The lower-risk gambling guidelines (LRGGs) were developed and introduced in Canada in 2021, providing guidance to gamblers on the amount of money, time and number of different types of gambling activity they should conduct to reduce their risk of gambling harm. They were compiled by comparing gambling involvement with gambling related harm for over 60,000 people who gamble from eight countries.
Currently, the most comparable public messaging campaign for gambling in the UK is the Take Time to Think campaign. Given existing evidence that public messaging campaigns such as these are ineffective, we wanted to explore whether the LRGGs could impact people’s self-reported gambling behaviours.
In this report, we present results from an online experiment, which shows that there are limited effects of using the lower-risk gambling guidelines compared to the existing Take Time to Think campaign. The guidelines, however, were perceived positively by gamblers and increased their confidence in knowing how to reduce their gambling behaviour, suggesting they could still have benefits if deployed in another manner.