers have been interested in and the discussions of policy makers and regulators. Researchers are most interested in the gaming market in terms of consumption and public health. Politicians and regulators are debating the advantages and disadvantages of various regulatory models, such as monopoly models or licensing systems. A closer interaction between researchers and regulators is therefore necessary.

Continue reading »]]> The RFMA (The national association against alcohol and drug addiction) held a conference on gambling addiction on February 7. Around 70 participants gathered in Stockholm for a full day program about pathways in and out of problem gambling.

Among the speakers were Fred Nyberg, professor at Uppsala University, the Faculty of Pharmacy, who gave a very informative talk about the neurobiological processes involved in addiction to drugs and gambling. Jakob Jonsson from Spelinstitutet told about pathways leading to gambling problems, with many examples from the clients he met during his long career as a CBT-therapist. The topic of therapy was more generally covered by Henrik Josephson and Lina Hedda from FORUM in Stockholm.

Anders Stymne had come all the way from Paris to tell us about what Swedish authorities have done throughout the years in terms of prevention of problem gambling and the development of treatment modalities. I myself held a presentation about changes in gambling and problem gambling in Sweden, as well as about why people gamble.

The presentations from the conference will be available at the RFMA website.

Continue reading »]]> This weekend I went on a study trip to Paris with the Board of Directors of the Swedish Gaming Board. Once a year we broaden our knowledge by visiting similar organizations in other countries. At these occasions, we also visit gambling companies, trade fairs and places of gambling that for various reasons are of current interest to us.

Our first stop in Paris was at the PMU – Pari Mutuel Urbain. This is a stated controlled French horse betting company that recently has expanded their business into online sports betting and poker. Then we went to the office of ARJEL – Autorité de Régulation des Jeux En Ligne (“The authority for regulation of online games”). It was interesting to learn how licenses for online gambling were issued and how the online market had developed in the recent year. In Sweden, there has for some years now been discussions about introducing a licensing system and therefore the Gaming Board closely follows the developments in other countries.

We spent the next day at Grosbois, the huge trotting horse training facility in the outskirts of Paris. Swedish trainer Anders Lindqvist showed us around and told us many fascinating stories from the world of trotting.

The highlight of the trip was the Prix d’Amérique – the world’s most prestigious trotting race. Around fifty thousand people had gathered at the hippodrome of Vincennes. We met plenty of other Swedes there and most of them hoped that the Swedish horse Maharajah would win. Maharajah’s odds dropped dramatically as the Swedes at the track bet heavily. However, the favorite and last year winner Ready Cash had no problem winning the race. I spent a modest €50 on various bets during the day and won exactly the same sum (entirely thanks to a big trifecta bet that I was invited to join).

The Director General of the Gaming Board has blogged about the same trip, highly recommended!

Anders Lindqvist with a promising trotter

Ready Cash's triumphal procession

Continue reading »]]> The value of anthropological gambling research is discussed in a forum in the journal Suomen Antropologi (2011, vol. 36, no. 1). The issue was published this spring but came to my attention only a few days ago. The forum contains short articles by five Finnish scholars. It is an excellent introduction to how anthropologists can think about gambling.

Pauliina Raento, research director at the Finnish Foundation for Gaming Research, introduces the topic. She writes that “The time is ripe for anthropologists to take a fresh look at gambling.” Pauliina also makes the good observation that: “A closer look at gambling can also expand anthropology’s interdisciplinary horizons. Many outsiders perceive anthropology as an insular discipline which fails to use its full potential.”

The four other contributions to the forum deal with online poker, immigrant gambling in Finland, the social rewards of gambling, and gambling and consumption. The short articles give an idea of the novel and interesting perspectives offered by anthropological research into these aspects of gambling.

Suomen Antropologi is the journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society. it is available online with EBSCO Academic Search Complete.

Continue reading »]]> The prevalence of gambling problems in Sweden remained largely unchanged between 2009 and 2010. There was a trend towards lower prevalence – down from 2.2 percent to 1.9 percent – but it was not statistically significant. Gambling problems were defined as respondents scoring three points or higher on the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI). The information is presented in a recent paper published in the journal International Gambling Studies, discussing data from the first two prevalence studies in the Swedish longitudinal gambling studies (SWELOGS).

This means that gambling problems, according to the three national prevalence surveys conducted this far in Sweden, have on a population level remained largely unchanged since 1999. However, gambling problems among young males doubled between 1999 and 2009.

