The effect of awareness of recreational gamblers on implicit attitudes

Abstract

Gamblers consist of two sub-categories: pathological and recreational gamblers. People have negative attitudes toward gamblers, which often makes pathological gamblers hesitant about seeking others’ help or seeing a doctor. To resolve this problem, relatively positive attitudes toward recreational gamblers might be effective in changing the negative stereotypes associated with them. In measuring the change in attitude, the effect of social desirability should be considered. For this purpose, implicit rather than explicit attitudes need to be evaluated. In this study, 40 university students participated in a vignette experiment. They read one of the vignettes depicting a target: pathological gambler or recreational gambler, and implicit attitudes toward gamblers were measured by Single-Category Implicit Association Test before and after reading the vignette. The results show that participants who read the vignette of a recreational gambler had more positive attitudes toward gamblers. We suggest that drawing awareness to the recreational gamblers subgroup, who are not often recognized, is effective in psychological research aiming to change attitudes toward pathological gamblers.