Minding the consumer mindsets in addressing gambling consumption harms

Gambling is a widely accessible form of consumption across numerous jurisdictions around the world (Orford, 2020), with its global market size reaching hundreds of billions of dollars annually (Research and Markets, 2021). Despite this mass popularity of gambling consumption internationally, it has been well-recognized that such consumption can have harmful consequences on various aspects of individual consumers’ life, such as their finance, health, relationship, work, or study (e.g., Li et al., 2017). The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the latest findings in consumer psychology/behavior on consumer mindsets, and to provide critical analysis on how consumer mindsets could be potentially leveraged to address harms from gambling consumption. Based on the consumer psychology literature (Rucker and Galinsky, 2016), a consumer mindset can be defined as a psychological orientation that affects consumer information processing, consumer evaluations, and consumer responses. Three specific consumer mindsets will be discussed below as exemplars which can have direct relevance to the pathways to reduce or prevent gambling consumption harms, including the fresh start mindset (Price et al., 2018), the busy mindset (Kim et al., 2019), and the short-term mating mindset (He and Cunha, 2020).