Illinois Professor Kindt Continues to Slander Online Gambling
The website for radical conservative Christian group Focus on the Family quoted Illinois business professor John Kindt Friday as reasserting his statements about the harm of online gambling. Kindt, supposedly versed in scientific objectivity and proper research methods, continued his personal diatribe against gaming in general and Internet casinos in particular, despite evidence that he is clearly incorrect."Online gambling is the 'crack cocaine' of creating new addicted gamblers," says Kindt, a statement he repeats around the country on speaking tours, ignoring the accumulated data and researchers' conclusions that he is dead wrong.
Sociologist Joel Best has said an incorrect statistic is "harder to kill than a vampire." Armed with that knowledge, Kindt seems determined to continue uttering falsehoods in the belief that hearing them repeated will convince the general public of their truth.
But objective studies, confirmed by peer review, have found that Internet gambling is actually much less addictive than land-based gaming. Dr. Howard Shaffer admitted his two-year study at Harvard Medical School expected to find a high level of problem gambling among online players, but the actual evidence confirmed the opposite: online gambling is safer than other forms of betting.
Dr. Dan Ross, the director of research for the National Responsible Gambling Program in South Africa, concurred with Shaffer's results, saying, “On a theoretical level, online gaming’s increased accessibility should make it more dangerous than traditional gaming. But... it does not seem to be the reality.”
And Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling in the US, says the level of pathological gamblers seems to remain consistent, reagardless of online or offline, legal gambling or illegal.
But a business professor who happens to be a fundamentalist Christian chooses to disagree with three distinguished men whose goal is to protect problem gamblers. Using the word "addicted," which is frowned upon by scientists as an imprecise and vague layman's term, and is not even mentioned in the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual as a proper diagnosis, Kindt swears that his supposedly objective determination is that online gambling is as bad as crack.
Of course, when it comes to peer review, Kindt has been slammed for approaching research as a persuasive technique, rather than "following a rigorous academic methodology." Kindt's work has been found by fellow academics as "not conforming to the conventions of scholarship, including the appearance of impartiality, intellectual distance, and due source skepticism."
If Kindt wants to offer his opinion based on faith rather than facts, he should leave the university and join his friend James Dobson in the pulpit, OCA gaming analyst Sherman Bradley remarked.