Additional data on problem gambling prevalence is offered by the general health surveys conducted by the Swedish National Institute of Public Health (SNIPH). These surveys include four questions on gambling problems derived from the SOGS instrument, which have been selected because they perform well in discriminating between problem and problem-free gamblers. The following figures (source) show the percentages (confidence interval within brackets) of people answering in the affirmative to one or more of the four questions:

2004 4.1 % (3,7-4,4)
2005 3.8 % (3,3-4,3)
2006 3,8 % (3,3-4,3)
2007 4,2 % (3,6-4,7)
2008 3,7 % (3,3-4,0)
2009 3,7 % (3,3-4,0)
2010 3,3 % (2,9-3,6)

Another set of measurements is the yearly surveys made by the state owned gambling company Svenska Spel. No standard instrument for measuring problem gambling is used but rather a set of questions resembling parts of the SOGS-instrument (video of presentation, table shown at 4:00 minutes, no confidence intervals are presented):

1999 1,8 %
2000 1,5 %
2001 1,2 %
2002 1,9 %
2003 1,2 %
2004 1,3 %
2005 1,6 %
2006 1,4 %
2007 1,9 %
2008 1,5 %
2009 1,2 %
2010 1,4 %

What can we conclude from these three sets of measurements of problem gambling in Sweden? One thing is sure. The prevalence of gambling problems in the general population have remained about the same between 1999 and 2010. There are indications of a sudden increase in problems in 2007, which would coincide with the poker boom. This would be expected, since a lot of people played internet poker and a substantial proportion of them experienced gambling problems. It has been estimated that about one third of the players showed some sign of risky or problematic gambling behavior.

Gambling problems thus tend to remain, over longer periods of time, at the same level despite the introduction of new risky forms of gambling. This can be explained by preventive measures being effective, an increasing awareness of the risks of gambling, and that players adapt to new forms of gambling and a higher risks level.

Continue reading »]]> Gambling, Space, and Time: Shifting Boundaries and Cultures is a new book from the University of Nevada Press. It includes a chapter on Swedish horse betting, written by me.

About the book
“The eight essays in Gambling, Space, and Time use a global and interdisciplinary approach to examine two significant areas of gambling studies that have not been widely explored—the ever-changing boundaries that divide and organize gambling spaces, and the cultures, perceptions, and emotions related to gambling. The contributors represent a variety of disciplines: history, geography, sociology, anthropology, political science, and law. The essays consider such topics as the impact of technological advances on gambling activities, the role of the nation-state in the gambling industry, and the ways that cultural and moral values influence the availability of gambling and the behavior of gamblers. The case studies offer rich new insights into a gambling industry that is both a global phenomenon and a powerful engine of local change.” (University of Nevada Press)

Editors
Pauliina Raento and David G. Schwartz.

Contributors
Per Binde, Larry Gragg, Sytze F. Kingma, Steven Andrew Light, Kathryn L. R. Rand, Pauliina Raento, David G. Schwartz, and Denise von Herrmann.

Reviews
“Gambling, Space, and Time extends the available research on gambling, and therefore makes a significant contribution to the literature. There is no doubt that the contributors have done careful and extensive original research.”
— James Smith, author of The Business of Risk: Commercial Gambling in Mainstream America.

“This book looks at gambling spaces from a number of perspectives: legal, political, social, and geographic; and discusses how such spaces have evolved over time. The essays provide insights into how this rapidly expanding but controversial activity has evolved in America and Europe, and where it will emerge in cyberspace.”
— William R. Eadington, Director, Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming, University of Nevada, Reno.

About the book chapter Trotting territory: The cultural realm of Swedish horse betting
Human beings in social interaction create life-worlds with shared symbols, meanings, and values. Some forms of gambling, among them horse betting, therefore tend to evolve into bounded cultural domains with specific beliefs, norms, and traditions. Gambling becomes the core of a world-building activity. This chapter concerns one such cultural realm established by gambling – the one created and re-created at the Åby trotting track in Sweden at the days of racing. The study builds on participant observation and analyses the social interactions and cultural meanings that structure people’s experience of Åby trotting track. Author: Per Binde.

Order the book from the University of Nevada Press

Order the book from the Swedish bookseller Adlibris

Continue reading »]]> “Perspektiv på spelande och spelproblem” (Perspectives on gambling and problem gambling) is the title of a recent publication (in Swedish) from the Swedish National Institute of Public Health (SNIPH). It is an easy to read booklet that shows the breadth of today’s gambling research and presents a number of different perspectives on gambling. The publication is primarily for people whose work involves coming into contact with gambling and problem gamblers.

The booklet builds on three previous publications from the SNIPH. One is about biological causes of pathological gambling, the other presents a bio-psycho-social model of gambling addiction, and the third is my own report Gambling involvement and motivation: A review of social science research.

Read Perspektiv på spelande och spelproblem (PDF)

Continue reading »]]> “Why people gamble” (or something similar) is the title of one of my most appreciated lectures. It is in demand by gambling companies, treatment agencies and at a variety of academic meetings and conferences. Last Thursday I delivered the lecture to a group of gambling regulators from the Nordic countries, at a seminar organized by the Gaming Board for Sweden.

In the first part of the lecture, I give an outline of the distribution of gambling in the societies of the pre-colonial world and discuss the factors that promoted or restrained gambling: the presence of commercially used money, social inequality, inter-tribal gambling and nomadism. In the second part, I present my model of the motives that individuals have for gambling in western societies of today. The model comprises five motivational dimensions: the dream of hitting the jackpot and transforming one’s life, social rewards, intellectual challenge, mood change induced by playing, and the fundamental motive for all gambling, the chance of winning, viewed as a psychobiological as well as a symbolic and cultural entity. Of course, the lecture is tailored to meet the specific interests of various audiences.