Original title: Network structure of gambling-related cognitions and risk behaviors among sports bettors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: a cross-sectional EBICglasso network analysis (N = 2261)
Degani Banzulu Bomba, Mechac Koffi Nkazi, Kevy Nguya Makonda, Christian Badimanya Albert +2 · August 2026
Sports betting is spreading fast across sub-Saharan Africa, but scientists know little about how bettors' thoughts connect to their risky behaviors. Researchers surveyed sports bettors to see how their beliefs, feelings, money habits, and social lives tie together. They mapped these ideas like an interconnected web, where each thought or feeling acts as a point linked to others. This map shows which thoughts drive the rest. The team discovered that feelings of guilt and a specific thought labeled G1 were the most connected points in the entire web. Guilt and social pressure served as key bridges that tied different groups of thoughts and behaviors together. Meanwhile, seven items had zero bridge strength. Overall, betting expectancies formed the most tightly linked set of beliefs. These findings show which thoughts and social triggers sit at the center of sports betting, helping experts design better support programs.
You are trying to understand why a friend keeps losing money at the arcade. You list every thought they have about the games, then draw lines between thoughts that appear together. Most thoughts connect to only one or two others, but two thoughts — feeling guilty after losing and feeling pressured by friends — connect to almost everything. In this paper, researchers mapped the same kind of web for 2,261 sports bettors, and found that guilt and social pressure are the thoughts that link gambling beliefs to risky betting.
Sports betting is expanding rapidly across sub-Saharan Africa, yet little is known about which beliefs drive risky betting. This study maps the thoughts of 2,261 Congolese bettors and finds that guilt and social pressure are the bridge nodes connecting gambling cognitions to risk. That gives intervention designers specific targets: address guilt and social pressure rather than only general gambling attitudes.
The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot show whether guilt and social pressure cause risky betting or result from it. The sample was recruited only at betting venues in Kinshasa, so findings may not generalize to other regions or to bettors who do not visit venues. All measures were self-reported, which can introduce bias. The sex difference detected in the sensitivity analysis was not localized to any specific edge, so its practical meaning is unclear.
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Network structure of gambling-related cognitions and risk behaviors among sports bettors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: a cross-sectional EBICglasso network analysis (N = 2261) — Degani Banzulu Bomba, Mechac Koffi Nkazi, Kevy Nguya Makonda et al. — Addictive behaviors reports — doi:10.1016/j.abrep.2026.100746
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.