When Wanting More Meets the Casino Floor

Most explanations of problem gambling lean on a familiar character: the impulsive person who cannot resist a bet. It is a tidy story, and it has shaped a lot of public health messaging. But what if the problem for some people is not a failure of brakes at all? What if it is a steady, almost philosophical conviction that whatever they have, it is not yet enough?

That is the question behind a new paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, titled "Hungry Ghosts Eat Casino Chips: Associations Between Dispositional Greed and Gambling" [2]. The work comes from Joshua Weller, an associate professor of behavioral decision making at the University of Leeds, together with Marcel Zeelenberg and Barbara Summers. Their argument is that a personality trait called dispositional greed — a chronic sense that more is always wanted — predicts who gambles, how often, and how badly things go.

Dispositional greed is not the same as ambition or even materialism. People high on the trait tend to feel that satisfaction is permanently out of reach. They acquire, and the wanting resets. The researchers reasoned that a casino, a betting app, or a scratch card offers exactly the kind of open-ended promise that such a temperament finds hard to ignore. The next hand could always be the one that finally closes the gap.

To test that idea, the team ran two large studies. The first drew on 1,118 adults from a representative Dutch sample, measuring greed, materialism, and gambling habits over the prior twelve months. The second was bigger and more pointed: 4,855 adults in England, blending the general population with people who already reported an interest in gambling. Here the researchers tracked greed alongside motor impulsiveness, how often people gambled, what they spent over a two-week window, and how much harm their gambling had caused.

The pattern held across both. Greedier people gambled more frequently and across a wider range of activities. They were not simply dabbling in one familiar game; they spread out. And critically, greed predicted the severity of gambling-related harm even after the researchers statistically accounted for impulsivity [1]. That is the finding that should make people pause. Impulsivity is the usual suspect, the trait clinicians watch for. Yet greed appeared to carry its own independent weight, pointing to a route into trouble that has little to do with poor self-control in the moment.

Why might that be? The data offered a hint. People high in greed were more likely to hold certain distorted beliefs about gambling. They overestimated their chances of winning. They reported a stronger illusion of control, the feeling that skill or ritual could bend a random outcome. Some also leaned on gambling as a way to manage stress. None of these distortions is unique to greedy people, but the trait seemed to amplify them, as if the appetite for more recruited a set of convenient rationalizations.

There is one more wrinkle worth noting. The association between greed and gambling survived even when the researchers controlled for materialism. That matters because it is tempting to assume the two are the same thing wearing different clothes. Materialism is about valuing possessions and status. Greed, in this framing, is closer to a bottomless drive to acquire, regardless of what the object is. The fact that greed kept predicting gambling after materialism was held constant suggests the engine is the wanting itself, not the love of stuff.

So should we treat greed as a red flag in the same way the field treats impulsivity? Not so fast. The study has real limits, and the authors are upfront about them. Both studies are cross-sectional, which means they captured a single slice of time. You cannot tell from such data whether greed pushes people toward gambling, whether heavy gambling sharpens a greedy outlook, or whether some third factor feeds both. The behavioral measures also rely on what participants remembered and reported rather than on observed betting. Self-reports of spending and harm are vulnerable to faulty memory and to the understandable wish to look better than the truth. And the samples were drawn from general populations, not from people with a clinical diagnosis of gambling disorder. The trait may behave differently at the severe end of the spectrum, where the most pressing public health concern actually sits.

What the research does well is widen the lens. For years the conversation about who falls into gambling harm has circled around impulsivity, almost to the exclusion of other dispositions. This work suggests that a quieter, more persistent trait may be doing some of the damage, and doing it through a different mechanism. If that holds up in longitudinal studies, it could change how screening tools are built and how prevention messages are worded. A campaign aimed at impulsive risk-takers will not necessarily reach someone whose problem is a calm, unrelenting sense that enough never arrives.

For now, the safest reading is a modest one. Greed looks like a meaningful correlate of gambling behavior, distinct from the usual explanations, and worth taking seriously. Whether it earns a place alongside impulsivity in the clinical picture is a question the next round of research will have to answer. The broader pattern here — personality traits quietly shaping choices in ways that overlap with but are not reducible to self-control — turns up in other domains too. Research on how Big Five traits influence sexual fantasy frequency found a similar story: specific facets, not broad traits, carry the signal. And the question of why some people absorb a loss and adjust while others double down connects to findings on what predicts whether someone forgives betrayal or walks away, where personality again explained less than intuition suggests. For more on the psychology of how character shapes behavior, see more psychology coverage.

Sources

1. Weller, J., Zeelenberg, M., & Summers, B. (2025). Hungry Ghosts Eat Casino Chips: Associations Between Dispositional Greed and Gambling. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672251315200
2. White Rose Research Online. (2025). Hungry Ghosts Eat Casino Chips: Associations between Dispositional Greed and Gambling. https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/221437/

This article summarizes published research for general informational purposes only. It is not medical advice and should not be used to guide treatment, diagnosis, or other health decisions. Speak with a qualified healthcare professional about any health concern.