Comparing Justifications and Permissive Beliefs in Relation to Gambling Severity

People use reasons to justify engaging in desirable behaviors. To tap such reasoning, two questionnaires were recently developed: one assessed justifications in gambling behavior, and one assessed permissive beliefs in other addictive behaviors, separating two constructs of Deserving Reward and Defensive Optimism. In this preregistered cross-sectional study, we compared these constructs in their associations with problem gambling severity, and with theoretically-related constructs – metacognition, reflection, and self-control – among 292 participants with gambling experience recruited from an online crowdsourcing platform. Justifications and Deserving Reward, but not Defensive Optimism, were positively correlated with the Problem Gambling Severity Index at a bivariate level. Supporting our prediction, in our preregistered multiple regression model, Justifications were positively associated with the Problem Gambling Severity Index. In this model, Deserving Reward did not reach significance and the effect of Defensive Optimism showed a negative association. In exploratory sensitivity analyses, Deserving Reward showed a positive effect, and the negative effect for Defensive Optimism only occurred between No Risk and High Risk gamblers. Justifications, Deserving Reward, and Defensive Optimism were 1) not strongly explained by metacognition, reflection, nor self-control, and 2) appeared as distinct constructs as indicated by theory-driven psychometric modelling. Our findings indicate that justifications and permissive beliefs, despite their conceptual similarity, show different relationships with gambling severity. These data inform cognitive models of gambling and other addictive behaviors with implications for psychological therapies.