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An international team of psychologists has revamped one of the gambling industry’s standard research tools and come to the conclusion that when people gamble mainly to escape their lives, their risk of developing a gambling disorder rises sharply.
The new findings centre on an updated Gambling Motives Questionnaire, a widely used scale that asks people why they place bets or play games of chance. The revised version, known as the GMQ-R-27, adds a dedicated “escapism” dimension that was missing from the original model and, according to researchers, better captures the profile of at-risk gamblers.
“People who gamble to escape their real lives – their worries, stress and negative emotions – are more likely to develop a gambling disorder,” said Beáta Bőthe, a psychology professor at Université de Montréal and co-author of the study, in a statement on the university’s website. She described escapist gambling as “a form of self-medication” that can feel soothing in the moment but becomes dangerous when it turns into someone’s main coping strategy.
Researchers rebuild key gambling-risk scale amid surge in accessible online betting
For years, clinicians and researchers have relied on the original Gambling Motives Questionnaire to sort players into broad motive categories such as coping, socialising, and enhancement or pleasure. Those dimensions overlap with the wider “motivational model of alcohol use”, which has guided addiction research for decades.
But as online gambling has become more accessible, the team behind the new GMQ-R-27 argued that the old scale no longer captured the full picture. Interviews with gamblers and statistical analyses suggested that many people were not just gambling “to feel good” or “to be with friends”, but explicitly to get away from daily stressors – a nuance that didn’t fit neatly into previous categories.
In the updated questionnaire, escapism is treated as its own, measurable motive rather than being folded into generic coping. The new 27-item tool was validated on large samples in multiple countries and showed that high scores on the escapism dimension were consistently linked with more severe symptoms of gambling disorder, even when controlling for how often people gambled or how much they spent.
A “bubble” that can turn into a trap
Bőthe said escapist gambling often starts as a way of creating a mental buffer between the player and their real-world problems.
“When people gamble to escape, it can become a gateway to another world, a bubble where the tensions of daily life can be temporarily forgotten,” she noted. In that sense, she added, it functions much like alcohol or other high-risk behaviours that “provide emotional relief” in the short term but can become compulsive over time.
The problem arises when gambling becomes the only reliable route to feeling better. At that point, the behaviour can harden into a disorder marked by loss of control, mounting debts, and serious harm to work, relationships, and mental health.
Global data underline why this matters for policymakers and operators. The World Health Organization classifies gambling disorder as a behavioural addiction, and population studies in Europe and North America routinely find that a small minority of intensive gamblers account for a disproportionate share of total losses and harm.
Implications for treatment and safer-gambling tools
One of the study’s core messages is that understanding why someone gambles may be as important as tracking how much they gamble when assessing risk.
“It is therefore important to investigate a person’s motives when treating gambling addiction,” Bőthe said. “If escapism and managing negative emotions emerge as the main reasons for gambling, you have to offer alternative strategies to break the vicious circle.”
Those alternatives can include well-established approaches such as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), which helps people challenge beliefs about luck and control, and mindfulness-based techniques that train them to recognise and regulate difficult emotions without immediately reaching for a bet.
For operators and regulators, the new scale offers a potential blueprint for more nuanced risk detection. Many online platforms already use behavioural markers – such as chasing losses, playing through the night, or sudden spikes in deposits – to trigger safer-gambling interventions. The GMQ-R-27 suggests that adding motive-based screening tools, especially around escapism, could help flag customers who may look “average” in terms of spend but are gambling for high-risk reasons.
Several European regulators, including in the UK and the Nordics, have been moving towards rules that require proactive monitoring and personalised interventions for at-risk players. Integrating questions about motives into onboarding questionnaires, affordability checks, or voluntary self-assessments could, in principle, make those systems more targeted.
A call for earlier, motive-based screening
Ultimately, the research team argues that the updated GMQ-R-27 is not just a technical tweak for academics but a potential early-warning system.
By capturing escapism alongside coping, socialising, and enjoyment, the new tool gives clinicians and researchers a more precise way to separate recreational play from emerging problem behaviour. In Bőthe’s words, escapist motives deserve to be treated “as a red flag, not an afterthought” in both treatment and policy design.
As governments and regulators continue to refine safer-gambling rules – from ad restrictions to affordability checks – the study adds a psychological dimension to debates that are often dominated by financial thresholds. For people who gamble primarily to escape their lives, the line between pastime and pathology may be crossed long before their spending becomes extreme.
Source: Université de Montréal
