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Record W4409545409 · doi:10.1080/16066359.2025.2486964

The licensing effect in gambling choice: a daily diary study

2025· article· en· W4409545409 on OpenAlexafffund
Raymond Wu, Luke Clark

Bibliographic record

VenueAddiction Research & Theory · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicGambling Behavior and Treatments
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsPsychologySocial psychologyAdvertisingBusiness

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

People with gambling problems gamble despite resolutions to stop. These choices may be more likely in contexts that allow for them to be justified (e.g. after a productive day at work), termed the licensing effect. Using a daily diary design over 21 days (nparticipants = 156, nreports = 2,516), we recruited gamblers trying to reduce their gambling and assessed their daily justification opportunities (e.g. feelings of effort and achievement), gambling involvement (e.g. gambling episodes), and aspects of self-control (i.e. craving, conflict, craving suppression) and affect (positive and negative). We tested the degree to which justification opportunities, self-control, and affect predicted a prospective gambling episode, and the reverse temporal effect. Gambling occurred on 33% of the reported days. Prior-day justification opportunities were associated with higher odds of gambling. Prior-day craving suppression showed a similar effect. Prior-day gambling was associated with stronger cravings, weaker craving suppression, and poorer well-being (lower positive affect, higher negative affect). In our between-person analyses, days gambled and problem gambling severity were positively associated with negative affect; but, in our lagged analysis, prior-day negative affect was associated with lower odds of gambling. Our findings indicate that justification opportunities may precede gambling episodes, and therefore the licensing effect may contribute to why people sometimes gamble despite resolutions to stop.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.010
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.280
Threshold uncertainty score0.624

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0100.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.121
GPT teacher head0.517
Teacher spread0.396 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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