Legal sports betting on mobile devices is available in 34 states, with sportsbooks bringing in nearly $150 billion in wagers last year. While this can add excitement to the games, it can also be problematic for some fans.

Dr. Logan Fields, an associate professor of Psychology, is an expert on the sociological, psychological, and biological underpinnings of addictive behaviors such as gambling.

With the NFL season kicking off next week, he shared his thoughts on the explosion of the sports betting industry below.

This Q&A has been slightly edited for clarity and length.

What makes sports betting so appealing/addictive?
Think of sports betting like a “tasty treat” for the reward system: you taste something delicious, you get a rush of reward, and the brain stores that memory as, “that felt good, let’s do it again soon.” Sports betting adds an extra layer because it looks skill-based. You can check injuries, weather, and trends, so it feels like you have more control than you do. This sense of control nudges your confidence higher than the betting odds ever support. The win pattern in sports betting is also unique: it runs on a variable-ratio schedule, one where someone believes that the next big win is just around the corner, even if it’s been 10, 100, or 1,000 bets. This is the same kind of schedule that keeps people pulling slot-machine levers and checking phones for notifications. Small, infrequent rewards and rare, big rewards keep the behavior going for years and often turn it problematic.

If this sounds familiar, compare it to alcohol. Most adults can have a drink and move on. For some, just having one sets off a chain of events in their brains that push them to keep pressing the “bet again” button. Tobacco works similarly through cue reactivity and rapid reinforcement; it is easy to slip from sometimes to automatic. 

Sports betting can supercharge this loop, especially when the app puts a new wager one thumb-tap away and offers micro-bets that shorten the time between “urge” and outcome. These apps especially push “parlay bets,” where a series of unlikely events needs to occur for the bettor to win. Again, the companies pay for specific marketing to make the average bettor  feel as if they “know better than the computer” and can beat the astronomical odds. They make most of their money off of these because they “bet” on people being confident in their skills and wanting to chase that high of a possible big win.

Betting ads are everywhere now. How does that near-constant barrage impact people’s behaviors?
When betting brands are shown along with the games, your podcasts, and your social feed, the line between being a fan and being a bettor starts to blur. A recent study showed that a sports betting ad of one kind or another played about every 13 seconds during broadcasts of certain high-profile sporting events. With that much exposure, it’s impossible to avoid, and it’s impossible to think it’s “not normal.”

This constant exposure normalizes the behavior and turns everyday moments like seeing the constant ads into cues. These cues trigger your brain to think about betting when you wouldn’t have otherwise. That is classic cue reactivity and social learning at work, the same way a beer commercial during a big game makes a cold drink feel almost automatic. With sports betting, the cue is often paired with a one-click offer, so the distance between “want” and “do” gets very short. For example, during a game, they often run a “one-time” $20 offer to match a bet, and this makes it almost irresistible to NOT bet. 

Again, this ubiquity normalizes betting behavior. We saw it with alcohol and the countless beer commercials that make drinking a beer seem so appealing, cigarettes with Joe Camel in the 90s, or JUUL vaporizers a couple of years ago, and even sugary snacks advertising to kids with bright colors and fun cartoons. When a company spends a TON on advertising, it often turns into dollars for them, particularly for things that are related to addictive/impulsive behavior.

What can be done to reduce the risks of sports gambling?
Short answer: A combo of education and policy, just like we learned from alcohol and tobacco. However, I should warn that “better education” can frame the issue as more of a personal problem than a societal one in the sense that “if I know more, I can avoid falling prey to this stuff.” We see the same logic with substance use. Though this is true to an extent, we aren’t giving credit to the absolute menace these companies can be, and just how finely tuned their “take people’s money” machine is. People’s careers in these companies are devoted to getting you hooked on their product and to get as much money from you as possible. So, being educated is nice, but at some point, even the most informed person can fall prey to this stuff. This is where I think the government has an obligation to step in. 

However, if we want to be more informed, I would recommend a better understanding of the mechanics that make betting feel particularly illusive: illusion of control, near-miss effects, and why variable-ratio rewards keep us chasing. Also, you could do a quick parlay math demo so people see how the house edge grows with each added leg, the same way we explain standard drinks and blood-alcohol curves in alcohol education. We could also add pre-commitment habits: set a budget and a time limit before the game, turn on deposit caps, uninstall during playoffs if that is a trigger. In alcohol terms, think “designated driver” planning.

As for policy and product guardrails, I might recommend things like capping bonus-bet style to certain dollar or time limits and tightening when and where ads can run, especially around youth programming, mirroring what worked for tobacco sponsorships and flavored-product bans. You could make time-outs and self-exclusion easy and prominent. You could also require real-time spend dashboards and block credit-card funding, similar to alcohol rules that restrict service past certain hours. Finally, strengthening age verification, just as we do for alcohol retail, and possibly using data to flag at-risk people and offer one-click help. 

I think a few of these things would certainly be a good start for undoing the harms we are already seeing.