$3.1 billion.
That’s the amount of money Americans are projected to bet on the 2026 FIFA World Cup™, according to Bookies.com, an online sports betting and casino information platform; it is also $1.3 billion more than what individuals wagered on the 2026 Super Bowl. And the bets aren’t limited to North America, which plays host to the World Cup this summer: Industry analysts expect the tournament will shatter gambling records across the globe.
As sports betting reaches unprecedented levels, Bryant psychology and economic experts are examining the forces behind its growth.
“This is a major cultural event that's touching people around the globe, and it makes you feel like you're missing out on something if you're not engaging with it,” explains Psychology Department Chair and Professor Heather Lacey, Ph.D. “When you're betting, you feel like you're part of the action.”
America’s sports betting industry has been on the rise since 2018, when a Supreme Court ruling helped create a path for legalized sports betting. In 2025, the industry’s market value within the United States stood at $10.68 billion and is projected to grow to $27.35 billion by 2034, according to a report from Market Data Forecast.
While the industry’s projections are skyrocketing, Bryant University Economics Lecturer Liam Rice explains that legalized sport gambling in its current state has far-reaching economic implications.
“While the direct benefits of legalized gambling to state economies have been touted over the past years, the direct and indirect costs are much less publicized and outweigh those revenue benefits,” says Rice.
Breadth of gains, losses
Research from the past several years reveals that sports gambling services are an economic rent extraction machine: they create social losses for the public in exchange for private company gains, explains Rice.
On one hand, legalized sports gambling is a revenue generator for state budgets through taxation. For instance, in 2025, sports wagering generated $3.2 billion in U.S. state tax revenue, according to the American Gaming Association.
“This is valuable state revenue that helps fund various services and is particularly valuable to states that lack other revenue drivers,” notes Rice.
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On the flip side, negative direct costs to consumers and society vastly outweigh the benefits. Legalized sports gambling, particularly mobile gambling, increases personal bankruptcies, crowds out household savings and investment, and intensifies interpersonal violence, which results in increased social services needs.
“When states legalized gambling, there was a 10 percent increase in bankruptcy likelihood resulting in approximately 30,000 more bankruptcies per year in states with online betting,” Rice says. “We also see detrimental impacts to credit scores, with scores falling 2.75 points in states with mobile gambling.”
The brain game
Lacey shares that dopamine plays a major role in betting. The biggest dopamine surges occur when someone gets a reward that’s better than anticipated, while predictable rewards cause a moderate dopamine kick, and losses cause a dopamine dip. Interestingly though, the brain will treat “almost wins” as real wins.
“When you almost make it, your brain is still seeing a mismatch between what it thought was going to happen and what happened, so you were expected to lose and, all of a sudden, you almost broke through. Your brain has still registered this as an unexpectedly good outcome compared to what it thought it was going to get,” Lacey says.
In addition to dopamine, emotions tend to hijack the sports betting experience. She explains that there are two parallel mechanisms in the mind for processing risk-based decisions in two separate channels. One channel (system one) is instinctive and emotional while the other (system two) is more methodical and evidence driven.
“System one usually wins when the two are in conflict,” Lacey says. “There's a lot of evidence to show that when we're analyzing risks, we're not paying a lot of attention to the probabilities involved. We're mostly paying attention to how good it would feel if the good thing came or how bad it would feel if the bad thing came.”
Spotting fallacies
Rice notes that sportsbooks make most of their profit from addicted users, not casual retail gamblers, and that behavioral economics concepts can help explain why sports bettors lose in the aggregate — even if the prices of bets themselves are fair.
For instance, in the “hot hand fallacy,” if a bettor has won several bets in a row, they become overconfident of their odds to win the next bet when winning streaks don’t last. There’s also recency bias, where retail bettors are prone to overvaluing recent results — placing an outsized effect on the odds of a future result — and loss chasing where individuals continue betting to earn back what they lost.
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The gambler's fallacy is another one, adds Lacey, and is the tendency for individuals to overlook normal random or distribution processes and expect things to happen because they're due. For instance, say someone flipped a coin and got heads 10 times, that person may start thinking, ‘I'm due for a tails now.’
“When your brain is computing what might have happened, what could have happened, and what almost happened, you're starting to anticipate what ought to happen the next time — overlooking the reality that this event is independent from whatever happened a minute ago,” Lacey says.
Sports betting and youth
If the industry's growth depends on emotional decision-making and frequent engagement, Lacey and Rice say young adults are particularly vulnerable.
“College students are at a prime age where normal brain development for managing impulses and inhibiting responses is still maturing, so a lot of 20-year-olds who are old enough to have the accounts, but not old enough to effectively control the impulses and are getting sucked in pretty dramatically,” says Lacey.
Additionally, she notes that online betting’s micro bets add a new impulse challenge.
“You're no longer placing a bet on the overall outcome of the game. You're now placing a bet on what's going to happen in the next two minutes. That gives people an illusion of control,” Lacey says, adding that the platforms’ bonuses and comps keep the decision makers in the emotion zone.
Rice adds that, according to an NCAA report, nearly 70 percent of college students who live on campus have gambled, and a 2022 report found that 60 percent of high school students gambled in the last year. Legalized gambling, he emphasizes, should be restricted to physical locations or sports gambling advertisements should be banned in venues with a high likelihood of children and young adults.
“This rise in youth gambling will have knock-on effects for future years, as these people save less money and have higher debt burdens, which will weigh down economic growth in the future,” Rice says.