Vocabularies of Motives for Gambling Behavior

Abstract

In an examination of the verbal explanations ordinary gamblers provide for their conduct, it was found that the motive of “play, leisure, and recreation” was most often given to explain their behavior, with the related motive of “relieving boredom and generating excitement” ranking a distant second. Significant variations in these responses were found according to sex and social class. Explanations of why other people gamble differed markedly from explanations of one's own gambling behavior. Regarding this finding, we suggest that respondents were providing socially acceptable vocabularies of motives to defend self by neutralizing the social stigma attached to gambling and/or by justifying one's monetary gains and losses.

Alibis for Adult Play

“…Amateur gamblers peruse opposite alibis for the same reasons: They account for gambling as inconsequential leisure because the gambling stigma of addiction and financial folly far outstrips the mild disapproval stirred by “frivolous fun” ( Smith & Preston, 1984 ). And like professional gamers, professional gamblers neutralize the stigma of gambling by accounting for it as routine, professional, and gainful labor ( Vines & Linders, 2016 ).…”

Public Accounts: Defending Contested Practices

“…They distinguished between two categories of accounts: excuses , which they defined as “accounts in which one admits that the act in question is bad, wrong, or inappropriate but denies full responsibility”; and justifications , or “accounts in which one accepts responsibility for the act in question, but denies the pejorative quality associated with it” (p. 47). These concepts have been widely used to categorize peoples' explanations for their involvement in a variety of discrediting behaviors, such as murder (Ray and Simons 1987), rape (Scully and Marolla 1984), student absenteeism (Kalab 1987), and gambling (Smith and Preston 1984). In addition to the multitudinous research on accounts and vocabularies of motives, scholars have generated a number of similar concepts such as dismissals (Wagner 1980), neutralizations (Sykes and Matza 1957), disclaimers (Hewitt and Stokes 1975), quasi‐theories (Hewitt and Hall 1973), anticipatory accounts (Murphy 2004), discounts (Pestello 1991), and legitimation techniques (Irwin 2000).…”

Recreational betting: everyday activity and strategies

“…Psychoanalytic and economistic theories are notable for the inattention they pay to gamblers' own meanings and explanations of their behaviour. While this is more characteristic of at least some sociological approaches, as Smith and Preston (1984) argue, there is a danger evident in many studies of confusing motivations and motives or motivational statements. However, investigation of subjects' expressed motivations or more profound meaning structures has to be conducted in the context of what they do in particular gambling activities and of their patterns of behaviour in gambling over time.…”