There is a long list of cognitive biases that attract people to the lottery, keep them playing every week and make them pick certain numbers. Paul Rogers published a comprehensive review of the cognitive psychology of lottery gambling in the Journal of Gambling Studies a number of years ago. One of the fundamental problems with lottery (and other) gambling is humans’ unrealistic optimism and our misunderstanding of probabilities. Odds that are as small as those of a lottery win simply lie outside the range of our experience of probabilities in everyday life. We can’t easily grasp them. We’re also more used to thinking in terms of absolute numbers (e.g. 10) than probabilities or proportions (e.g. 0.1%). Research on the ratio bias, for example, has shown that people are swayed more by absolute numbers than probabilities. When people are given the chance of winning money by drawing a red jelly bean out of a bowl, they are more likely to go for the bowl in which 10 out of 100 jelly beans are red than the one in which 1 out of 10 jelly beans is red. That’s despite the fact that the probability of drawing red is the same for both bowls. The perceived likelihood of winning is also influenced by the availability bias. Winning seems more likely if we can easily think of an instance of ‘winning’ or an actual lottery winner. Media publicity focuses on the rare winners not the millions of losers, which makes winning salient in people’s minds.
In addition to the erroneous belief in hot and cold numbers and the superstitious thinking that fuels strategies like picking birth dates or anniversaries, other irrational thinking identified by Rogers includes the gambler’s fallacy – the mistaken belief held by some people that independent events, such as successive lottery draws, are interrelated. Is the number 3 less likely to be a winning number next week because it was drawn in the last two lottery draws already? We know that the answer is no, but our gut feeling may tell us otherwise. Then there’s perceived luckiness – people sometimes think of gambles as a combination of chance (coincidence) and luck (a personal attribute). Finally, some people exhibit an illusion of control. One study found that letting players select their own lottery numbers increased their expectations of success.
So what keeps lottery players going? One specific phenomenon that can serve as an incentive to “try again†is a ear miss. For example, if the numbers 4, 12 and 19 are drawn, having picked 3, 11 and 18 can be perceived as a near miss, even though any other random numbers (e.g., 8, 16 and 27) were just as likely to be drawn. A near miss makes the probability of winning more vivid and may give gamblers the illusion of “getting closerâ€. This example of irrational thinking is particularly prominent in slot machine gambling. Perhaps a far more widespread reason that keeps lottery gamblers going is evident in entrapment or sunk cost bias. As money spent on lotteries accumulates over time, players may justify a continued “investment†in the lottery in order to make good on the losses they have incurred already. I can’t give up now – I’ve been playing the lottery for 20 years!
Lottery expenditures in the U.S. have grown over the last few decades, but the recession does not seem to have deterred Americans from buying lottery tickets. In fact, a recent analysis by Csilla Horváth and Richard Paap looked at trends in casino gambling, lotteries, and parimutuel wagering, and found that lotteries appear to be recession-proof. This may be due to their relatively low price. Small-stakes gambles like lotteries are not only more easily justified by consumers as an expense, but lotteries also offer people some hope to improve their circumstances during times of economic hardship. Hope trumps reason.
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References
Horváth, C., Paap, R. (2012). The effect of recessions on gambling expenditures. Journal of Gambling Studies, 28, 703-717.
Rogers, P. (1998). The cognitive psychology of lottery gambling: A theoretical review. Journal of Gambling Studies, 14, 111-134.
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